What the folks with an IQ greater than their shoe size probably realized from my post, is that I was pointing out the conflict of interest between supposedly objective scientists and the need to get funding for their research. That money doesn't fall from the sky you know. And to get funding, you have to sell yourself/your research. So naturally, it's in the climate researchers best interest to talk big about global warming, even in the face of dubious evidence, to get that next grant. Get it now?
Lucky for me, I have enormous feet. You're just another hypocrite: you want to dismiss the research of scientists based on some highly dubious profit motive with one hand and on with the other hand cite the work of an economist author as refutation of this whole field of research? How many people care to read what a meteorologist has to say about macroeconmics?
And thanks for stooping to insults to get your point across. I see I no longer need to waste my time in this discussion. I'll take
So how can you expect proof, without being able to trace every carbon dioxide molecule from its birth at the rear of an SUV through it's life as it blankets the earth? All you can do is look at the data and find patterns.
This is very well put. I suspect we come from different prejucices when it comes to this issue, but I couldn't agree with you on this point more.
Bottomline: I don't smoke because I know it's really bad for me. I also make active choices in my life to minimize my negative effects on the environment because it's good for everyone. And just like a smoker who doesn't give a damn, the western cultures may never stop its destruction of the environment.
Profit is not a motive?? You don't get the research grant if you don't show a reason. As a current researcher myself, I know how difficult it is to shake down the military for cash, unless you have a solution to their problems.
The military is hardly the primary source of funding for this research. Think DOE. The military's bottomless trust fund certainly makes barons out of its contractors, but few if any of those are pursuing global warming/climate change inititiatives. In any case, I'll suspect the profit motive when a climatologist runs me down in a Escalade. Maybe I'm too old, but my peers all drove bicycles.
If we're making such drastic changes, which is arguable at best, then how can minor changes help one damn it?
An example: The CFC's emitted as propellant and leaked as coolant nearly wiped out the ozone layer. Enforced by international treaty, we changed the chemical compounds used for these purposes to a similar, but benign cousin of CFC's and we are now making progress undoing that damage. In terms of global warming, raising the CAFE standards would be a major step in the right direction.
I'm tired of hearing this "junk science" rap. It's entirely too much like Dubya's "fuzzy math". If you're willing to dismiss an enormous field of study, and each of its thousands of scientists in a single, trite phrase, you're not part of the discussion. Show me some valid, non fossil fuel industry sponsored research that counters research published by the likes of the National Academy of Sciences.
Global warming is not junk science. As a former knowledge-craving, research-grant-supplicant, I assure you profit is nary a motive among the world's climate researchers. Only politicians, pundits and preachers profit from scare tactics.
As for your time-scale assertion, you're correct, we cannot PROVE(obnoxious style yours) that the warming pattern we have found existed outside the time frame of the Industrial Revolution. But that doesn't matter since that is not the point.
The point is that humans are changing the global climate relatively drastically in such a short period of time that it outstrips the rate of normal climate variation. Sure, the changes we're experiencing might happen on their own over the next 100 million years. I for one would rather it happen then than in the next 50 years. To frostall this, we could make just minor changes in our so-called American "lifestyle." What is a little less gluttony in light of the bounties of future climate stability?
Its much easier and more cost effective to bring the code over nearly as-is versus migrating to a new language entirely.
If it really is, then bravo. You've made the right decision. In my experience however, most people making this decision haven't taken into account the complete cost of these applications. More than the absurb hardware maintenance costs, there is an elevated cost for running batch-oriented applications. How many times a week does a human have to intervene overnight when a job fails? How much does that human cost you per hour in salary, benefits, office space, etc?
My point is that mainframes and the applications designed for them were built under the assumption that an hour of human time is orders of magnitude cheaper than an hour of computer time. Now, especially with high power to cost ratio systems like Linux/x86, that ratio has inverted. It's now much cheaper to let computers do the repetitive work and send the humans home. You might be able to save enough to justify spending nearly half a million dollars on some quality people to rewrite those applications for you.
"...it might make bringing those COBOL apps over to Linux possible..."
Please don't.
Programs written for mainframes suck no matter where you run them. Paying people to sit around to watch batch jobs run is stupid no matter whether they're watching a 3270 terminal or an xterm.
I'm working a doomed-to-tail outsourcing project myself right now, and some things you've said strike a chord with me:
You say:
It's way behind schedule, and keeps on tripping over itself at acceptance test points (one item is fixed, others are broken).
