"I'm thinking it's the part where people arrive at a conclusion regarding matters of science from a path dictated by politics and or religion."
I'm thinking your thinking is irrelevant to the science. Why not try to answer the question with data or reasoned argument rather than a nice sophistic non-denial denial?
There was nothing in the post concerning what we know about the effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is in any way the product of politics or religion, so exactly what's your point about there only being a "correlation" and not a well understood cause and effect relationship?
Do you actually have to observe someone hitting you on the head with a hammer before you can notice that your head hurts? That might be a pretty rigorous form of hypothesis testing, but like the case of study of global warming, your approach is going to be both far more expensive and painful than it needs to be.
"Most, but not all, instructors are teaching because they can't hack it in the real world of their chosen field."
Those who hold this notion obviously have a very limited understanding of academia.
At least in the world of science, scientist covet teaching positions, particularly at prestigious universities, as this provides them the opportunity to seek competitive grants to conduct "leading edge" research and to have access to the smartest and most capable students to assist them in pushing the envelope. If you work for a private company or a government entity, you have very severe restrictions on the direction your own research takes.
A Kindle puts one in the position of being of just plain out of luck if the author chooses to limit the ability of Amazon to act as an authorized seller at some future point in time, or if you manage to mangle or loose your DMR certificates, or if your Kindle breaks and you have to reinstall (read repurchase) all your ebooks, of if all your old ebooks are no longer Kindle 2.0 compatible, because then you no longer have legal access to your prior purchases.
As the Apple approach shows, this kind of system works economically only if multiple corporations (content providers/content distributors) and the "government" collude sufficiently to lock in users and if they can keep the price of the collusion to potential buyers just low enough to keep wanton piracy and open standards at an acceptably low level (of course for some any piracy or open standards at all is unreasonable).
The real threat to Kindle will come when an enterprising young entrepeneur makes a Kindle-llike device that permits artists/writers to register their works by which the artists themselves keep the lion's share of the cost of a download say, 95%, and accept the royalties directly rather than through the Amazon middleman.
Of course, first she will have to find venture capital in order to hire a good enough lawyer to get her product successfully embedded in the marketplace and 1,000,000 friends in her political district to keep her "representatives" from accepting "contributions" from corporations like Amazon to make sale of such a "revolutionary" device illegal or somehow "sufficiently unsafe as to require regulation" lest it fall into the wrong hands and upset domestic tranquility (ie existing corporate profits).
As Darwin in a humorous frame of mind once noted "Its everyone for themselves. Its a jungle out there."
"but experience has demonstrated that only people who are lucky enough to have exceptional teachers or middle class families will have the environment to excel"
Obviously, you haven't heard of Gauss or Ramanujan. The former began his mathematical career at the age of 3, correcting accounting errors in his father's business. The latter was a self taught genius who rose from extreme poverty on the strength of his mathematical ideas alone. Had he not died prematurely and his work more accessible to the less gifted, he would have been much more widely known.
In fact there are a great many famous mathematicians from very humble backgrounds, which only goes to prove that you do yourself and humanity a great disservice in perpetuating stereotypes. There is no single path to genius nor is there a single special kind of intellect. Any young student may prove they have talent, if they can learn to think clearly enough.
PS. Why would anyone want broadband speeds in excess of 256 K? There ought to be a law against it. It sounds unamerican and can only lead to a new world order.
You have not watched Sun closely enough to realize that its executive suite is divorced from its technical divisions. The sale has more to do with salvaging big golden parachutes for McNeally and other execs than it has with either shareholder's benefits or the longterm viability of the company. Once they have a buyer for the parachutes, the rest can simply fall wherever.
criticism vs complaining - documentation?
on
Linux Needs Critics
·
· Score: 1
often criticism and complaining stem from misunderstanding. Lets face it learning Linux is not that easy once you get past using menu driven applications. Take for example, Netbeans. Its a wonderful and powerful application building interface. However, for someone, even with modest coding skills, it is difficult to understand how to use its full power. It is very difficult to get across the big picture, which is needed to provide insight into the devil in the details.
Often developers can get far more from "critics" if they provide better documentation, including examples that lead users into the use of the program and hence the details of the code (albeit indirectly). Likewise, the "novice", who may actually be an expert in another area of computing, can get often learn that the problem they have with a given program has often been considered and solved, but perhaps not in the same way or with the same concepts/words/ideas that might be familiar to the user. Sometimes understanding comes from using the same terminology and language (conceptual, not coding).
Linux developers and users really need to look hard at the issue of documentation and how it can be better managed, networked, integrated, and distributed, because, after all this is much of what this discussion of "criticism" is often about.
In that sense I found the original article interesting as the writer was a literature major with limited coding experience, but with sufficient users skills to be able to actually make a living writing technical books.
Making oneself clear can often remove a lot of unnecessary criticism, not to mention provide a sound foundation to build more knowledgeable Linux users.
