Not an environmental scientist, but I am a scientist, accustomed to developing hypothesis and establishing the correctness or otherwise of same.
Hey, me too!
How many vast Ice sheets have cracked recently? I haven't heard of many.
Well, think of if this way. If you had heard of many of them cracking up, we would be in very serious trouble!
Ice is melting all over the arctic it seems, and there are tentative links to global warming. However no-one has proven that these are not natural events slightly speeded up.
Sorry, but you are way out of date here. These are not 'slightly' speeded up. They are dramatically seeded up here. The links to global warming are not tentative - ice melts on that scale because of global warming.
I'm not interested in getting the facts from whatever group can shout the loudest, or who succeeds in worrying the most people, I'm interested in knowing the precise cause, or combination of causes, before resorting to being scared to voice a variant opinion.
Then do what any sensible scientists does - do a literature survey.
I am very wary of jumping to conclusions though.
I shared your opinion ten years ago. The time of uncertainty about all this has long past, I am sorry (and very sad) to say.
It isn't that fragile. No amount of climate change is going to erase the rotary engine, mathematics, electricity, etc.... away and leave us back in the dark ages. Well, no climate change due to global warming anyway... The people you are most worried about are the ones who still live the same way we did 1300 years ago, so civilization isn't the most solid argument against global warming.
Not just them. Think of the major cities that would be threatened by even a few metres rise in sea levels. London, New York, Tokyo, just to name a few Things would be a little bit troublesome for our economies if any one of those was seriously damaged by flooding, for example.
I don't think there is any chance of humanity regressing to the dark ages; but life could become very difficult for a vast number of people.
Sorry, but you said you weren't an environmental scientist, so how can you be in a position to say that more data is required? How do you know that this is "just one event"? There are plenty of other sources of data on ice melting in the Arctic.
It's a fair question, yes? Like when I hear "such and such place recorded the highest temperature in 150 years this week!" I think "What caused the previous high 150 years agp?" My brain has a pesky habit of continually asking questions.
The problem is, you need to ask the right questions - you are asking the wrong ones. What matters is not what caused an area of ice to break off 30 years ago. The correct question is: "How much faster is the ice breaking off now than then?" Just because it has taken 30 years for an area to exceed the previous record, does not mean that no ice has been breaking off since.... in fact, warming might might mean that smaller pieces break off more often, explaining the long time to break the record!
Re:Why I should be a highly paid spin consultant.
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Giant Ice Shelf Snaps
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The implication is that 30 years ago there was a larger event. So if a smaller sheet of ice broke off now than the one from 30 years back, doesn't that mean the problem is going away?:)
No, things aren't that simple, because what matters is not just how large the events are, but how often they happen.
that's my thought. a 1300 years ago it was so warm in England that english wine was better than french wine. I am not going to worry about Global warming until that happens again.
This is a very naive view. The problem is that most of our current civilization and infrastructure has been developed in the past few centuries during which the climate was not that warm. This infrastructure is fragile - it would not take much sea rise or change in rainfall patterns to cause major problems for a significant proportion of humanity.
You may not need to worry, but the hundreds of millions (if not billions) whose lives rely on our current climate would probably need to worry if things changed to the way they were 1300 years ago.
I'm certainly not saying that OO is never an appropriate or sufficient choice. I'm sorry if I gave that impression.
No, I understood what you were saying.
However, my experiences are very different to yours. I've seen people try OO, and reject it outright after fighting this or that irritation for an hour. It's stuffed the formatting of every moderately complex.doc I've ever opened in it to some degree, often in a not-even-close kind of way. It has fundamental bugs in things like PDF export that make it unreliable for production use if you haven't got things planned and tried out ahead of time.
I guess the thing is, that I have had precisely this kind of problem with MS Office (which I have been dealing with since it first came out). There are problems with MS Office import, but nothing worse than you would get opening a legacy MS Office or Corel Office document from current MS Office.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm guessing the people you've worked with successfully using OO are mostly fairly small businesses. These can overcome this sort of difficulty with some ingenuity, but it's really an unacceptable liability if you're working in an environment where the "local geek" doesn't sit on the desk next to you or you're sending out documents to big business or media contacts who will be using Word even if you're not.
