Posts Tagged subject=future
Reference: An Enterprise Near to Collapse ?
Posted by admin in Editorial, Library World on August 11th, 2009
The following is an excerpt from a conversation between:
Charlie Stross (CS) – Hugo Award winning author and
Paul Krugman (PK) – Nobel Prize winning economist and columnist for the New York Times
at the 2009 World Science Fiction Convention in Montreal
“…
PK: We still haven’t figured out the economics of easy information dissemination. Even though the Internet is all old hat, we still haven’t seen the economics of it play out. One of the big problems is we don’t know how do people get compensated for producing information when it can be …
CS: This is a personal preoccupation of mine, shall we say.
PK: It’s to some extent mine, although more of one of my employers. The New York Times has got enormous web presence, four million or so people read it online and yield the corporation very little in the way of revenue in the process. Whereas the dwindling number of people who want the dead tree paper are the source of … and the thing survives to some extent because people still like a piece of paper with their breakfast coffee but also to a large extent because you still can’t online get quite the visual quality of color advertisements for luxury goods that you can get in the New York Times Magazine. But you’re relying upon a very thin lag in technology to make the whole enterprise of creating and disseminating information viable. And if that starts to apply to lots of physical goods as well, we’re going to see whole sectors just implode.
CS: Oh, yeah. On the other hand, with physical goods, you’re still going to need mass and energy to assemble the frames. As for the intellectual property, I try not to get too worked up about it. There’s a lot of people angsting about piracy and copying of stuff on the Internet, publishers who are very, very worried about the whole idea of ebook piracy. I like to get a little bit of perspective on it by remembering that back before the Internet came along, we had a very special term for the people who buy a single copy of a book and then allow all their friends to read it for free. We called them librarians.
PK: Which is why … we used to work the professional journals, something I do know something about, professional journals sold about a couple of thousand copies worldwide, at an enormous price because every university library felt it had to have them and still does to some extent, but that’s an enterprise near to collapse because everybody reads the things online now.
Universities can survive only with radical reform
See full essay“…we must fundamentally reinvent our institutions. We must become more agile, more responsive, less insular, and less bureaucratic. In so doing, we will save ourselves from slouching into irrelevance.
To accomplish the wholesale change that is needed for our students, our nation, and our world, universities must break out of the silo structures – of departments and budgets and mind sets – that have calcified over time.” – Gordon Gee (President of Ohio State University)
A version of this essay was given as the keynote address at the annual meeting of the American Council on Education in February.
Future Quotes
The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet. – William Gibson
Plan for the future because that’s where you are going to spend the rest of your life. – Mark Twain
The best way to predict the future is to invent it. – Alan Kay
The empires of the future are the empires of the mind. – Sir Winston Churchill
The problem with the future is that it isn’t here yet. – unknown
Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. – Neils Bohr
As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it. – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Show me someone who doesn’t dream about the future and I’ll show you someone who doesn’t know where they are going. – unknown
Telling the future by looking at the past assumes that conditions remain constant. This is like driving a car by looking in the rearview mirror. – unknown
He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future. – George Orwell
Tim Bray on the Future of the Web
http://www.infoq.com/interviews/tim-bray-future-of-web#
Tim Bray comments on the importance of Ajax, JavaScript, agile development methodologies, REST, open source, and cloud computing.
In case you’re not familiar with his work “Tim Bray launched one of the first public web search engines in ‘95, co-invented XML 1.0, co-edited “Namespaces in XML”, served on the W3C Technical Architecture Group, and co-chaired the IETF AtomPub Working Group. Currently, he serves as a Distinguished Engineer and Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems”
Here are some of his quotes from the article.
“Ajax is getting awfully good in particular with the advances that are being made in the browser technology with the increased compatibility between things like Firefox and Safari and so on and the new canvas element and the fact that the new browsers have these fantastically high performance JavaScript engines in them. I suspect that the gap in the ecosystem that lies between what you could achieve with Ajax and what you need something like Flash or JavaFX or Silverlight to achieve it’s not that big enough to be terribly interesting.”
“… from the business point of view we are going to see that a lot of traditional application planning a deployment cycles are simply going to be broken. The notion that you can use the waterfall model to spec out a project and start by buying Oracle licenses and hardware servers for seven figures and plan for deployment fourteen months from now, the senior VP isn’t going to sign off on that anymore. They are worried about getting over the next six weeks and not about the next fourteen months.
I think that this is probably a very powerful force, in favor of things like Agile methods and Open Source Software and the Cloud all the things that are both monetization on the point of value. Technologies that are going to succeed in a tough times are going to be the ones that are free to adopt, and cheap to deploy and then when they actually start to go to production that’s when you are willing to pay some real money for them, because you saw. So I think that moves us from services and support business model to big up front license and cost business model from deployment to the cloud as opposed to deployment into privately held servers. I think that it is easy to see a bunch of existing technologies, that are going to be encouraged and promoted like Agile like Cloud, like Open Source.”
“On the client, JavaScript is really going through a golden age JQuery is very very good, presumably the ease which you can achieve JavaScript effects without having to sweat too much about different kinds of browsers will continue to increase and get better”
“…it’s pretty clear that at the moment REST is the horse that most people are betting on.”
“I see very few instances of interesting new WS-* stuff being stood up. And I would think that as we move in a more service oriented and web oriented direction, increasing the interesting services are going to be RESTful. Kinds of services and the pressure to integrate with and use those will push things in the right direction.
Even Microsoft which was clearly the leader or co-leader with IBM with WS-* movement, in the next generation of WCF everything is starting to look a whole lot more RESTful and Microsoft Azure has built around AtomPub in large parts. The vendors are pulling and pushing and the services are pulling and pushing. So I think the movement will happen fairly organically.”
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