"Past Performance is Not Necessarily Indicative of Future Results"
How ironic. Dr. Dyson wouldn't be the first aging, but unquestionably brilliant physicist at the Institute for Advanced Studies, who spent his last days pointlessly and wrongly, arguing about perceived inaccuracy of cutting edge scientific theories that continued to gain scientific credence dispite such arguments. Albert Einstein's quibbles with fundamental aspects of quantum physics are now largely forgotten.
Dr. Dyson might do better to provide detailed simulation models that counter to Dr. Hansen's pioneering work rather what offering what otherwise seems to be little more than armchair speculation of dubious relevance to global warming.
You can tell an idea is still being formulated, when the people using it can not even define it.
Open the "open manifesto" and read the definition of cloud computing then explain to your self what cloud computing is. Whatever it is is just as old as its architecture and since artictectures change it may be obsolete before its even fully defined.
I would say Microsoft has little to worry about, at least at this stage.
This probably is a pipedream. However, for very large corporations the IBM/Sun merger would be definitely a monopoly game-changer in the server space and for businesses that rely on servers to conduct their business, which today is nearly everyone. You would think that the closing comments in the article, which I believe are right on the money, regarding the need for Java users and developers to bring their wallets to the next JavaOne conference would at least merit some discussion in various board rooms.
It might well be that some corporations such as Google/Cisco/MS or a conglomerations of other competitors may need to consider bidding for Sun, if for no other reason than to slow down the time it would take for IBM to consolidate the purchase and monetize their emerging monopoly of the Unix/Linux/Server market.
Since the merger will likely dramatically warp the Linux development space for some time to come, if not fundamental alter the landscape of FOSS well into the future, some corporations might wish to slow things down a bit or make them more complicated for IBM, lest they find themselves truly stoned and at the short end of the stick as the ink dries and the dust settles.
Sun is like so many other American corporations. The thing they really invested in heavily was stock options for corporate execs and their egos.
Don't get me wrong. I ponied up $45,000 worth of SUNW/JAVA stock many years ago and still have far too much of it. What do I have to show for my retirement fund? 1% of the original purchase price. I held in there for years foolishly thinking that Sun and Java really were full of promise, despite their misfortunes, if only they and the broader community would recognize it.
However, they only proved that they never really learned how to use their advantages or sharpen their focus sufficiently to outcompete their competitors and the current management is now so bankrupt of ideas and sapped of energy to preserve their own perks that they view a sale as essential. Ironically, the FOSS community will never learn to appreciate its contributions until it disappears.
I would expect at this point to roughly double my money relative to the premerger price, when IBM buys out Sun or that simply Sun continues to whither until it is a dying ember, should they think a merger is not really worth the effort. With existing management, investment in Sun will always prove equivalent to flushing money down the toilet, not that many in Sun, particularly their engineers, are not an earnest bunch, do good work, and have contributed to making Open Source successful. However, as has been said above they never really learned the IBM lesson of providing and monetizing value added service. Sun lost it as a viable company when they lost Zander as CFO.
Anyway, as many have posted here, what remains, once the corporate shriveled egos and the whiz programmers drift off into the sunset, will disappear into a faceless IBM that charges too much for me and most FOSS users to ever be able to afford any of their products, save the free stuff they might from time to time throw to the Linux community to keep MS or RedHat temporarily off balance. Too bad about Netbeans.
Ironically, your idea/question might actually force IBM to pay more for Sun than they would wish. But I really doubt the opensource community really has that kind of cohesion or sense of self-focus to pull it off. It would mean spending real money in a difficult time. The FOSS community is by and large one that looks, with some justification, but at some cost, for sofware for "free", as in free beer. In these times, we all need more free beer.
Oddly, I always thought that a Sun/AMD deal would have been a good entry for Cisco to expand its presence in the datacenter, networked OS/virtual platform space. However, they seem to be like Sun and most other corporations, more focused on devising executive stock option schemes of their own to be interested in the tecnological/economic potential. Should IBM eat Sun, I suspect Cisco will wish that they had.
But, I'm really not sure its going to matter much soon anyway, as the US government will be forced soon to step in to buy up all failing US corporations as the bailout business and government stimulus contracting business are the only boom industry left, at least until the Chinese come in and buy out the US government, using increasingly worthless US dollars, of course.
That being said, I wonder if Sun ever shopped the company in China. At least the Chinese seem to have a knack for management, even if one, might find their political culture a little too rigid, not to mention the national security implications. My own personal view is that judging from the way Congress is managing things these past years, the later fears are greatly overblown as the Chinese are becoming better capitalists than we are, would be destined to overtake us anyway.
As for investment, its nearly all at the point of amusement now. I can still remember their heyday when all those Sun exec's were sitting around the conference table in their commercial gazing in amazement while staring at the giant shiny
Amen. American politics has degenerated into a pay for play system, not that it hasn't always been to varying degrees throughout our history. Its just more noticeably extreme now.
If you can't buy yourself a politician, you're simply not in the ballgame, but you are permitted to rant and rave to your heart's content so that all can pretend that you have your right to be heard.
The people will surrender their 1st amendment rights, their second amendment rights, etc. However, they will never surrender their right to complain. That would definitely be un-american.
