Liudvikas Bukys

Christian Science Monitor:
an experience with Dramatica Pro
[via Techdirt]

David Berlind‘s

JamSpam.org

J.H. Saltzer, D.P. Reed and D.D. Clark: End-to-End Arguments in System Design (circa 1980)

Cringely: Collateral Damage:
Why Most Internet Advertising Doesn’t Work and What Little Does Work Is Killing Us:

“ At the same time that the sheer volume of spam is clogging networks and demanding server upgrades to handle all the sludge, crude anti-spam techniques are making our Internet communications less effective and less efficient. We are both drowning in spam and trying to stop it by hitting ourselves in the head. But wait, there’s more! Politicians, who think their job is to make laws that tell us when to breathe, now want to make spam illegal, which might be nice if it didn’t at the same time trample on the U.S. Constitution. One minute spam will be illegal and the next minute it will be against the law to say vice president Dick Cheney really ought to lose a little weight. Killing spam isn’t worth the loss of free speech, at least not to me.”

Linux Journal: Health Monitoring with lm_sensors

O’Reilly Network: Stein Gives Bioinformatics Ten Years to Live [Feb. 05, 2003]:
‘ Lincoln Stein’s keynote at the O’Reilly Bioinformatics Technology Conference was provocatively titled “Bioinformatics: Gone in 2012.” Despite the title, Stein is optimistic about the future for people doing bioinformatics. But he explained that “the field of bioinformatics will be gone by 2012. The field will be doing the same thing but it won’t be considered a field.” His address looked at what bioinformatics is and what its future is likely to be in the context of other scientific disciplines. He also looked at career prospects for people doing bioinformatics and provided advice for those looking to enter the field.
…
One of Stein’s tests for a discipline is the “Department Of” test. Take your favorite field or service and prepend it with your favorite institution’s name, followed by “Department of”. For example, he is quite happy with the phrase “the Harvard Department of Genetics.” On the other hand, a “Department of Microscopy” seems to him to fit better at an Institute of Technology. He said that for him, a Department of Bioinformatics has the same feel and he doesn’t predict the establishment of bioinformatics departments.
…
Stein returned to the question, what is bioinformatics? In light of his thoughts on services defined by tools and disciplines defined by problem, his answer was simple. Bioinformatics is just one way of studying biology. Whether you think of bioinformatics as High Throughput Biology, Integrative Biology, or Large Data Set Biology, fundamentally Stein argues that bioinformatics is biology.
’

Forbes.com: Pfizer’s Definition Of ‘Invention’:
‘Today Pfizer is celebrating because a patent covering a whole class of arthritis medicines was declared invalid. But the world’s largest drug company still insists that a similarly broad patent on impotence pills is valid. Any cynic would note one difference between the two patents: Pfizer owns the impotence patent, not the arthritis one. Still, it is worth taking a look at Pfizer’s definition of the word “invention.”’

Doc Searls and David Weinberger: World of Ends:

When it comes to the Net, a lot of us suffer from Repetitive Mistake Syndrome. This is especially true for magazine and newspaper publishing, broadcasting, cable television, the record industry, the movie industry, and the telephone industry, to name just six.

…
Fortunately, the true nature of Internet isn’t hard to understand. In fact, just a fistful of statements stands between Repetitive Mistake Syndrome and Enlightenment…

…
The Nutshell
1.
The Internet isn’t complicated

2. The Internet isn’t a thing. It’s an agreement.
3. The Internet is stupid.
4. Adding value to the Internet lowers its
value.
5. All the Internet’s value grows on its
edges.

6. Money moves to the suburbs.
7. The end of the world? Nah, the world of
ends.
8. The Internet’s three virtues:
a. No one owns it

b. Everyone can use it
c. Anyone can improve it
9. If the Internet is so simple, why have
so many been so boneheaded about it?
10. Some mistakes we can stop making already

Clay Shirky: Enter the Decentralized Zone
“The IT workers of any organization larger than 50 people are now in an impossible
situation: They are rewarded for negative events-no crashes or breeches-even as workers
are inexorably eroding their ability to build or manage a corporate sandbox. The obvious
parallel here is with the PC itself; 20 years ago, the mainframe guys laughed at the
toy computers workers were bringing into the workplace because they knew that computation
was too complex to be handled by anyone other than a centralized group of trained
professionals. Today, we take it for granted that workers can manage their own computers.

But we still regard network access and configuration as something that needs to be
centrally managed by trained professionals, even as workers take network configuration
under their control. There is no one right answer-digital security is a trade-off. But
no solution that requires centralized control over what network users do will succeed. ”

Microsoft & BEA: XML, SOAP, and Binary Data

Tim Bray: Bosworth et al on XML, SOAP, Binary Data