Friel's book may or may not be a valid critique of Bjørn Lomborg's work, but that doesn't change the fact that when it came out, Lomborg's book "The Skeptical Environmentalist" was investigated by the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty and found to be scientifically dishonest, but that Lomborg was not guilty of gross negligence because of his lack of expertise in the field.
In other words, he was deemed incompetent, not dishonest.
However, in his subsequent work over the years, I think it's safe to say he's not only dishonest, but forcefully dishonest with his repeated, controversial stances against climate science and his willfull misinterpretations. Lomborg has a Ph.D. in political science. He has no training in climatology, meteorology, biology, physical sciences, or anything that would allow him to actually understand the science of the issues he's publically talking about.
What Lomborg is doing is "meta-science" where he's selectively collecting other people's research without understanding any of it, and massaging it to fit his agenda. This sort of research aggregation is the most error-prone of all and quickly deteriorates into pure statistics based on numbers of which you have no understanding. The results are absolutely meaningless because you're no longer finding the statistic significance of facts, you're finding the statistic significance of research papers.
The investigative committee cited of "the skeptical environmentalist":
1. Fabrication of data;
2. Selective discarding of unwanted results (selective citation);
3. Deliberately misleading use of statistical methods;
4. Distorted interpretation of conclusions;
5. Plagiarism;
6. Deliberate misinterpretation of others' results.
Bjørn Lomborg is no better than all the other nutcases on anti-climate blogs claiming they've found discrepancies in the scientific literature, when in fact the issue is that reading a lot of these scientific climatology papers requires at least a graduate-level understanding of statistics, biology, oceanography, etc, etc.
You wouldn't expect a meaningful result if you had a bunch of old ladies from the local knitting club review the specifications for the latest CERN particle accelerators. I don't know why people think climate science is any different.
As far as I'm concerned, physical games will survive for as long as the downloaded types will be DRM-tied to an account that someone (like Steam) can cancel at anytime for any reason, or otherwise deny you access to.
We had a solution for that at the place I used to work. There was one computer in the hallway serving as a time punch-in machine. You'd go there, type your login and password and it would register you as being at work from then on, regardless of your own computer being booted up or not.
We had computers running Windows 2000 that took 15-20 minutes to boot up, what with all the corporate network scripts and anti-virus updates it needed to run before you'd even see the login box. Then it took another 2-4 minutes for the desktop to become responsive, and god knows how long to start up all the applications you needed.
If employers don't want to pay you for booting up, make a boot up script. I can't imagine how this can ever become an issue.
I've had two Das Keyboard, one for home and one for work, for almost a year now. It is honestly the best keyboard I've ever had. The tactile feedback and clicky noise does amazing things for my touchtyping speed because with this thing I immediately sense if I've hit the wrong key, or typed something wrong.
What got me to buy these in the first place is that I frequently change the language layout of my keyboard while I type. The US English layout is the only sensible thing to use for programming, but for emailing, typing documents, etc. I need the characters of my native language. Finding the right letters is easy enough, but the problem is that all the non-letter symbols get arbitrarily shifted around as well when you change layout. The fact that Das Keyboard doesn't have any markings on it makes me able to do the layout switch in my head much more easily because there's nothing on the keys to confuse me about where the symbols are when I look down.
(On a related note I've also found a use for the Caps Lock key. In the Ubuntu keyboard settings, I can set this key to switch between language layouts)
The lack of multimedia buttons is an inconvenience I can live with. I've just remapped Ctrl+Alt+various keys to Volume control, Play/Pause, etc. in my music player.
I don't think MS ever needs to write viruses or purposefully cripple their OS. The crippling is already happening all by itself, and there's plenty of people writing viruses for them. All they have to do is do nothing.
I don't think there's any argument that ideas and designs can be copied, that's why there's a patent system in the first place. Good ideas tend to be copied.
But that whole 'who copied who' debate is pointless. Every single 'new' feature that all the big browsers have implemented ever since they began is something you can trace back to application of varying obscurity that somebody wrote in the 60s. Tabs, gestures, everything you care to name has existed before, and all you'll ever accomplish is to get into a pointless argument over whether the developers knew about this or reinvented it on their own because it's such an obvious next step.