True, but in my experience even the larger organisations would have someone to deal with sending out such stuff. They may even use MS Office to check stuff for compatibility before it is sent out (they may have different versions of MS Office, to check how things look for those with legacy versions) but is MS Office required for Joe or Jane Public's desktop for everyday use in most business situations? I really don't think it is.
Larger businesses also tend to be the ones to benefit most from things like reviewing and team-working features, which are things OO barely has but MS Office has done for years. Similar arguments apply to using Outlook with Exchange Server, which is something small businesses rarely do, but large organisations sometimes base their whole infrastructure around.
Sure. All I can say is that I have heard of this, but never seen it used effectively - I have seen large organisation set up large infrastructures based on Outlook and MS Office in the belief that this is necessary, but few used it. I was involved in setting up an open-source equivalents in another company that my boss was associated with, and the results were far more efficient and productive. Again, this is simply personal experience.... but I do wonder how much of this supposed infrastructure is actually necessary and used. I can see where it IS used, then Office integration could be a major factor to consider. The issue for me is that I have had to deal with so much MS Office incompatibility on upgrades over the years that I would never recommend basing an infrastructure on their software.
This is why, IMHO, a more effective office suite is the killer app for Linux in the business world.
Yes. The problem is that people seem to expect MS Office. But I agree that the way Office software works needs to be reviewed, and there could be far better solutions than MS Office or Open Office (which is, after all, attempting to be a clone).
Meanwhile, reliability problems with import/export of.DOC files, the underpowered Calc that can't keep up with Excel, the lack of anything to compete head-to-head with Outlook, and several other serious concerns will prevent most/all mid- and large-sized businesses moving to OO any time soon. It's just not ready for the big time yet, like so many other OSS applications, and this is exactly my point.
I just don't accept this; I have been supporting businesses using Open Office for a long time, and haven't encountered major issues. Import and export of.doc files has not been a problem (even novice users seem to have few difficulties with this).
I have transferred users from Outlook to Evolution with few problems. I have not seen, in placed where I have deployed this software, anyone who wants or needs to match Outlook feature-for-feature. I fact, support for business processes has been simpler as a result.
So my practical experience based on years of support is that Open Office really is up to the job, at least for the scale of companies I deal with.
The problem with 'something better than MS Office' is that developers get distracted into trying to things the MS Office way. Microsoft is great with providing rich feature sets, but poor in terms of simplicity. They provide what users think they want, not what users actually need (which is fair enough, as MS want to sell software, not improve productivity).
A close-approximation with a somewhat lower price tag isn't worth much in this game.
When you are talking about free, my experience is that it is worth a lot. Low budget resulting from the use of Open Office+Linux has made a big impression on the owner of one company I support, to the extent where he is looking at ways to roll out the same technologies in other organisations.
But let's be fair: Linux has, as yet, no answer to MS Office at work, and no answer to the range of games available for Windows and/or the latest generation of consoles at home.
I agree about the home software range, but it is simply not true that there is no answer to MS Office. I have been involved in supporting a medium sized business that has been using Open Office for years. There have been few problems (certainly no more problems that we used to have with MS Office). Compatibility with MS Office isn't perfect, but it is no worse than compatibility between different versions of MS Office.
Linux has a long way to go for home use, but for general corporate desktops, I can't see many issues - in fact, we have found it far easier to support and maintain (and the low software budget was a major shock to managers).
I really believe that Linux is good enough for general corporate desktop use, and the killer application that allows that is Open Office.
I'm talking about the Many Worlds theory in the sense of Everett, also described by David Deutsch.
But even those aren't the same. Some of Deutch's ideas about how Many Worlds works are fundamentally different from Everett's.
it simply defines what they are and proves that they exist.
Not really, as a common 're-interpretation' of Many Worlds is that all but one of the parallel worlds are simply 'potential' and we live in the 'actual' one. There is certainly no proof that these worlds exist.
Do you, as an observer, want an explanation why you personally experienced a collapse to event A? That, to me, is as if a twin asks "why was I the one born first?" Well, one had to be born first; your brother wonders why he was born second.
To a significant number of physicists and philosophers it is not the same question - if it was, they would not have so much difficulty with it, and they would not have made attempts to deal with the time-asymmetric continuous generation of new conciousnesses like the 'Many Minds' interpretation of H. Dieter Zeh and David Albert. To many, the splitting of concious observers is not something trivial.