The prestige comes from such journals having a good track record for producing good science and the development of a web of reviewers around such publication outlets. Broadening the number of such outlets only increases the competition not the quality of the science in either the "prestigious" or "non prestigious" journals.
Scientists gravitate to publishing in certain journals to increase the visibility of their work, the relevancy of the journal to the topic at hand, and the opportunities they provide to interact with other similarly minded scientists, who they view as making important contributions to the science at hand, so as to improve their chances at funding. The same is true for their gravitation to particular institutions (not to mention the payscales).
If there were more open journals seeking readers, it would only serve to focus the attention of scientists to communities of scientists they perceive as providing the best opportunities to advance their work. This should be something controlled by the scientific community itself, not through what essentially amounts to abuse of the copyright process. Open publication might actually force the media and policy makers to focus on what really constitutes good science rather than simply looking to a narrow spectrum of science published in a few journals as a proxy for the scientific process.
By taking some of the money out of the publication process that the large publishing houses have been able to extract for the "toll" of publishing, those funds can be better directed back toward the community of scientists themselves rather than allowing it to be placed in hands of those whose agendas that are not necessarily the same as the scientific community.
Paying for editorial services for scientific journals is hardly a widespread practice. I personally know of no such instances, although I once kindly received a free copy of a book from UC Berkeley Press for reviewing a very large monograph. In fact, scientific integrity would argue against such a practice. Unfortunately, good science can't be outsourced.
This may certainly be true for book publication and for non-scientific disciplines involving peer-review.
With regard to all those who do all this thankless, time-consuming, hard work, welcome to the world of science and scientific review.
Exactly, they even went so far as to suggest that NOAA should not give out weather information, because it was "unfairly" competing with privately funded weather reporting by Accuweather, who was actually compiling public weather data and disseminating it to the public for a fee.
Politicans, especially republican ones like Santorum, love these "let the private sector handle it initiatives" as its such a great way to insure a steady stream of campaign contributions.
As if, somehow, all those no bid contracts in Iraq saved us taxpayers a ton of money.
But boy am I glad to see they've become such fiscal conservatives since Obama took office. Personally, I'll begin to believe them when I see them demanding and voting for smaller salaries, fewer health benefits, and fewer publicaly funded perks of office for themselves.
Nobody is questioning publisher's right to try to make as much money as they can. Nor is anyone really arguing that "publication" should somehow be free. Lets face it, we all pay taxes and most such research is done either directly or indirectly with public funding. So most publications are not "free" even before the words even get into a wordprocess, much less published.
What the MIT faculty and others are doing in pushing for more open models of publishing is responding to the continuation of a system that allows publishing houses to act as toll keepers to the dissemination of knowledge that unlimited copyright gives them. Yes, this system serves publisher's business models well. However, the larger public interest in seeing less restrictions on access to scientific publication is much less well served. The business model in this case is based on the notion that profits can be maximized by relying on the exclusivity granted by the copyrights process. It becomes obsolete, if authors refuse to play by these rules (but, yes, you're right, it also becomes much less valuable to those who see it as a mechanism for making money).
You talk about what sacrifice does MIT faculty make? First of all, not all sacrifice can be measured in monetary terms. Not everyone monetarizes every action or principle they have. Your question fails to address the cost to MIT faculty of not having their work more widely appreciated by the "peers", ie. a larger public who might, if they took the time to become sufficiently literate in the subject at hand to understand the notation and ideas contained therein.
What you fail to address in your post is why should publishers be able use exclusive copyrights that allow them to act as toll collectors on the road to public knowledge. Sure it benefits a particular business model, you say is never obsolete. However, is supporting the publishers monopoly on access via the copyright process actually the best way to provide the greatest public good? In the age of the internet and online publication, the answer seems to be that there ought to be less restrictive mechanisms for the public to gain access to knowledge and by less restrictive, we are often talking about less costly since often it is cost that determines who will be able to gain access to "published" knowledge and who won't. It also bears on whether such a model is really the best way to strengthen the infrastructure of science and science education.
My view is that this issue is much larger and actually is about who gets to set the agenda with regard to the dissemination of knowledge and to a large extent what directions that agenda can take by virtue of what points of view get broad discussion.
I think today's presidential "news conference", which took place on line is a good example of the larger issue. Obama has concluded, and I think reasonably so given the desire of traditional media to manipulate coverage for their own purposes, that it is time to use new online technologies to broaden the public of which issues of importance to the body politic get discussed and how they get discussed. The traditional media no longer have an exclusive hold on what or how the news will be covered. Now the public has a mechanism to raise their own voice in this regard, both as to what the agenda should be and who should set it.
Some in this thread have wondered whether Science or Nature could survive. From the perspective of the science, it doesn't really matter. The stature of these publications does not lie in their ability to control what is the best science, but rather in the inherent peer review process that scientists themselves place around such publications. If scientist submitted the same papers in an open/forum style of publishing and those same papers receive the same level of scientific review (and lets face it, such review is not uniformly always stellar), the prestige and status of such publications would gravitate elsewhere, as it should.
Creationism is not science. It never has been and it never will be.
