One of my favorite shows as a kid was MacGyver, I mean, with nothing more than a dab of toothpaste and a slice of aluminum foil Richard Dean Anderson managed to shift the trade winds and realign the planets into their proper orbits. And of course, who could forget his arch-nemesis Murdoc!
Anyways, I’m not sure if you guys remember Episode 6 of the first season (Trumbo’s World), but it was one of my most memorable episodes: the Army Ant one. You see a mass of what look like hot tamales scurrying across the jungle floor devouring every animal (anything really) in their path. As a boy, such a creature consumed much of my non-sleeping, non-recess, non-cartoon day. I would spend hours reading up on what a thorax and abdomen did and imagined what it would be like to have an exoskeleton impervious to bullets (I said imagined).
And then one day I grew up and left the creepy-crawling Ant Kingdom behind. It appears however, that someone picked up my preliminary Nobel-prize class research and has further continued the study of these unfurry, unmeaty and unsavory insects.
Apparently, these fearsome six-legged scavengers have not evolved at all in the past 100 million years – that date varies slightly with my finding pegged at approximately 97.369 million years (hehe, could you imagine a 10-year old kid using some sort of radioactive-decay instrument to carbon date a footprint left behind by one of those insects?).
Sean Brady, a Cornell postdoctoral researcher in entomology “studied the DNA of 30 army ant species and 20 possible ancestors within the army ant community, divided between the New World species in Ecitoninae and the Old World groups Aenictinae and Dorylinae. He specifically sought information from four different genes to uncover clues to their relationships.”
And what he discovered was nothing short of a shocking Jerry Springer episode: they were all related. Or as he said, “If they share those mutations, we can infer they evolved from the same source.”
So the next time you’re deep in the Amazonian rainforest, sipping a java and catching some rays and you notice a mile long brigade of hot tamales marching through the jungle, you’ll know that the smug grin plastered on their face today, is the same one they had when Chupacabras, Yeti’s and Homo promiscuous walked the earth.
Academic honesty: Just Say No to Plagiarism. This topic was brought up time and again in my history classes back in college. Copying word for word without citing sources is a big no-no and you would hear stories of both undergrad and graduate students being flunked or expelled for doing so.
Two years ago (almost to the day), University of Virginia physics Professor Louis Bloomfield discovered that 158 current and former students had plagiarized (either actually copying or allowing someone to copy) term papers. 48 were actually found guilty, including graduate students (20 by through a student-run trial and 28 others left “admitting guilt”).
The highly publicized probe generated a wave of concern about cheating in higher education after physics Professor Louis Bloomfield, acting on a tip from a student, wrote a computer program that searched for repeated word patterns in term papers that had been submitted over five semesters in his introductory physics course. Concern about plagiarism has grown with the development of the Internet. (Washington Post)
Now Dr. Jenkins over at Microdoc News throws in a new, but similar wrinkle regarding media outlets and their online behavior:
The Register charges that Bloggers are simply copiers of each others posts and many just link from their blog to someone else’s blog and essentially have the same story. Mainstream news media can be charged with the same thing, only that they do not provide a link to where they got the story from!! At least bloggers acknowledge where they got the story from and who originated the story. What about it mainstream media, identify who else is running the story and identify which news organization actually wrote the story, and who ran it first!! It is about time mainstream media came up to bloggers’ standards!!
And guess what computer program he used to discover this? Yup, news.google.com, the new kid on the block. He looked at the new branches of news.google.com for India, Australia and the UK and noticed a striking similarity between stories, pictures and attribution (or lack thereof).
Now, this is not to say that all bloggers are not guilty of plagiarizing. The Agonist was accused of copying material from the pay-for-intelligence service Stratfor throughout the Iraqi conflict.
The Agonist:
10:36 EST U.S. troops fired on a car that reportedly had tried to
crash through a checkpoint near As Samawah. One man was killed
and three people were wounded. U.S. officials say the man who
was killed was an Iraqi soldier.
Stratfor:
0256 GMT - U.S. troops fired on a car that reportedly had tried to
crash through a checkpoint near As Samawah. One man was killed and
three people were wounded. U.S. officials say the man who was killed
was an Iraqi soldier.
The Agonist:
10:41 EST coalition forces have flown 2,000 sorties in the last 24
hours. That is double the number of sorties flown on March 30.
Stratfor:
0229 GMT - U.S. officials say coalition forces have flown 2,000
sorties in the last 24 hours. That is double the number of sorties
flown on March 30.(source)
If I were to do anything like The Agonist did back in college, I would have been summarily flunked, and justly so. And ignoring for a moment his failure to attribute sources appropriately, the Agonist simply copied the material adding little original commentary to the messages. Note: this is where sites like BlogPulse could come in handy, to see who is just copying posts – there is a term for that: Parroting.
At any rate, the media outlets that continue to do this brought the coming gauntlet upon themselves. There is really no excuse for failing to link to the proper source in this Search Engine Age. Erasmus is surely rolling in his grave, poor poor Erasmus.