What I meant by my question was that I don't understand how you can 'copy' the implementation of an open standard. To my knowledge SVG is a W3C standard. The whole point of a standard is that you want everybody to implement it. So short of copying Opera's code, I don't see how other developers can possibly 'copy Opera's SVG support' as you say, when it's an open standard?
And if you're having problems narrowing down a search in google, you could try just using the search on the Firefox extensions website. You're more likely to get what you want there.
This is not just about the text window resizing; there have been several heavy-handed UI changes since GAIM that were opposed by the user base, such as the change in layout of the IM input window which wastes a lot of empty space on nothing but grey background because of the new placement of tabs and icons. The send button and other buttons provided by plugins also seem to be placed arbitrarily with each new version. The user icon has been reduced in size to the point of being unrecognizable and there is no option to move it or change the size. The GAIM input window was a lot more compact and the space it took up was used a lot more efficiently.
After long and quite frankly frustrating debates about the continued degradation of UI features and user options with every new version of Pidgin, the suggestions to KEEP the useful UI features and make them optional at the very least have repeatedly been met with "won't fix" or just been plain ignored by the developers. Being presented with a modified UI with every new version of an application and no way of reversing the changes is extremely frustrating for a user.
To be clear, there is no technical reason for changing things around. As can plainly be seen in the fork, Funpidgin provides the old functionality with option boxes on an extra settings tab, and an external plugin is included that lets you resize the input window as before.
As the Funpidgin website states "FunPidgin is a Pidgin fork readding some functionality that was removed from Pidgin's main branch, with the stated goal of being user-driven."
From an outsider perspective, it seems like it would be trivial for the pidgin developers to make all their bad UI changes since GAIM simply an option instead of a forced 'feature'. Or maybe they could provide the options as a plugin if they don't want to clutter the settings tabs with more options.
We've been waiting for over two years for Livejournal to let OpenID accounts be linked to your existing LJ account. How the hell can you take someone seriously who is trying to push an idea on everybody else that they won't even implement themselves?
Am I the only one who finds it TOTALLY bizarre that MS compares their newest desktop operating system to a Linux server operating system?
And quoting an installed user base of less than 1% for desktop Linux as other people have done in this thread just mystifies me even more.
I think that there's just no way you can compare operating systems based on vulnerabilities in a meaningful way because they don't have the same number of users, they're not used for the same things, and they all include different programs that may or may not be counted alongside. Honestly, how many security vulnerabilities can there be in Notepad, Paint and Calc?
I think Jeff Jones is absolutely correct when he says that you should count what comes with the default install of a common, working setup. But you shouldn't count vulnerabilities, like he does.
The only way to get any kind of metric for how secure an operating system is, is by looking at how many of these vulnerabilities are actually exploited. So what if Ubuntu or RHEL has a vulnerability that could somehow, potentially let someone take over my computer under the right circumstances? If this vulnerability isn't even close to being exploited by shady types, what difference does it make to me, the user?
How about looking at how likely I am to be robbed of personal information, having my credit card number stolen, or being included in a botnet to do evil? Although, with F-Secure's 2007 count of 500,000 pieces of malware for Windows (a doubling since 2006), maybe I'd stare real hard at meaningless statistics too if I were Jeff.
You're wrong, and so is the person you replied to.
Just look at the comparison, they're comparing Vista (a desktop OS) to RHEL (a server OS). Someone on this thread keeps quoting a Linux desktop install base of below 1%, which is totally bizarre since it has absolutely nothing to do with RHEL. Red Hat is on faaaar more computers than Vista is, so while I may agree with your idea that users are not proportional to vulnerabilities reported, Linux is certainly not running on only 1% of the computers in the world.
See that's the thing. You've had no problems with Vista, but a lot of other people have. They can't get anything working the way you claim it just does, yet Ubuntu or whatever distro they favor just does things automagically.
Depends on what you use it for, what programs you want to run, what devices you want to plug in and what network environment you're running it in. But why is my experience with my computer always dictated by what Microsoft wants? Graphics hardware support, laptop modems, wireless network cards, and games are the areas that Linux suffers in, and there's only one company to blame for that.