Creationism is a dark age religion nonsense that people in the 21st century should abolish. People around the world should also abolish there own primitive religions.
There is one good reason for that, among many others to do this. To make the world a better place.
The human race can do so much, and can have so good live. We don't need a world with poverty, wars and disease. The human race is on the technological point that those things can be abolished all together.
Sadly, some people are more keen to hold on there to there own greed, power and religion bad ideas then to improve the world around them.
For the record. I am an atheist and I want the world to be a better place for everyone.
I agree. The recent comments by the Pope bear this out. He proclaims in a remarkably un-Christian way that he is perfectly willing to look the other way and be completely indifferent to the loss of millions of lives from the failure to promote condoms to arrest the transmission of HIV.
Why? Because to do so threatens the notion that as Pope he has some kind of special authority or wisdom that is supreme to rational thought.
Consequently, the Pope only shows he is morally bankrupt and anti-Chrfistian, hoping vainly to protect his business model rather than any real interest in actually saving lives. Ironically, if one truly believes in the teachings of Jesus, one can only vigorously pray for the Pope's soul.
There are some cosmologists who believe that the fundamental laws of the universe, like incipient life, may actually evolve in time, since the concept of time itself can not be entirely disentangled from our concepts of space and mass, especially at the earliest micro-seconds of our universe, which we know were all about incredible densities in mass/energy.
The origins of life are quite relevant to the theory of evolution as much as the tips of the most recently evolved branches. This is so because how life may have originated from the inanimate fundamental building blocks would obviously greatly influence the kind of evolution (events that actually occurred) and how life is organized at its most fundamental (and subsequent) levels. In the context of evolution by means of natural selection there is no necessary discontinuity between non-life and life, although obviously at some point the mechanism being acted upon by natural selection becomes the notion of hereditable variation itself and its consequent physical manifestation as genetic machinery rather than potentially abiotic organisizing factors. Obviously, for most of the history of life molecular biologists are interested in specific nucleic acids and nucleic acid protein interactions/organizations as the fundamental machinery that is selected for/against through time. Nonetheless, it is not unreasonable to suppose that prior to that fuzzy boundary prior to "life as we know it", that there were other natural selection mechanisms that may have been operating on systems of physical/chemical interactions affecting the organization of "immediately pre-life forms".
Obviously, the details are difficult to know with precision, just as is our knowledge of distant galaxies and the incipient moments of the universe, because the knowledge about these long distant events or places are understood via indirect inference.
Nonetheless, this is precisely why exobiologists are particularly interested in finding life on other planets. If we find, say life on mars, or so other "earth like" planet, their would be the reasonable and testable expectations that life on such a planet[s] would have originated and evolved independently from that on earth. One might then be in a position to ask, what are the fundamental chemical/physical mechanisms that have made such different origins similar or dissimilar or even possible at all.
I am constantly bemused by those seeking proof in science. There are no certain constants in science, only those which are regarded as constant because observation fails to suggest that they are anything other than constant. How constant are constants is often a reasonable source of inquiry for physicists just as they are for biologists, chemists, or geologists. Many "constants" have proved to be non-constants in all circumstances.
Explanations about the origin of life are as sketchy only the extent current theories regarding biochemical and organic chemistry are insufficiently understood to distinguish among a bewildering variety of possible kinds of chemical reactions that could and likely did occur in the past.
To seek absolute proof, however, is to misunderstand how science distinguishes among various potential "scientific" explanations and what science is. It is not a body of fact that flows necessarily from a great book, somehow mysteriously written by some guy in the sky.
In this sense mathematics is not a science, since it relies on axioms from which other concepts and consistency follow by their acceptance. That is not to say that there are not concepts that fall outside of what mathematics can be used to deduce or infer, as Godel and Cohen recognized in discussing the underlying logical foundations of axiomatic set theory. There are some kinds contradictions that can not be explained away regardless of what axioms one chooses.
Rather, natural science looks for logical inconsistency among ideas and predicted observations that can be reasonably expected given a particular idea or set of ideas (e
The fact that they don't think doesn't really bother me about the anti-science crowd. What bothers me is that they keep insisting that no one else should think either.
The anti-science vigilantes like the Taliban want to march America back to the 5th (4th?) century. The question at hand is how many in Texas are so indifferent to their own future that they will march back in time with them.
No one would accuse the authors of this article as being scientific. A truly scientific approach would be fascinating, however. Nonetheless, the article does hit the IT phenomenon in once sense, directly on the head.
The single largest component of the innovation is often the magnitude of the HYPE that sustains much of it. Without the hype, how could we compare the true significance of say the consequences of Alan Turing's work to say "Twitter", where all that is wisdom must be limited to 150 characters.
To really understand where technology pools, we need a follow-up article taking a critical look at where are the big dumping grounds for all the IT waste that is generated world-wide.
Where's the story about the real long term impact of the IT industry? Sure we know all about the tabloid glamor, but what about following up to find out where IT technology really "pools"?
Slashdot Mirror
"I'm thinking it's the part where people arrive at a conclusion regarding matters of science from a path dictated by politics and or religion."