The collapse by conciousness and the splitting of conciousness are of equivalent weirdness, and both suggest an incomplete understanding of QM, or that QM itself is incomplete.
It also suggests a tendency of physicists to excessively 'reify' mathematics: Just because you use the mathematics and models to solve things, does not mean that the mathematics and models describe what is really going on, and extrapolating to ideas like Many Worlds seems a bit excessive (as, indeed, do other interpretations of QM).
QM is almost certainly incomplete anyway, and what may result with unification with gravity could result in different interpretations. There have been interesting suggestions, like that of Penrose in which Many Worlds can exist on a small scale, but a collapse is forced when the worlds become sufficiently large for gravitational effects to apply.
Anyway, to me, Many Worlds hand-waves away personal experience in a way that reminds me of Terry Pratchett's Discword philosopher Didactylos. His explanation for events was "Things just happen".
Sure, but the theory doesn't require them, it just allows for them.
There are numerous versions of Many Worlds, and they way that each does or doesn't incorporate concious observers differs.
True, the subjective collapse that every observer experiences is explained by Many Worlds. So "collapse", rather than the biggest mystery of QM, is simply a phenomenon predicted by the theory.
I would argue that the subjective collapse experienced by each observer really isn't explained by Many Worlds, as it does not explain any better than any other interpretation why any given observer experiences a particular version of events. The Copenhagen Interpretation requires a collapse on observation, the Many Worlds Interpretation requires an uncountable and growing number of parallel universes. Neither seem satisfactory to me.
I'm not familiar with that one, I'll check it out, thanks.
John Cramer is the orginator of the Transactional Interpretation. I mentioned it because it shows how the commonly held belief that you have to believe either in some mysterious collapse due to observation, or in Many Worlds is wrong - there are other alternatives, and the Transactional Interpretation is kind of fun!
In the theory we have a problem, because the standard interpretations of quantum mechanics use terms such as "measurement" and "collapse" which they refuse to define, and then they refuse to explain why a collapse would occur, and you get people speculating about a requirement for conscious observers and other nonsense.
It isn't nonsense - there are still concious observers in the Many Worlds interpretation, in fact an increasing number of them (at least in most versions of Many Worlds). This raises all kinds of issues.
Well, it depends what kind of explanation you want. Of course no approach to quantum mechanics can tell you why you experienced history A rather than history B; all it can tell you is what the probabilities of the two histories are. The many world-worlds interpretation gives a (to me) convincing account as to how these probabilities arise from Schrödinger's equation alone.
But there is still a collapse - just for the individual experiencing it. What the Many-Worlds interpretation does is to hand-wave individual experience away as irrelevant (because other copies of you are experiencing something else). To me, it is deeply philosophically unsatisfying.
There are other interpretations which neither require a mysterious conciousness-driven collapse or a proliferation of universes or conciousnesses (such as the Transactional Interpretation). I am surprised they aren't more popular.
The measurement problem is beautifully resolved by the many-worlds interpretation: all you have is a humongous wave function that describes everything and evolves under Schrödinger's equation. "Measurements" have no special status.
In practice, the many-worlds interpretation solves little. The point of physics should be to explain a particular history that is experienced. Saying "there are other histories as well" is no more of an explanation than "the wave function collapsed into this one".
You have little to no understanding of the topic of discussion, which is not surprising since you say you don't care and consider it all "mental masturbation".
Where do our desires come from? If they come from the our bodies and ultimately the universe, then that's determinism. If they come from nothingness, then you have free will. It is not a false dichotomy. There is either causality or there is not.
If you research this topic you will see that the poster was right. It is not a matter of where our desires come from, it is a matter of how we choose to react to them. It is indeed a false dichotomy. There is a well-established school of thought called the 'Compatibilists' (including the modern philosopher Daniel Dennett) who claim that free will and determinism can exist together.
Typical Slashdot parroting of horrible science reporting. One mildly interesting case does not do much to advance a theory - it may provide a starting point for further investigation, but that's about it.