The point that everyone who are usually painted as Linux fanboys are trying to make is that _everybody_ ought to have the opportunity to choose what works best for them. Without the MS monopoly, without the intimidation exerted on universities and schools, without the strong-arming of OEMs to sell only MS products, without the attack ads, without the smear campaigns against Red Hat, without the underhanded pacts about patent protections, without undermining the entire international standards boards, without the extermination of smaller companies that make useful software, without creating an MS-only version of every single technology in existance, etc.
Yeah, because as we all know, every single modern OS has to throttle the network connection in order to play an MP3 file. The colossal resource usage for playing music on a 3GHz dual core CPU with 800MHz front side bus and gigabit network is just so enormous that there's absolutely NO WAY these two functionalities can possibly co-exist.
Obviously adjusting the buffer length in the media playing program is out of the question, so the best we can do is to slow down the network and hope nobody notices.
Microsoft has been wasting boatloads of resources on just maintaining backward compatibility with bugs and misbehaving applications
Is that really true? It's been accepted as conventional wisdom for quite a long time, but it's starting to sound more and more like something you'd like to put on snopes.com. I'm sure they've been asked on more than one occasion to maintain retarded backwards compatibility with some things, but it sounds like a drop in the ocean quite frankly. It doesn't really explain the massive amounts of screw-ups and undocumented nonsense that for instance the WINE project has uncovered. Blaming backwards compatibility for all their ills seems to be just a lame excuse by now, because every new iteration of windows has broken an awful lot of programs and where exactly is the benefit?
Perhaps most damningly to MS is the fact that when they do completely break backwards compatibility, the end result is not very impressive. We certainly don't gain any security or stability from it, I think Vista has already proved that quite convincingly. So I'm no longer willing to take their word for it when they say that compatibility is to blame.
How the heck did this garbage get modded as insightful?
Microsoft is already talking about the next OS being much closer, sometime in 2009 is planned. That's just two years away. Plus they've changed so much of the underlying technology that it breaks backwards compatibility with just about everything. If that doesn't make Vista an intermediate OS, what does?
It's already been shown that the DRM crap is active even if you don't use HD hardware. It consumes resources, runs in the background, the architecture of it makes it much harder for software developers to write Vista programs, and most recently the DRM doubles as a rootkit since it can be used to protect malicious processes so not even antivirus programs have access to it. So don't even start the tired old "DRM doesn't affect me" speech.
Bitlocker is only available in the most expensive version of Vista and if you really need full encryption of your OS drive that badly, it would've been a lot cheaper to buy that separately.
Linux sale? What's a Linux sale?
If you're talking about Linux adoption, then yes that number has exploded recently. Mostly thanks to the crappiness of Vista, the increased user-friendliness of Ubuntu, and all the planets being aligned.
That expression is just sooooo wrong. Have you ever been on acid?
It's only wild and colorfull and amazing and explosive and out there for YOU, not for everyone else.
You end up examining the pattern of your floor tiles for 8 hours straight and to you it's the most fascinating thing you've ever seen in your entire life, but to everyone else you become the most boring person in the world....come to think of it, your analogy was fairly accurate after all.
Microsoft has not gotten rid of the Registry in Vista. In fact, the new boot manager uses a registry hive to store boot configuration, replacing the old boot.ini.
Oh wonderful. Does this mean that WHEN Windows crashes and refuses to boot up again I'll have absolutely no way of editing the boot configuration with a rescue disc?
Slashdot Mirror
Friel's book may or may not be a valid critique of Bjørn Lomborg's work, but that doesn't change the fact that when it came out, Lomborg's book "The Skeptical Environmentalist" was investigated by the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty and found to be scientifically dishonest, but that Lomborg was not guilty of gross negligence because of his lack of expertise in the field.
In other words, he was deemed incompetent, not dishonest.
However, in his subsequent work over the years, I think it's safe to say he's not only dishonest, but forcefully dishonest with his repeated, controversial stances against climate science and his willfull misinterpretations.