I'm thinking your thinking is irrelevant to the science. Why not try to answer the question with data or reasoned argument rather than a nice sophistic non-denial denial?
There was nothing in the post concerning what we know about the effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is in any way the product of politics or religion, so exactly what's your point about there only being a "correlation" and not a well understood cause and effect relationship?
Do you actually have to observe someone hitting you on the head with a hammer before you can notice that your head hurts? That might be a pretty rigorous form of hypothesis testing, but like the case of study of global warming, your approach is going to be both far more expensive and painful than it needs to be.
"Most, but not all, instructors are teaching because they can't hack it in the real world of their chosen field."
Those who hold this notion obviously have a very limited understanding of academia.
At least in the world of science, scientist covet teaching positions, particularly at prestigious universities, as this provides them the opportunity to seek competitive grants to conduct "leading edge" research and to have access to the smartest and most capable students to assist them in pushing the envelope. If you work for a private company or a government entity, you have very severe restrictions on the direction your own research takes.
A Kindle puts one in the position of being of just plain out of luck if the author chooses to limit the ability of Amazon to act as an authorized seller at some future point in time, or if you manage to mangle or loose your DMR certificates, or if your Kindle breaks and you have to reinstall (read repurchase) all your ebooks, of if all your old ebooks are no longer Kindle 2.0 compatible, because then you no longer have legal access to your prior purchases.
As the Apple approach shows, this kind of system works economically only if multiple corporations (content providers/content distributors) and the "government" collude sufficiently to lock in users and if they can keep the price of the collusion to potential buyers just low enough to keep wanton piracy and open standards at an acceptably low level (of course for some any piracy or open standards at all is unreasonable).
The real threat to Kindle will come when an enterprising young entrepeneur makes a Kindle-llike device that permits artists/writers to register their works by which the artists themselves keep the lion's share of the cost of a download say, 95%, and accept the royalties directly rather than through the Amazon middleman.
Of course, first she will have to find venture capital in order to hire a good enough lawyer to get her product successfully embedded in the marketplace and 1,000,000 friends in her political district to keep her "representatives" from accepting "contributions" from corporations like Amazon to make sale of such a "revolutionary" device illegal or somehow "sufficiently unsafe as to require regulation" lest it fall into the wrong hands and upset domestic tranquility (ie existing corporate profits).
As Darwin in a humorous frame of mind once noted "Its everyone for themselves. Its a jungle out there."
"but experience has demonstrated that only people who are lucky enough to have exceptional teachers or middle class families will have the environment to excel"
Obviously, you haven't heard of Gauss or Ramanujan. The former began his mathematical career at the age of 3, correcting accounting errors in his father's business. The latter was a self taught genius who rose from extreme poverty on the strength of his mathematical ideas alone. Had he not died prematurely and his work more accessible to the less gifted, he would have been much more widely known.
In fact there are a great many famous mathematicians from very humble backgrounds, which only goes to prove that you do yourself and humanity a great disservice in perpetuating stereotypes. There is no single path to genius nor is there a single special kind of intellect. Any young student may prove they have talent, if they can learn to think clearly enough.
I'm from Mississippi. What's an Arkansas?
PS. Why would anyone want broadband speeds in excess of 256 K? There ought to be a law against it. It sounds unamerican and can only lead to a new world order.
You have not watched Sun closely enough to realize that its executive suite is divorced from its technical divisions. The sale has more to do with salvaging big golden parachutes for McNeally and other execs than it has with either shareholder's benefits or the longterm viability of the company. Once they have a buyer for the parachutes, the rest can simply fall wherever.
often criticism and complaining stem from misunderstanding. Lets face it learning Linux is not that easy once you get past using menu driven applications. Take for example, Netbeans. Its a wonderful and powerful application building interface. However, for someone, even with modest coding skills, it is difficult to understand how to use its full power. It is very difficult to get across the big picture, which is needed to provide insight into the devil in the details.
Often developers can get far more from "critics" if they provide better documentation, including examples that lead users into the use of the program and hence the details of the code (albeit indirectly). Likewise, the "novice", who may actually be an expert in another area of computing, can get often learn that the problem they have with a given program has often been considered and solved, but perhaps not in the same way or with the same concepts/words/ideas that might be familiar to the user. Sometimes understanding comes from using the same terminology and language (conceptual, not coding).
Linux developers and users really need to look hard at the issue of documentation and how it can be better managed, networked, integrated, and distributed, because, after all this is much of what this discussion of "criticism" is often about.
In that sense I found the original article interesting as the writer was a literature major with limited coding experience, but with sufficient users skills to be able to actually make a living writing technical books.
Making oneself clear can often remove a lot of unnecessary criticism, not to mention provide a sound foundation to build more knowledgeable Linux users.
On paper it sounds good, a simple calculation, but he never addresses how much energy that would take or where the water would come from.
"Past Performance is Not Necessarily Indicative of Future Results"
How ironic. Dr. Dyson wouldn't be the first aging, but unquestionably brilliant physicist at the Institute for Advanced Studies, who spent his last days pointlessly and wrongly, arguing about perceived inaccuracy of cutting edge scientific theories that continued to gain scientific credence dispite such arguments. Albert Einstein's quibbles with fundamental aspects of quantum physics are now largely forgotten.