Then get on their ass. You're undoubtedly paying these people a healthy sum of money to do this job. Tell them to get it done or else. This is the singular advantage of outsourcing work: you spend money to rid yourself of some pain. Quit worrying about HOW they do it and demand the results agreed upon in your contract.
However later you say:
They have no regression test suite that runs through the original system and the newly generated system to ensure that they produce the same result [this apparently was 'our job' to do it manually].
So, you didn't read your own outsourcing agreement? You can't blame this vendor for being this way. Stop letting the tail wag the dog and show them who's got the money. It's a buyer's market, use it to your advantage. If they keep this up, kick these fools out and cut your losses. I know some excellent people available right now who can get this done.
If this is a truly introductory class, please do what my first programming teacher didn't do: take a few classes to explain what the hell "programming" is. I went through a lot of confusion making the connection between words written into a file and behavior later when executing that file. Granted, this was a long time ago, and I had never sat behind a computer until my first lab in that class, but I imagine this is still a problem for most first timers.
In my case, I was able to fall back on my considerable experience with logic concepts and advanced mathematics. Fortunately for me, Fortran behaved(s) itself in this regard and allowed me to apply these concepts. I learned that this text needed to be processed before running it, but I had no idea until I started studying C what the hell those steps really meant.
Students today already have a bunch of assumptions of what computers are/do, so I imagine you'll have to help them unlearn some of that limited perspective. They also probably haven't learned a great deal of formal logic, so they might need some instruction there as well.
I believe nothing is more impressive than knowing what you're doing with the world of UNIX command line tools and standard in/out on the pipe. I often show up Perl studs at work, creating similar functionality to their spaghetti code with a few lines of korn shell code in much less time. Shell programming with the pipe is the most powerful form of elegant simplicity I've ever seen in any computing.
This makes me think of an oversimplification of the origin of killer bees:
Scientist 1: "How can we make these docile, yet territorial honey bees make more honey?"
Scientist 2:"Let's cross breed them with these here harder working, yet more agressive African bees. We'll get harder working honey bees!"
Scientist 1: "Did you just pinch my ass, or was that a..."
Of course, what we got instead were hyper-agressive, territorial bees; not harder working honey bees. Or something like that.
So what happens when we create this super organism that eats carbon dioxide and craps out twinkies? Nothing bad, of course! Side effects are inconceivable! Those obedient microorganisms would never take their behavior beyond what we want. There's no way they would go on to consume too much airborn carbon, ending the greenhouse effect, and tumbling the Earth into a devastating iceage, now would they?
I'm tired of shortsighted technogeeks peddling pseudoscience that could alter the earth's entire ecosystem; never seeking to fully understand the complexity of the issue at hand. The same caution that prevented us from using nuclear bombs to create commerce in Alaska applies here.
Am I the only person who had to upgrade bioses to fix y2k issues? Oh wait, that's all in the past.
No one will ever make that kind of mistake again, right?
This is far from "flamebait." Oh, wait, this is slashdot, where realistic appraisals of Perl are non grata.
C and sh are MUCH better for system administration once you figure out how to use the pipe along with the hundreds of useful utilities already on the system. Perl is for people who don't get the pipe. Perl is for people who think their scripts are portable since it runs on both of their linux systems. Remember people, Perl modules are written in C.
And I just thought he was an idiot for stating that Solaris, Irix, and HP/UX "were designed from the ground up with mainframe usage in mind".
UNIX was designed to get away from the mainframe usage paradigm, not reinforce it. Read the article. It yields good insight into the differences between the Mainframe Way (machine resources are more important than user demands) and the UNIX Way (users needs are more important than the machine's).
Why not set up a shell server that your users log into and then from there use any of the ample, able 3270 emulators to then connect to the ultimate destination(s)? All you should need for 2000 clients is any reasonably modern FreeBSD/Linux box with a fat LAN connection.
You do know you're not likely to get to use anything better than SNMP v1. That's at least as big a security issue. SNMP v1 is rightly derided as Security is Not My Problem.
My advice is to carefully firewall that machine with iptables. Block any network activity on the port that doesn't originate from the localhost. Also, be sure to filter spoofed packets.
Or simply write your own damn software. How hard can it be to snoop the traffic on the serial line that connects to the UPS and reverse engineer the protocol?