Lomborg has a Ph.D. in political science. He has no training in climatology, meteorology, biology, physical sciences, or anything that would allow him to actually understand the science of the issues he's publically talking about.
What Lomborg is doing is "meta-science" where he's selectively collecting other people's research without understanding any of it, and massaging it to fit his agenda. This sort of research aggregation is the most error-prone of all and quickly deteriorates into pure statistics based on numbers of which you have no understanding. The results are absolutely meaningless because you're no longer finding the statistic significance of facts, you're finding the statistic significance of research papers.
The investigative committee cited of "the skeptical environmentalist":
1. Fabrication of data;
2. Selective discarding of unwanted results (selective citation);
3. Deliberately misleading use of statistical methods;
4. Distorted interpretation of conclusions;
5. Plagiarism;
6. Deliberate misinterpretation of others' results.
The original biologist who submitted a complaint to the committee still maintains a website listing all the errors of Lomborg's work.
Bjørn Lomborg is no better than all the other nutcases on anti-climate blogs claiming they've found discrepancies in the scientific literature, when in fact the issue is that reading a lot of these scientific climatology papers requires at least a graduate-level understanding of statistics, biology, oceanography, etc, etc.
You wouldn't expect a meaningful result if you had a bunch of old ladies from the local knitting club review the specifications for the latest CERN particle accelerators. I don't know why people think climate science is any different.
they're 'enabling the Speech 3.0, Voice 3.0, and Business 3.0 markets,' whatever that means."
It obviously means they're outsourcing all the work to 3.0rd world countries.
Idiots. Just install the 'Tab Mix Plus' extension if you want Firefox tabs to work properly.
In fact, make that the default functionality of Firefox so I don't have to install it all the time. Firefox is useless without it.
As far as I'm concerned, physical games will survive for as long as the downloaded types will be DRM-tied to an account that someone (like Steam) can cancel at anytime for any reason, or otherwise deny you access to.
We had a solution for that at the place I used to work. There was one computer in the hallway serving as a time punch-in machine. You'd go there, type your login and password and it would register you as being at work from then on, regardless of your own computer being booted up or not.
We had computers running Windows 2000 that took 15-20 minutes to boot up, what with all the corporate network scripts and anti-virus updates it needed to run before you'd even see the login box. Then it took another 2-4 minutes for the desktop to become responsive, and god knows how long to start up all the applications you needed.
If employers don't want to pay you for booting up, make a boot up script. I can't imagine how this can ever become an issue.
'Far Cry Vengeance' has been out for the Wii since late 2006.
I've had two Das Keyboard, one for home and one for work, for almost a year now. It is honestly the best keyboard I've ever had. The tactile feedback and clicky noise does amazing things for my touchtyping speed because with this thing I immediately sense if I've hit the wrong key, or typed something wrong.
What got me to buy these in the first place is that I frequently change the language layout of my keyboard while I type. The US English layout is the only sensible thing to use for programming, but for emailing, typing documents, etc. I need the characters of my native language.
Finding the right letters is easy enough, but the problem is that all the non-letter symbols get arbitrarily shifted around as well when you change layout. The fact that Das Keyboard doesn't have any markings on it makes me able to do the layout switch in my head much more easily because there's nothing on the keys to confuse me about where the symbols are when I look down.
(On a related note I've also found a use for the Caps Lock key. In the Ubuntu keyboard settings, I can set this key to switch between language layouts)
The lack of multimedia buttons is an inconvenience I can live with. I've just remapped Ctrl+Alt+various keys to Volume control, Play/Pause, etc. in my music player.
I don't think MS ever needs to write viruses or purposefully cripple their OS. The crippling is already happening all by itself, and there's plenty of people writing viruses for them.
All they have to do is do nothing.
I don't think there's any argument that ideas and designs can be copied, that's why there's a patent system in the first place. Good ideas tend to be copied.
But that whole 'who copied who' debate is pointless. Every single 'new' feature that all the big browsers have implemented ever since they began is something you can trace back to application of varying obscurity that somebody wrote in the 60s. Tabs, gestures, everything you care to name has existed before, and all you'll ever accomplish is to get into a pointless argument over whether the developers knew about this or reinvented it on their own because it's such an obvious next step.