Dr. Dyson might do better to provide detailed simulation models that counter to Dr. Hansen's pioneering work rather what offering what otherwise seems to be little more than armchair speculation of dubious relevance to global warming.
You can tell an idea is still being formulated, when the people using it can not even define it.
Open the "open manifesto" and read the definition of cloud computing then explain to your self what cloud computing is. Whatever it is is just as old as its architecture and since artictectures change it may be obsolete before its even fully defined.
I would say Microsoft has little to worry about, at least at this stage.
Apple can't afford it. They are rapidly becoming an ipod/iphone company anyway.
This probably is a pipedream. However, for very large corporations the IBM/Sun merger would be definitely a monopoly game-changer in the server space and for businesses that rely on servers to conduct their business, which today is nearly everyone. You would think that the closing comments in the article, which I believe are right on the money, regarding the need for Java users and developers to bring their wallets to the next JavaOne conference would at least merit some discussion in various board rooms.
It might well be that some corporations such as Google/Cisco/MS or a conglomerations of other competitors may need to consider bidding for Sun, if for no other reason than to slow down the time it would take for IBM to consolidate the purchase and monetize their emerging monopoly of the Unix/Linux/Server market.
Since the merger will likely dramatically warp the Linux development space for some time to come, if not fundamental alter the landscape of FOSS well into the future, some corporations might wish to slow things down a bit or make them more complicated for IBM, lest they find themselves truly stoned and at the short end of the stick as the ink dries and the dust settles.
I doubt it. The answer is . as in .com.
Sun is like so many other American corporations. The thing they really invested in heavily was stock options for corporate execs and their egos.
Don't get me wrong. I ponied up $45,000 worth of SUNW/JAVA stock many years ago and still have far too much of it. What do I have to show for my retirement fund? 1% of the original purchase price. I held in there for years foolishly thinking that Sun and Java really were full of promise, despite their misfortunes, if only they and the broader community would recognize it.
However, they only proved that they never really learned how to use their advantages or sharpen their focus sufficiently to outcompete their competitors and the current management is now so bankrupt of ideas and sapped of energy to preserve their own perks that they view a sale as essential. Ironically, the FOSS community will never learn to appreciate its contributions until it disappears.
I would expect at this point to roughly double my money relative to the premerger price, when IBM buys out Sun or that simply Sun continues to whither until it is a dying ember, should they think a merger is not really worth the effort. With existing management, investment in Sun will always prove equivalent to flushing money down the toilet, not that many in Sun, particularly their engineers, are not an earnest bunch, do good work, and have contributed to making Open Source successful. However, as has been said above they never really learned the IBM lesson of providing and monetizing value added service. Sun lost it as a viable company when they lost Zander as CFO.
Anyway, as many have posted here, what remains, once the corporate shriveled egos and the whiz programmers drift off into the sunset, will disappear into a faceless IBM that charges too much for me and most FOSS users to ever be able to afford any of their products, save the free stuff they might from time to time throw to the Linux community to keep MS or RedHat temporarily off balance. Too bad about Netbeans.
Ironically, your idea/question might actually force IBM to pay more for Sun than they would wish. But I really doubt the opensource community really has that kind of cohesion or sense of self-focus to pull it off. It would mean spending real money in a difficult time. The FOSS community is by and large one that looks, with some justification, but at some cost, for sofware for "free", as in free beer. In these times, we all need more free beer.
Oddly, I always thought that a Sun/AMD deal would have been a good entry for Cisco to expand its presence in the datacenter, networked OS/virtual platform space. However, they seem to be like Sun and most other corporations, more focused on devising executive stock option schemes of their own to be interested in the tecnological/economic potential. Should IBM eat Sun, I suspect Cisco will wish that they had.
But, I'm really not sure its going to matter much soon anyway, as the US government will be forced soon to step in to buy up all failing US corporations as the bailout business and government stimulus contracting business are the only boom industry left, at least until the Chinese come in and buy out the US government, using increasingly worthless US dollars, of course.
That being said, I wonder if Sun ever shopped the company in China. At least the Chinese seem to have a knack for management, even if one, might find their political culture a little too rigid, not to mention the national security implications. My own personal view is that judging from the way Congress is managing things these past years, the later fears are greatly overblown as the Chinese are becoming better capitalists than we are, would be destined to overtake us anyway.
As for investment, its nearly all at the point of amusement now. I can still remember their heyday when all those Sun exec's were sitting around the conference table in their commercial gazing in amazement while staring at the giant shiny
Amen. American politics has degenerated into a pay for play system, not that it hasn't always been to varying degrees throughout our history. Its just more noticeably extreme now.
If you can't buy yourself a politician, you're simply not in the ballgame, but you are permitted to rant and rave to your heart's content so that all can pretend that you have your right to be heard.
The people will surrender their 1st amendment rights, their second amendment rights, etc. However, they will never surrender their right to complain. That would definitely be un-american.
