Wednesday, January 12, 2011

<RANT> Its kind of sad that the lights of progress are typically dimmed by politics and greed. While I fully believe that authors deserve reward for their efforts, the current IP envrionment has little to do with the moral "right and wrong" of the issue and a lot more with the greedy "dollars per copy" issue which is in my mind despicable. </rant>

That litle rant simply sets off the point that academia and technology can't solve the issues of the human condition. Nonetheless, the horizon report highlights the beauty of the internet: a giant ubiquitous, high speed, library void of social, political and religious boundries which makes available a wealth of information to many who would not have that access any other way before. With all these sources of data, people can gain new insights, synthesize new information and add many new data points to triangulation efforts.

WRT to technology, I recall the old adage "the more things change, the more they remain the same". The latest "new" technology is actually a pretty OLD concept: "cloud computing"...its been done before. It was called "Mainframe time/partition sharing" The differences are, of course, technology implementation and system capability. Whereas mainframes had limited WAN acces over private transports, today's server farms (the analog) have access anywhere there is an internet POP. Moreover, applications arent limited to what is available on any specific machine...given the beauty of virtuallization in terms of end-platforms and networks, from the user perspective "anything can be anywhere".

What technology truely offers (beyond better mouse-traps) is the opportunity for all persons to exercise their minds in ways that were once limited to the most priviledged.