What I meant by my question was that I don't understand how you can 'copy' the implementation of an open standard. To my knowledge SVG is a W3C standard. The whole point of a standard is that you want everybody to implement it.
So short of copying Opera's code, I don't see how other developers can possibly 'copy Opera's SVG support' as you say, when it's an open standard?
How can someone copy Opera's SVG support if it isn't open source?
I've used Linky in the past to list urls. It doesn't work on the RC1 yet, however.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/425
And if you're having problems narrowing down a search in google, you could try just using the search on the Firefox extensions website. You're more likely to get what you want there.
Why would you post a story like this and not even provide a link to the fork?
This is not just about the text window resizing; there have been several heavy-handed UI changes since GAIM that were opposed by the user base, such as the change in layout of the IM input window which wastes a lot of empty space on nothing but grey background because of the new placement of tabs and icons.
The send button and other buttons provided by plugins also seem to be placed arbitrarily with each new version. The user icon has been reduced in size to the point of being unrecognizable and there is no option to move it or change the size. The GAIM input window was a lot more compact and the space it took up was used a lot more efficiently.
After long and quite frankly frustrating debates about the continued degradation of UI features and user options with every new version of Pidgin, the suggestions to KEEP the useful UI features and make them optional at the very least have repeatedly been met with "won't fix" or just been plain ignored by the developers.
Being presented with a modified UI with every new version of an application and no way of reversing the changes is extremely frustrating for a user.
To be clear, there is no technical reason for changing things around. As can plainly be seen in the fork, Funpidgin provides the old functionality with option boxes on an extra settings tab, and an external plugin is included that lets you resize the input window as before.
As the Funpidgin website states "FunPidgin is a Pidgin fork readding some functionality that was removed from Pidgin's main branch, with the stated goal of being user-driven."
From an outsider perspective, it seems like it would be trivial for the pidgin developers to make all their bad UI changes since GAIM simply an option instead of a forced 'feature'. Or maybe they could provide the options as a plugin if they don't want to clutter the settings tabs with more options.
Seriously.
We've been waiting for over two years for Livejournal to let OpenID accounts be linked to your existing LJ account. How the hell can you take someone seriously who is trying to push an idea on everybody else that they won't even implement themselves?
Am I the only one who finds it TOTALLY bizarre that MS compares their newest desktop operating system to a Linux server operating system?
And quoting an installed user base of less than 1% for desktop Linux as other people have done in this thread just mystifies me even more.
I think that there's just no way you can compare operating systems based on vulnerabilities in a meaningful way because they don't have the same number of users, they're not used for the same things, and they all include different programs that may or may not be counted alongside. Honestly, how many security vulnerabilities can there be in Notepad, Paint and Calc?
I think Jeff Jones is absolutely correct when he says that you should count what comes with the default install of a common, working setup. But you shouldn't count vulnerabilities, like he does.
The only way to get any kind of metric for how secure an operating system is, is by looking at how many of these vulnerabilities are actually exploited. So what if Ubuntu or RHEL has a vulnerability that could somehow, potentially let someone take over my computer under the right circumstances? If this vulnerability isn't even close to being exploited by shady types, what difference does it make to me, the user?
How about looking at how likely I am to be robbed of personal information, having my credit card number stolen, or being included in a botnet to do evil?
Although, with F-Secure's 2007 count of 500,000 pieces of malware for Windows (a doubling since 2006), maybe I'd stare real hard at meaningless statistics too if I were Jeff.
You're wrong, and so is the person you replied to.
Just look at the comparison, they're comparing Vista (a desktop OS) to RHEL (a server OS). Someone on this thread keeps quoting a Linux desktop install base of below 1%, which is totally bizarre since it has absolutely nothing to do with RHEL. Red Hat is on faaaar more computers than Vista is, so while I may agree with your idea that users are not proportional to vulnerabilities reported, Linux is certainly not running on only 1% of the computers in the world.
I'm not worried, I'm sure Viacom's lawyers know exactly how far they can take the joke.
Unless of course they were all too busy suing someone for a billion dollars.. hmmmm....