The prestige comes from such journals having a good track record for producing good science and the development of a web of reviewers around such publication outlets. Broadening the number of such outlets only increases the competition not the quality of the science in either the "prestigious" or "non prestigious" journals.
Scientists gravitate to publishing in certain journals to increase the visibility of their work, the relevancy of the journal to the topic at hand, and the opportunities they provide to interact with other similarly minded scientists, who they view as making important contributions to the science at hand, so as to improve their chances at funding. The same is true for their gravitation to particular institutions (not to mention the payscales).
If there were more open journals seeking readers, it would only serve to focus the attention of scientists to communities of scientists they perceive as providing the best opportunities to advance their work. This should be something controlled by the scientific community itself, not through what essentially amounts to abuse of the copyright process. Open publication might actually force the media and policy makers to focus on what really constitutes good science rather than simply looking to a narrow spectrum of science published in a few journals as a proxy for the scientific process.
By taking some of the money out of the publication process that the large publishing houses have been able to extract for the "toll" of publishing, those funds can be better directed back toward the community of scientists themselves rather than allowing it to be placed in hands of those whose agendas that are not necessarily the same as the scientific community.
Paying for editorial services for scientific journals is hardly a widespread practice. I personally know of no such instances, although I once kindly received a free copy of a book from UC Berkeley Press for reviewing a very large monograph. In fact, scientific integrity would argue against such a practice. Unfortunately, good science can't be outsourced.
This may certainly be true for book publication and for non-scientific disciplines involving peer-review.
With regard to all those who do all this thankless, time-consuming, hard work, welcome to the world of science and scientific review.
Exactly, they even went so far as to suggest that NOAA should not give out weather information, because it was "unfairly" competing with privately funded weather reporting by Accuweather, who was actually compiling public weather data and disseminating it to the public for a fee.
Politicans, especially republican ones like Santorum, love these "let the private sector handle it initiatives" as its such a great way to insure a steady stream of campaign contributions.
As if, somehow, all those no bid contracts in Iraq saved us taxpayers a ton of money.
But boy am I glad to see they've become such fiscal conservatives since Obama took office. Personally, I'll begin to believe them when I see them demanding and voting for smaller salaries, fewer health benefits, and fewer publicaly funded perks of office for themselves.
Nobody is questioning publisher's right to try to make as much money as they can. Nor is anyone really arguing that "publication" should somehow be free. Lets face it, we all pay taxes and most such research is done either directly or indirectly with public funding. So most publications are not "free" even before the words even get into a wordprocess, much less published.
What the MIT faculty and others are doing in pushing for more open models of publishing is responding to the continuation of a system that allows publishing houses to act as toll keepers to the dissemination of knowledge that unlimited copyright gives them. Yes, this system serves publisher's business models well. However, the larger public interest in seeing less restrictions on access to scientific publication is much less well served. The business model in this case is based on the notion that profits can be maximized by relying on the exclusivity granted by the copyrights process. It becomes obsolete, if authors refuse to play by these rules (but, yes, you're right, it also becomes much less valuable to those who see it as a mechanism for making money).
You talk about what sacrifice does MIT faculty make? First of all, not all sacrifice can be measured in monetary terms. Not everyone monetarizes every action or principle they have. Your question fails to address the cost to MIT faculty of not having their work more widely appreciated by the "peers", ie. a larger public who might, if they took the time to become sufficiently literate in the subject at hand to understand the notation and ideas contained therein.
What you fail to address in your post is why should publishers be able use exclusive copyrights that allow them to act as toll collectors on the road to public knowledge. Sure it benefits a particular business model, you say is never obsolete. However, is supporting the publishers monopoly on access via the copyright process actually the best way to provide the greatest public good? In the age of the internet and online publication, the answer seems to be that there ought to be less restrictive mechanisms for the public to gain access to knowledge and by less restrictive, we are often talking about less costly since often it is cost that determines who will be able to gain access to "published" knowledge and who won't. It also bears on whether such a model is really the best way to strengthen the infrastructure of science and science education.
My view is that this issue is much larger and actually is about who gets to set the agenda with regard to the dissemination of knowledge and to a large extent what directions that agenda can take by virtue of what points of view get broad discussion.
I think today's presidential "news conference", which took place on line is a good example of the larger issue. Obama has concluded, and I think reasonably so given the desire of traditional media to manipulate coverage for their own purposes, that it is time to use new online technologies to broaden the public of which issues of importance to the body politic get discussed and how they get discussed. The traditional media no longer have an exclusive hold on what or how the news will be covered. Now the public has a mechanism to raise their own voice in this regard, both as to what the agenda should be and who should set it.
Some in this thread have wondered whether Science or Nature could survive. From the perspective of the science, it doesn't really matter. The stature of these publications does not lie in their ability to control what is the best science, but rather in the inherent peer review process that scientists themselves place around such publications. If scientist submitted the same papers in an open/forum style of publishing and those same papers receive the same level of scientific review (and lets face it, such review is not uniformly always stellar), the prestige and status of such publications would
gravitate elsewhere, as it should.
The issue is also much broader in that i
Creationism is not science. It never has been and it never will be.