Several years aga, I used UUnet dial-up for a traveling job that sent me just about everywhere in the US, many places in Great Britain, the Caribbean, Scandinavia, Germany, and elsewhere. I found their service to be routinely excellent and reliable, no matter where I was. However, things have certainly changed in the dial-up marketplace since then (1996-7), so their service may no longer be what it once was.
Use their POP finder to seek out dial up access points for wherever you may be going.
If you're still using Windows clients, you really want WinSCP. It is closed source, freeware but this is for Windows after all.
One of the many wonderful things about ssh is that is provides many interfaces to the same protocol. The ssh protocol combines file transfer, remote shell access, port forwarding, encryption and compression all on one port/service. That means when you turn on the ssh port, you can access it using an interactive shell (ssh), or an interactive file transfer session (sftp) or an automated file transfer session (scp). WinSCP truthfully acts more like a GUI ftp client, but, when it comes to ssh, what's in a name?
Slashdot Mirror
Science defends itself against The Skeptical Environmentalist Will do...and you feel free to go shoot up the rusting camaro in your backyard and beat your wife.
Lucky for me, I have enormous feet. You're just another hypocrite: you want to dismiss the research of scientists based on some highly dubious profit motive with one hand and on with the other hand cite the work of an economist author as refutation of this whole field of research? How many people care to read what a meteorologist has to say about macroeconmics?
And thanks for stooping to insults to get your point across. I see I no longer need to waste my time in this discussion. I'll take
This is very well put. I suspect we come from different prejucices when it comes to this issue, but I couldn't agree with you on this point more.
Bottomline: I don't smoke because I know it's really bad for me. I also make active choices in my life to minimize my negative effects on the environment because it's good for everyone. And just like a smoker who doesn't give a damn, the western cultures may never stop its destruction of the environment.
The military is hardly the primary source of funding for this research. Think DOE. The military's bottomless trust fund certainly makes barons out of its contractors, but few if any of those are pursuing global warming/climate change inititiatives. In any case, I'll suspect the profit motive when a climatologist runs me down in a Escalade. Maybe I'm too old, but my peers all drove bicycles.
An example: The CFC's emitted as propellant and leaked as coolant nearly wiped out the ozone layer. Enforced by international treaty, we changed the chemical compounds used for these purposes to a similar, but benign cousin of CFC's and we are now making progress undoing that damage. In terms of global warming, raising the CAFE standards would be a major step in the right direction.
I'm tired of hearing this "junk science" rap. It's entirely too much like Dubya's "fuzzy math". If you're willing to dismiss an enormous field of study, and each of its thousands of scientists in a single, trite phrase, you're not part of the discussion. Show me some valid, non fossil fuel industry sponsored research that counters research published by the likes of the National Academy of Sciences.
Global warming is not junk science. As a former knowledge-craving, research-grant-supplicant, I assure you profit is nary a motive among the world's climate researchers. Only politicians, pundits and preachers profit from scare tactics.
As for your time-scale assertion, you're correct, we cannot PROVE(obnoxious style yours) that the warming pattern we have found existed outside the time frame of the Industrial Revolution. But that doesn't matter since that is not the point.
The point is that humans are changing the global climate relatively drastically in such a short period of time that it outstrips the rate of normal climate variation. Sure, the changes we're experiencing might happen on their own over the next 100 million years. I for one would rather it happen then than in the next 50 years. To frostall this, we could make just minor changes in our so-called American "lifestyle." What is a little less gluttony in light of the bounties of future climate stability?
Maybe your SUV is more important to you?
If it really is, then bravo. You've made the right decision. In my experience however, most people making this decision haven't taken into account the complete cost of these applications. More than the absurb hardware maintenance costs, there is an elevated cost for running batch-oriented applications. How many times a week does a human have to intervene overnight when a job fails? How much does that human cost you per hour in salary, benefits, office space, etc?
My point is that mainframes and the applications designed for them were built under the assumption that an hour of human time is orders of magnitude cheaper than an hour of computer time. Now, especially with high power to cost ratio systems like Linux/x86, that ratio has inverted. It's now much cheaper to let computers do the repetitive work and send the humans home. You might be able to save enough to justify spending nearly half a million dollars on some quality people to rewrite those applications for you.
Please don't.
Programs written for mainframes suck no matter where you run them. Paying people to sit around to watch batch jobs run is stupid no matter whether they're watching a 3270 terminal or an xterm.