See that's the thing. You've had no problems with Vista, but a lot of other people have. They can't get anything working the way you claim it just does, yet Ubuntu or whatever distro they favor just does things automagically.
Depends on what you use it for, what programs you want to run, what devices you want to plug in and what network environment you're running it in.
But why is my experience with my computer always dictated by what Microsoft wants? Graphics hardware support, laptop modems, wireless network cards, and games are the areas that Linux suffers in, and there's only one company to blame for that.
The point that everyone who are usually painted as Linux fanboys are trying to make is that _everybody_ ought to have the opportunity to choose what works best for them. Without the MS monopoly, without the intimidation exerted on universities and schools, without the strong-arming of OEMs to sell only MS products, without the attack ads, without the smear campaigns against Red Hat, without the underhanded pacts about patent protections, without undermining the entire international standards boards, without the extermination of smaller companies that make useful software, without creating an MS-only version of every single technology in existance, etc.
Yeah, because as we all know, every single modern OS has to throttle the network connection in order to play an MP3 file. The colossal resource usage for playing music on a 3GHz dual core CPU with 800MHz front side bus and gigabit network is just so enormous that there's absolutely NO WAY these two functionalities can possibly co-exist.
Obviously adjusting the buffer length in the media playing program is out of the question, so the best we can do is to slow down the network and hope nobody notices.
Soooo, he's going to get a Windows that monitors everything he does, spies on all his activities and phones home about them.
How is this any different from Vista?
Why do they even need to install a piece of software for this? Couldn't they just subpoena Microsoft for all this info?
Microsoft has been wasting boatloads of resources on just maintaining backward compatibility with bugs and misbehaving applications
Is that really true? It's been accepted as conventional wisdom for quite a long time, but it's starting to sound more and more like something you'd like to put on snopes.com.
I'm sure they've been asked on more than one occasion to maintain retarded backwards compatibility with some things, but it sounds like a drop in the ocean quite frankly. It doesn't really explain the massive amounts of screw-ups and undocumented nonsense that for instance the WINE project has uncovered. Blaming backwards compatibility for all their ills seems to be just a lame excuse by now, because every new iteration of windows has broken an awful lot of programs and where exactly is the benefit?
Perhaps most damningly to MS is the fact that when they do completely break backwards compatibility, the end result is not very impressive. We certainly don't gain any security or stability from it, I think Vista has already proved that quite convincingly. So I'm no longer willing to take their word for it when they say that compatibility is to blame.
How the heck did this garbage get modded as insightful?
Microsoft is already talking about the next OS being much closer, sometime in 2009 is planned. That's just two years away. Plus they've changed so much of the underlying technology that it breaks backwards compatibility with just about everything. If that doesn't make Vista an intermediate OS, what does?
It's already been shown that the DRM crap is active even if you don't use HD hardware. It consumes resources, runs in the background, the architecture of it makes it much harder for software developers to write Vista programs, and most recently the DRM doubles as a rootkit since it can be used to protect malicious processes so not even antivirus programs have access to it. So don't even start the tired old "DRM doesn't affect me" speech.
Bitlocker is only available in the most expensive version of Vista and if you really need full encryption of your OS drive that badly, it would've been a lot cheaper to buy that separately.
Linux sale? What's a Linux sale? If you're talking about Linux adoption, then yes that number has exploded recently. Mostly thanks to the crappiness of Vista, the increased user-friendliness of Ubuntu, and all the planets being aligned.
That expression is just sooooo wrong. Have you ever been on acid? It's only wild and colorfull and amazing and explosive and out there for YOU, not for everyone else. You end up examining the pattern of your floor tiles for 8 hours straight and to you it's the most fascinating thing you've ever seen in your entire life, but to everyone else you become the most boring person in the world. ...come to think of it, your analogy was fairly accurate after all.
Yeah, they reinvented the wheel again, but they still haven't figured out how to make it round.
Microsoft has not gotten rid of the Registry in Vista. In fact, the new boot manager uses a registry hive to store boot configuration, replacing the old boot.ini.
Oh wonderful. Does this mean that WHEN Windows crashes and refuses to boot up again I'll have absolutely no way of editing the boot configuration with a rescue disc?