Remember those ads from Sun Microsystems 5 years ago –“We’re the dot in dotcom”? Well, Sun has definitely seen brighter days as they continue to lose both marketshare and clientele to most notably, the Penguin solution.
The information technology-centric blog, Always-On, put together a 3-part interview with Jonathan Schwartz, who is the Executive Vice President of Sun Software Group (AO also put together the Eric Schmidt series). I think this interview shows how the once magical Santa Clara-based firm is headed down the same path DEC forged 5 years ago.
First Mr. Schwartz emphasizes the role of Java, a technology that has been around for 8 years (this month) and has yet to fulfill the stated goal of revolutionizing the way Operating Systems and software works.
In fact, if there is anyone to blame for the lack of acceptance, it is Sun itself who continues to keep the technology proprietary. In addition to making themselves look foolish in court (by complaining about Microsoft using its own proprietary software to cause incompatibilities with Sun’s proprietary software) they have yet to provide your average Joe with the Insanely Great Java OS that can juggle, roll over and put out fires. Java’s become an industry leader in everything but clients, which is the only place Sun was targeting to begin with.
No geek or web host provider I know has any desire to use Solaris: it is proprietary software that still costs money to license – a double whammy. It’s the same reason individuals and companies are moving away from the Microsoft solutions. Sure, Solaris might be more robust, stable and secure than Windows Server 2003, but Sun misses the point, they are offering the same lose-lose solution.
Linux distributions and the BSDs do not cost a dime, nothing. Zero point nada. Additionally, the code in these open-source solutions is… open. Solaris is still closed and proprietary offering little incentive for code-hackers, developers and other misfits from modifying the code as they see fit (like fixing bugs or holes). Mr. Schwartz states:
“No CIO I know wants more source code. They’ve got enough, thank you very much. What they want is the economics of the Intel software.”
I’m fairly certain he meant Intel hardware, which is even more discouraging if I were a Sun stock holder. What does a customer need Sun for if they want to run Linux on Intel? Additionally, if the real appeal of Linux is Intel, why is IBM pushing Linux on RS6000? I do not use Linux on the servers because I get the opportunity to use Intel chips, no, as I mentioned in my Cringely rebuttal, it is because it is a cost effective solution that works. Neither Solaris nor Windows fits in this category.
If Sun wants to Solaris to stay alive easily, they should open-source it using a BSD or GPL-style license. My friend Sean Lynch (an open-source developer and advocate) summed it up:
Sun sounds like a drowning man trying to grasp onto passing detritus. They just don’t know it yet, they’re trying to jump on the Linux bandwagon but they don’t know why.
Stating, “We’re gonna let people use Linux so they can get x86s because we think they’ll want to run Solaris on x86 later” — like people really need Sun to sell them x86s so they can run Linux.
I’m asking, “Would you buy a used operating system from this man?” They’ve gotta be offering it to keep their existing customer base even though he says that’s not the case.
N1 and Orion appear to have won the praises at the board room meetings, but I doubt they will win the throngs of customers they need to not only earn a profit but to grow. Sun should simply state in a few comparison charts as to how any of their software solutions are a better, cost-effective approach to all competing solutions. So far they have not and by keeping Java fine-tuned and enhanced for Solaris, all it really does is encourage people to use 3rd party Java tools… like Jikes and Jbuilder.
The same should be expected from their UltraSparc division, what is the advantage of using their chips (that is another matter as well)?
His analysis of Eric Schmidt’s claim regarding “Moore’s Law” is even more obtuse. Mr. Schmidt is speaking from the end-user consumer perspective that needs exact and efficient solutions for their needs. Neither Solaris nor the Sparc fit into this equation in any meaningful position (nor does the Itanium or Windows Server for that matter). You can be self-righteous with the consumer all you want, but in the end, he is what provides your revenue: start providing something he says he needs, not something you think he needs.
And regarding Mr. Schwartz’s statement about games being the “single biggest content driver,” why hasn’t Sun done anything to capitalize off this? They don’t develop games, they don’t develop consoles and they don’t develop standards. Why didn’t they make a Javastation to compete with the Playstation’s? Why didn’t they come up with a reasonable or efficient standard OpenGL interface for Java? Why didn’t they do anything about this Prime Mover?
The interview should be sent to all Sun stockholders wherein they demand better executives, ones who actually have a coherent strategy. Jason Ditz concurs, stating:
Sun is positioning Solaris to compete head on with Linux, while at the same time embracing Linux on the very platform they’re trying to reintroduce Solaris to. Low-cost low-end 32-bit servers are great, but it makes absolutely no sense to put Solaris on them when it doesn’t give you any advantage over Linux and costs you more money.
From a theoretical history book written in 5 years: in the end, Scott McNealy became Larry Ellison’s auxiliary Bill Gates basher, spending too much time making jabs at Microsoft in court instead of developing a full-proof productive and profitable plan to lead the digital world with.