You say:
Then get on their ass. You're undoubtedly paying these people a healthy sum of money to do this job. Tell them to get it done or else. This is the singular advantage of outsourcing work: you spend money to rid yourself of some pain. Quit worrying about HOW they do it and demand the results agreed upon in your contract.
However later you say:
So, you didn't read your own outsourcing agreement? You can't blame this vendor for being this way. Stop letting the tail wag the dog and show them who's got the money. It's a buyer's market, use it to your advantage. If they keep this up, kick these fools out and cut your losses. I know some excellent people available right now who can get this done.
Hey Pudge, did you mean flummery?
flummery (flm-r) n. pl. flummeries
I'm pretty sure you did...
If this is a truly introductory class, please do what my first programming teacher didn't do: take a few classes to explain what the hell "programming" is. I went through a lot of confusion making the connection between words written into a file and behavior later when executing that file. Granted, this was a long time ago, and I had never sat behind a computer until my first lab in that class, but I imagine this is still a problem for most first timers.
In my case, I was able to fall back on my considerable experience with logic concepts and advanced mathematics. Fortunately for me, Fortran behaved(s) itself in this regard and allowed me to apply these concepts. I learned that this text needed to be processed before running it, but I had no idea until I started studying C what the hell those steps really meant.
Students today already have a bunch of assumptions of what computers are/do, so I imagine you'll have to help them unlearn some of that limited perspective. They also probably haven't learned a great deal of formal logic, so they might need some instruction there as well.
I believe nothing is more impressive than knowing what you're doing with the world of UNIX command line tools and standard in/out on the pipe.
I often show up Perl studs at work, creating similar functionality to their spaghetti code with a few lines of korn shell code in much less time.
Shell programming with the pipe is the most powerful form of elegant simplicity I've ever seen in any computing.
This makes me think of an oversimplification of the origin of killer bees:
Of course, what we got instead were hyper-agressive, territorial bees; not harder working honey bees. Or something like that.
So what happens when we create this super organism that eats carbon dioxide and craps out twinkies? Nothing bad, of course!
Side effects are inconceivable!
Those obedient microorganisms would never take their behavior beyond what we want. There's no way they would go on to consume too much airborn carbon, ending the greenhouse effect, and tumbling the Earth into a devastating iceage, now would they?
I'm tired of shortsighted technogeeks peddling pseudoscience that could alter the earth's entire ecosystem; never seeking to fully understand the complexity of the issue at hand. The same caution that prevented us from using nuclear bombs to create commerce in Alaska applies here.
Let's just end internal combustion and leave these undersea critters where they belong.
Am I the only person who had to upgrade bioses to fix y2k issues?
Oh wait, that's all in the past.
No one will ever make that kind of mistake again, right?
You could try IBM's AFS for Windows.
C and sh are MUCH better for system administration once you figure out how to use the pipe along with the hundreds of useful utilities already on the system.
Perl is for people who don't get the pipe.
Perl is for people who think their scripts are portable since it runs on both of their linux systems.
Remember people, Perl modules are written in C.
You're right. C is so very obscure. Hardly any software in use today is written in C.
UNIX was designed to get away from the mainframe usage paradigm, not reinforce it. Read the article. It yields good insight into the differences between the Mainframe Way (machine resources are more important than user demands) and the UNIX Way (users needs are more important than the machine's).
My advice is to carefully firewall that machine with iptables. Block any network activity on the port that doesn't originate from the localhost. Also, be sure to filter spoofed packets.
Or simply write your own damn software. How hard can it be to snoop the traffic on the serial line that connects to the UPS and reverse engineer the protocol?
Use their POP finder to seek out dial up access points for wherever you may be going.
One of the many wonderful things about ssh is that is provides many interfaces to the same protocol. The ssh protocol combines file transfer, remote shell access, port forwarding, encryption and compression all on one port/service. That means when you turn on the ssh port, you can access it using an interactive shell (ssh), or an interactive file transfer session (sftp) or an automated file transfer session (scp). WinSCP truthfully acts more like a GUI ftp client, but, when it comes to ssh, what's in a name?
For file synchronization, look into rdist, rsync, unison, and of course NFS, AFS, etc.
Buying anything from the makers of Diskeeper puts money in the hands of one of the world's most notorious cults.
Besides, it sounds like you're facing a grown-up problem. Why not use a grown-up filesystem and/or a grown-up operating system?
www.beepcore.org