Absolutely. Free will is an immensely complicated philosophical question. In a complex physical and philosophical Universe with quantum mechanics (involving spooky links across both space and time), chaos, an uncertain role for conciousness, the reality or otherwise of qualia, the idea that this article has anything major to say about free will, or implies that it 'erodes the idea of free will' is absurd. It is like saying that free will should be questioned because someone who has lost a leg loses can no longer choose to play football.
Also, in spite of what the articles says, the brain is not 'just a mechanism', or at least not until we can explain how a mechanism can be self-aware and feel sensations.
The open source community can't produce a comparable version because the goal line keeps moving. Sun keeps dumping more and more crap into J2SE, so the amount of work that open source developers would need to do keeps on increasing.
Nonsense. There would have been a significant demand for a high-performance version of Java as it was years ago - even a good Java 1.3 would have been welcomed by many. That has been stable for a very long time.
Also, much of what has been added to J2SE over the past few years has been in terms of Java libraries, not the JVM. A high performance JVM would have worked with those.
It is strange how so many in IT claim that Java is moving too slowly, but those trying to implement it claim it is moving too fast...
This does not necessarily mean that there are more brain cells. Increased volume of gray matter can result from the growth of more interconnections between existing cells. Recent studies of mammalian brains suggests that new brain cells may form in adults, but there is a lot of uncertainty about this.
Of course, if Java had been an open standard for the past 10 years, there'd be dozens of independent implementations right now. They'd be partially incompatible, and that would be a good thing.
It would have been a total disaster. One of the primary reasons for the success of Java is compatibility.
Overall, open sourcing Java was necessary for Sun to remain relevant at all; it will stabilize Java for a little longer, but unless Sun is willing to make some radical changes to the Java platform--including a massive cleanup and pruning of the libraries--Java is past its peak.
You have to be kidding. It is hard to imagine a set of statements so disconnected from IT reality.
First, you may want to take a look at recent server sales - Sun now sells more servers than Dell. Would you call Dell irrelevant or in decline?
Secondly of all, Java use is still growing - it has recently ranked above C++ on sourceforge. Java is not declining in the face of dynamic languages - in fact, one of the most exciting new implementations of a dynamic language - JRuby - is based on Java! The future is dynamic languages and Java together.
Secondly, the JRE is still relatively small. How long does a 15MB download take these days? A couple of minutes on broadband. Have you ever heard an end user of the JRE complain 'because there are too many libraries'? I haven't.
Yes, I have to concede you are right here. I am not impressed with the Language Shootout in general, but having looked
This is my mistake - I was remembering a report on dynamic languages on the JVM, and I remembered wrong - it was the 'Nice' language that showed good performance, not Groovy.
However, I am still not convinced that Rails is generally faster than Grails, because, as I said, Groovy is only a thin layer over an ORM which is well known for good performance.
So, I'll run some benchmarks on what I consider a reasonable object model (an actual example I wm working with) and report back.
Re:Let the Java vs RoR battles begin
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I agree that Hibernate is better than AR for more sofisticated apps, but for what AR is intended, it's sufficient in most cases.
No, it isn't. It is only suited for the smallest and simplest of queries. Anything more than a few tables and you end up with joins, large transactions and so on.
As for complex joins, it's always better to make them on the DB side.
No, it isn't. You lose portability. You also lose the ability of the ORM to opimise such things. This kind of justification of Rails' failings is typical: "If Rails can't do it, you shouldn't be doing it".
The results are for simple scaffold on one table, but I don't think that the results for something more sofisticated (typical reports or forms, not crunching thousands of records) would be radically different.
So I proved you wrong, Grails is not faster than Rails.
No, you haven't. The results for more sophisticated forms are certainly radically different. That is what the article I pointed out to you shows - Rails is poor at complex joins.
Also, you seem to have forgotten the challenge I mentioned:
Try running a single 100,000 record transaction in Rails. (Before you try it - something more than just one or two fields! Include some BLOBS - that is what I have to cope with).
Fetching small amounts of data from one single table is meaningless.
All you are doing is picking exactly the kind of small task that Rails is designed for and declaring Rails better on that task. It is always possible to find a microbenchmark where a particular language or system is faster.
So you are saying that cold water evaporates less than the ice covered ocean? It turns out that it can be and has been accurately MEASURED exactly how much water evaporates at any given temperature and pressure. Much more water evaporates off the areas that are now water, rather than ice.
I thought it was time I put a stop to this argument.
