On 10/10/2008, at 4:44 AM, Eric Wolf wrote: > together. And I might be missing a second, deeper point about GIS > insiders vs. FOSS4G outsiders... I'll read again to see if I can "get > it". This is an important subject for me, professionally.
Part of the problem is that outsiders can't make comments, because they don't know enough of the inside to place it in context. Consider the reactions to my various comments, which I will be the first to admit are ignorant, pushy, arrogant, and full of shit. The issue is that ignorant, pushy and arrogant are virtues when it comes to getting things done (less so in my case, as I will also be the first to admit that I don't live up to the ideal "flying car" model of excellence :). So there is a gap between the academic "knowing most things, doing little" and the outsider "knowing little, doing more". In the field of GIS, the more you know seems to lead to the situation of "the less you can do". I think part of this reason is that GIS has been so heavily constrained by the technical limitations of what computers could do 20 years ago, that entire fields of economical algorithms to extract power from limitations has become the default modus operandi. So academic investigations are incremental improvements where vastly more complicated approaches are used to eke out another 10% improvement. However the technical limitations have drastically changed in the meantime. The end result, I think, is what we see now. Newcomers who know nothing about the previous limitations now find that the limitations are not there, and use simple brute force to achieve things. And it works. If the academic arena could re-scope their conceptualisation of the field of GIS and just blast away with maximum power, they would step towards the middle ground with the advantage of the discipline of thinking. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