Creationism is a dark age religion nonsense that people in the 21st century should abolish. People around the world should also abolish there own primitive religions.
There is one good reason for that, among many others to do this. To make the world a better place.
The human race can do so much, and can have so good live. We don't need a world with poverty, wars and disease. The human race is on the technological point that those things can be abolished all together.
Sadly, some people are more keen to hold on there to there own greed, power and religion bad ideas then to improve the world around them.
For the record. I am an atheist and I want the world to be a better place for everyone.
I agree. The recent comments by the Pope bear this out. He proclaims in a remarkably un-Christian way that he is perfectly willing to look the other way and be completely indifferent to the loss of millions of lives from the failure to promote condoms to arrest the transmission of HIV.
Why? Because to do so threatens the notion that as Pope he has some kind of special authority or wisdom that is supreme to rational thought.
Consequently, the Pope only shows he is morally bankrupt and anti-Chrfistian, hoping vainly to protect his business model rather than any real interest in actually saving lives. Ironically, if one truly believes in the teachings of Jesus, one can only vigorously pray for the Pope's soul.
There are some cosmologists who believe that the fundamental laws of the universe, like incipient life, may actually evolve in time, since the concept of time itself can not be entirely disentangled from our concepts of space and mass, especially at the earliest micro-seconds of our universe, which we know were all about incredible densities in mass/energy.
The origins of life are quite relevant to the theory of evolution as much as the tips of the most recently evolved branches. This is so because how life may have originated from the inanimate fundamental building blocks would obviously greatly influence the kind of evolution (events that actually occurred) and how life is organized at its most fundamental (and subsequent) levels. In the context of evolution by means of natural selection there is no necessary discontinuity between non-life and life, although obviously at some point the mechanism being acted upon by natural selection becomes the notion of hereditable variation itself and its consequent physical manifestation as genetic machinery rather than potentially abiotic organisizing factors. Obviously, for most of the history of life molecular biologists are interested in specific nucleic acids and nucleic acid protein interactions/organizations as the fundamental machinery that is selected for/against through time. Nonetheless, it is not unreasonable to suppose that prior to that fuzzy boundary prior to "life as we know it", that there were other natural selection mechanisms that may have been operating on systems of physical/chemical interactions affecting the organization of "immediately pre-life forms".
Obviously, the details are difficult to know with precision, just as is our knowledge of distant galaxies and the incipient moments of the universe, because the knowledge about these long distant events or places are understood via indirect inference.
Nonetheless, this is precisely why exobiologists are particularly interested in finding life on other planets. If we find, say life on mars, or so other "earth like" planet, their would be the reasonable and testable expectations that life on such a planet[s] would have originated and evolved independently from that on earth. One might then be in a position to ask, what are the fundamental chemical/physical mechanisms that have made such different origins similar or dissimilar or even possible at all.
I am constantly bemused by those seeking proof in science. There are no certain constants in science, only those which are regarded as constant because observation fails to suggest that they are anything other than constant. How constant are constants is often a reasonable source of inquiry for physicists just as they are for biologists, chemists, or geologists. Many "constants" have proved to be non-constants in all circumstances.
Explanations about the origin of life are as sketchy only the extent current theories regarding biochemical and organic chemistry are insufficiently understood to distinguish among a bewildering variety of possible kinds of chemical reactions that could and likely did occur in the past.
To seek absolute proof, however, is to misunderstand how science distinguishes among various potential "scientific" explanations and what science is. It is not a body of fact that flows necessarily from a great book, somehow mysteriously written by some guy in the sky.
In this sense mathematics is not a science, since it relies on axioms from which other concepts and consistency follow by their acceptance. That is not to say that there are not concepts that fall outside of what mathematics can be used to deduce or infer, as Godel and Cohen recognized in discussing the underlying logical foundations of axiomatic set theory. There are some kinds contradictions that can not be explained away regardless of what axioms one chooses.
Rather, natural science looks for logical inconsistency among ideas and predicted observations that can be reasonably expected given a particular idea or set of ideas (e
The fact that they don't think doesn't really bother me about the anti-science crowd. What bothers me is that they keep insisting that no one else should think either.
The anti-science vigilantes like the Taliban want to march America back to the 5th (4th?) century. The question at hand is how many in Texas are so indifferent to their own future that they will march back in time with them.
The entire concept of Darwinian evolution threatens the religious bottom line, how much money finds its way into the collection plate.
No one would accuse the authors of this article as being scientific. A truly scientific approach would be fascinating, however. Nonetheless, the
article does hit the IT phenomenon in once sense, directly on the head.
The single largest component of the innovation is often the magnitude of the HYPE that sustains much of it. Without the hype, how could we compare the true significance of say the consequences of Alan Turing's work to say "Twitter", where all that is wisdom must be limited to 150 characters.
To really understand where technology pools, we need a follow-up article taking a critical look at where are the big dumping grounds for all the IT waste that is generated world-wide.
Where's the story about the real long term impact of the IT industry? Sure we know all about the tabloid glamor, but what about following up to find out where IT technology really "pools"?