The statement that 'much more water evaporates off the areas that are now water, rather than ice' is wrong. Because the vapour pressure of water has been measured accurately is why we know that it is insignificant at those temperatures.
Even if the vapour pressure was higher, it would be insignificant compared to the water vapour already in the atmosphere resulting from evaporation of warmer sources. The temperature of those warmer sources is not rising so fast, so you can't use that increase to suggest enough additional cloud cover to block sunlight in the Arctic.
The water resulting from melting ice in the Artic does not contribute significantly to global cloud cover, and so does not change the reflection back of solar radation.
This is why the positive feedback of ice melting, leading to more exposed water areas, absorbing more head and melting more ice, happens: negative feedback effects that would block sunlight hitting the Arctic are totally insignificant.
So you are saying that cold water evaporates less than the ice covered ocean? It turns out that it can be and has been accurately MEASURED exactly how much water evaporates at any given temperature and pressure. Much more water evaporates off the areas that are now water, rather than ice. This extra moisture has to and eventually and indeed does precipitate.
Sure, some of it does. But positive feedback could only be avoided if large areas of high-altitude reflective clouds sat over the poles to cover the area where the ice was. They obviously don't.
You do realise that those who model climate and talk about positive feedback systems do understand all this?
There is no need to conjecture about volcanic eruptions. Even the arctic and Antarctic waters, barely above freezing evaporate a huge amount of water, compared to the ice covered ocean and ice on land. Even ice and snow evaporate. The process is called sublimation, where a solid passed directly from solid to vapor, without becoming liquid.
Yes, I know.
The problem is that you keep ignoring the fact that your supposed negative feedback mechanisms haven't worked in the past. We have had massive ice ages and times where there was no ice at all.
Why should negative feedback magically overcome global warming now when it has failed to do so often in the past.
Even TEN YEARS after he had proposed it, including what I think you will agree are rather good reasons, the scientific community refused to accept it. In 1921 when Einstein received the Nobel prize, relativity was not menationed at all!
This is a very tired old argument. It goes like this:
(1) Science often progresses through a few individuals who disagree with the mainstream. (2) I disagree with the mainstream. (3) Therefore I am right.
Unfortunately, virtually all who disagree with the mainstream are wrong. There are few Einsteins. You don't get to pick and choose those who are Einsteins beforehand - you have to wait until their ideas are tested long term.
Also....
It would seem that one person can convince the scientific community if their arguments are good enough.
Yes, but your arguments aren't. You keep showing you either don't understand the physics of the situation (such as arguing that increased atmospheric vapour would counteract the effects of ice loss at the poles). Or you actually reject evidence, such as the well-established climatic effects of the Toba eruption.
Francis Bacon was unable to convince the scientistists of his time that the speed of light is finite.
Well that is hardly surprising, as there was at the time no way to measure the speed of light. Bacon died in 1626. The first practical measurements were in 1667.
Even TEN YEARS after he had proposed it, including what I think you will agree are rather good reasons, the scientific community refused to accept it.
Nonsense. Special Relativity was accepted immediately. General Relativity had to wait for evidence.
In 1921 when Einstein received the Nobel prize, relativity was not menationed at all!
The reason why it wasn't mentioned is that that particular Nobel Prize was not awarded for relativity. It was awarded for his work on quantum theory.
The last verification was in 2003, yet scientists still refuse to accept it. Why? Because it is real evidence that demolishes some key aspects of the "Big Bang" theory and the supposed age of the Universe.
No. They refuse to accept it because the evidence for it isn't clear. It certainly has not been "verified 4 times". In 2005 data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey was checked for evidence of periodicity and none was found (Tang and Zang, 2005). Also check the review of Bajan et al from this year: "in our opinion the existence of redshift periodicity among galaxies is not well established.".
An off that non-reflecting water more moisture evaporates which falls as more snow on the land, making more ice. Thus the negative feedback keeps the water level the same or makes it even less.
No, it doesn't, because it is too cold. Remember that water produced by ice melting is at the same temperature as the ice - you need to study the principles of latent heat. You aren't talking sense in terms of physics here.
Stop conjecturing about how things were ages ago when nobody was around to actually OBSSERVE what really happened. How does anyone know that it was that volcanic eruption and not one of many other causes that made a mini ice age?
Because the records of what happened are clear, and well understood. The eruption produced substantial quantities of ash and sulphates which blocked sunlight. This is all in the records of sedimentary deposits. It isn't controversial!
The humbling fact is that we humans simply cannot predict the future accurately, and that includes the weather, for tomorrow, the next year or the next millennium.
Sorry, but I am afraid we can. Predicting the weather for tomorrow is not the same as predicting long-term climate.
Also, we aren't talking about accuracy - but about trends.
Just because the majority of any group, including scientists, believes something is true, does not make it so.
Yes, I am afraid it does. That is the way science works, and has always worked.
Just because you, in a minority, believe differently, does not make what you believe right.
You can't have things both ways - try and provide me with evidence that positive feedback doesn't happen, but when I show you are wrong, you try and dismiss the subject altogether.
I am sorry for you. You are trying to hide behind so much false science and personal belief. The truth is hard to face, I know, but we have to face it.
Slashdot Mirror
Not an environmental scientist, but I am a scientist, accustomed to developing hypothesis and establishing the correctness or otherwise of same.
Hey, me too!
How many vast Ice sheets have cracked recently? I haven't heard of many.
Well, think of if this way. If you had heard of many of them cracking up, we would be in very serious trouble!
Ice is melting all over the arctic it seems, and there are tentative links to global warming. However no-one has proven that these are not natural events slightly speeded up.
Sorry, but you are way out of date here. These are not 'slightly' speeded up. They are dramatically seeded up here. The links to global warming are not tentative - ice melts on that scale because of global warming.
I'm not interested in getting the facts from whatever group can shout the loudest, or who succeeds in worrying the most people, I'm interested in knowing the precise cause, or combination of causes, before resorting to being scared to voice a variant opinion.
Then do what any sensible scientists does - do a literature survey.
I am very wary of jumping to conclusions though.
I shared your opinion ten years ago. The time of uncertainty about all this has long past, I am sorry (and very sad) to say.
It isn't that fragile. No amount of climate change is going to erase the rotary engine, mathematics, electricity, etc.... away and leave us back in the dark ages. Well, no climate change due to global warming anyway... The people you are most worried about are the ones who still live the same way we did 1300 years ago, so civilization isn't the most solid argument against global warming.
Not just them. Think of the major cities that would be threatened by even a few metres rise in sea levels. London, New York, Tokyo, just to name a few Things would be a little bit troublesome for our economies if any one of those was seriously damaged by flooding, for example.
I don't think there is any chance of humanity regressing to the dark ages; but life could become very difficult for a vast number of people.
Sorry, but you said you weren't an environmental scientist, so how can you be in a position to say that more data is required? How do you know that this is "just one event"? There are plenty of other sources of data on ice melting in the Arctic.
So what was the cause 30 years ago?
It's a fair question, yes? Like when I hear "such and such place recorded the highest temperature in 150 years this week!" I think "What caused the previous high 150 years agp?" My brain has a pesky habit of continually asking questions.
The problem is, you need to ask the right questions - you are asking the wrong ones. What matters is not what caused an area of ice to break off 30 years ago. The correct question is: "How much faster is the ice breaking off now than then?" Just because it has taken 30 years for an area to exceed the previous record, does not mean that no ice has been breaking off since.... in fact, warming might might mean that smaller pieces break off more often, explaining the long time to break the record!
The implication is that 30 years ago there was a larger event. So if a smaller sheet of ice broke off now than the one from 30 years back, doesn't that mean the problem is going away? :)
No, things aren't that simple, because what matters is not just how large the events are, but how often they happen.
that's my thought. a 1300 years ago it was so warm in England that english wine was better than french wine. I am not going to worry about Global warming until that happens again.
This is a very naive view. The problem is that most of our current civilization and infrastructure has been developed in the past few centuries during which the climate was not that warm. This infrastructure is fragile - it would not take much sea rise or change in rainfall patterns to cause major problems for a significant proportion of humanity.
You may not need to worry, but the hundreds of millions (if not billions) whose lives rely on our current climate would probably need to worry if things changed to the way they were 1300 years ago.
I'm certainly not saying that OO is never an appropriate or sufficient choice. I'm sorry if I gave that impression.
.doc I've ever opened in it to some degree, often in a not-even-close kind of way. It has fundamental bugs in things like PDF export that make it unreliable for production use if you haven't got things planned and tried out ahead of time.
No, I understood what you were saying.
However, my experiences are very different to yours. I've seen people try OO, and reject it outright after fighting this or that irritation for an hour. It's stuffed the formatting of every moderately complex
I guess the thing is, that I have had precisely this kind of problem with MS Office (which I have been dealing with since it first came out). There are problems with MS Office import, but nothing worse than you would get opening a legacy MS Office or Corel Office document from current MS Office.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm guessing the people you've worked with successfully using OO are mostly fairly small businesses. These can overcome this sort of difficulty with some ingenuity, but it's really an unacceptable liability if you're working in an environment where the "local geek" doesn't sit on the desk next to you or you're sending out documents to big business or media contacts who will be using Word even if you're not.
True, but in my experience even the larger organisations would have someone to deal with sending out such stuff. They may even use MS Office to check stuff for compatibility before it is sent out (they may have different versions of MS Office, to check how things look for those with legacy versions) but is MS Office required for Joe or Jane Public's desktop for everyday use in most business situations? I really don't think it is.
Larger businesses also tend to be the ones to benefit most from things like reviewing and team-working features, which are things OO barely has but MS Office has done for years. Similar arguments apply to using Outlook with Exchange Server, which is something small businesses rarely do, but large organisations sometimes base their whole infrastructure around.
Sure. All I can say is that I have heard of this, but never seen it used effectively - I have seen large organisation set up large infrastructures based on Outlook and MS Office in the belief that this is necessary, but few used it. I was involved in setting up an open-source equivalents in another company that my boss was associated with, and the results were far more efficient and productive. Again, this is simply personal experience.... but I do wonder how much of this supposed infrastructure is actually necessary and used. I can see where it IS used, then Office integration could be a major factor to consider. The issue for me is that I have had to deal with so much MS Office incompatibility on upgrades over the years that I would never recommend basing an infrastructure on their software.
This is why, IMHO, a more effective office suite is the killer app for Linux in the business world.
Yes. The problem is that people seem to expect MS Office. But I agree that the way Office software works needs to be reviewed, and there could be far better solutions than MS Office or Open Office (which is, after all, attempting to be a clone).
Meanwhile, reliability problems with import/export of .DOC files, the underpowered Calc that can't keep up with Excel, the lack of anything to compete head-to-head with Outlook, and several other serious concerns will prevent most/all mid- and large-sized businesses moving to OO any time soon. It's just not ready for the big time yet, like so many other OSS applications, and this is exactly my point.
.doc files has not been a problem (even novice users seem to have few difficulties with this).
I just don't accept this; I have been supporting businesses using Open Office for a long time, and haven't encountered major issues. Import and export of
I have transferred users from Outlook to Evolution with few problems. I have not seen, in placed where I have deployed this software, anyone who wants or needs to match Outlook feature-for-feature. I fact, support for business processes has been simpler as a result.
So my practical experience based on years of support is that Open Office really is up to the job, at least for the scale of companies I deal with.
The problem with 'something better than MS Office' is that developers get distracted into trying to things the MS Office way. Microsoft is great with providing rich feature sets, but poor in terms of simplicity. They provide what users think they want, not what users actually need (which is fair enough, as MS want to sell software, not improve productivity).
A close-approximation with a somewhat lower price tag isn't worth much in this game.
When you are talking about free, my experience is that it is worth a lot. Low budget resulting from the use of Open Office+Linux has made a big impression on the owner of one company I support, to the extent where he is looking at ways to roll out the same technologies in other organisations.
But I guess these are just my experiences.
But let's be fair: Linux has, as yet, no answer to MS Office at work, and no answer to the range of games available for Windows and/or the latest generation of consoles at home.
I agree about the home software range, but it is simply not true that there is no answer to MS Office. I have been involved in supporting a medium sized business that has been using Open Office for years. There have been few problems (certainly no more problems that we used to have with MS Office). Compatibility with MS Office isn't perfect, but it is no worse than compatibility between different versions of MS Office.
Linux has a long way to go for home use, but for general corporate desktops, I can't see many issues - in fact, we have found it far easier to support and maintain (and the low software budget was a major shock to managers).
I really believe that Linux is good enough for general corporate desktop use, and the killer application that allows that is Open Office.
I'm talking about the Many Worlds theory in the sense of Everett, also described by David Deutsch.
But even those aren't the same. Some of Deutch's ideas about how Many Worlds works are fundamentally different from Everett's.
it simply defines what they are and proves that they exist.
Not really, as a common 're-interpretation' of Many Worlds is that all but one of the parallel worlds are simply 'potential' and we live in the 'actual' one. There is certainly no proof that these worlds exist.
Do you, as an observer, want an explanation why you personally experienced a collapse to event A? That, to me, is as if a twin asks "why was I the one born first?" Well, one had to be born first; your brother wonders why he was born second.
To a significant number of physicists and philosophers it is not the same question - if it was, they would not have so much difficulty with it, and they would not have made attempts to deal with the time-asymmetric continuous generation of new conciousnesses like the 'Many Minds' interpretation of H. Dieter Zeh and David Albert. To many, the splitting of concious observers is not something trivial.
The collapse by conciousness and the splitting of conciousness are of equivalent weirdness, and both suggest an incomplete understanding of QM, or that QM itself is incomplete.
It also suggests a tendency of physicists to excessively 'reify' mathematics: Just because you use the mathematics and models to solve things, does not mean that the mathematics and models describe what is really going on, and extrapolating to ideas like Many Worlds seems a bit excessive (as, indeed, do other interpretations of QM).
QM is almost certainly incomplete anyway, and what may result with unification with gravity could result in different interpretations. There have been interesting suggestions, like that of Penrose in which Many Worlds can exist on a small scale, but a collapse is forced when the worlds become sufficiently large for gravitational effects to apply.
Anyway, to me, Many Worlds hand-waves away personal experience in a way that reminds me of Terry Pratchett's Discword philosopher Didactylos. His explanation for events was "Things just happen".
Sure, but the theory doesn't require them, it just allows for them.
There are numerous versions of Many Worlds, and they way that each does or doesn't incorporate concious observers differs.
True, the subjective collapse that every observer experiences is explained by Many Worlds. So "collapse", rather than the biggest mystery of QM, is simply a phenomenon predicted by the theory.
I would argue that the subjective collapse experienced by each observer really isn't explained by Many Worlds, as it does not explain any better than any other interpretation why any given observer experiences a particular version of events. The Copenhagen Interpretation requires a collapse on observation, the Many Worlds Interpretation requires an uncountable and growing number of parallel universes. Neither seem satisfactory to me.
I'm not familiar with that one, I'll check it out, thanks.
John Cramer is the orginator of the Transactional Interpretation. I mentioned it because it shows how the commonly held belief that you have to believe either in some mysterious collapse due to observation, or in Many Worlds is wrong - there are other alternatives, and the Transactional Interpretation is kind of fun!
In the theory we have a problem, because the standard interpretations of quantum mechanics use terms such as "measurement" and "collapse" which they refuse to define, and then they refuse to explain why a collapse would occur, and you get people speculating about a requirement for conscious observers and other nonsense.
It isn't nonsense - there are still concious observers in the Many Worlds interpretation, in fact an increasing number of them (at least in most versions of Many Worlds). This raises all kinds of issues.
Well, it depends what kind of explanation you want. Of course no approach to quantum mechanics can tell you why you experienced history A rather than history B; all it can tell you is what the probabilities of the two histories are. The many world-worlds interpretation gives a (to me) convincing account as to how these probabilities arise from Schrödinger's equation alone.
But there is still a collapse - just for the individual experiencing it. What the Many-Worlds interpretation does is to hand-wave individual experience away as irrelevant (because other copies of you are experiencing something else). To me, it is deeply philosophically unsatisfying.
There are other interpretations which neither require a mysterious conciousness-driven collapse or a proliferation of universes or conciousnesses (such as the Transactional Interpretation). I am surprised they aren't more popular.
The measurement problem is beautifully resolved by the many-worlds interpretation: all you have is a humongous wave function that describes everything and evolves under Schrödinger's equation. "Measurements" have no special status.
In practice, the many-worlds interpretation solves little. The point of physics should be to explain a particular history that is experienced. Saying "there are other histories as well" is no more of an explanation than "the wave function collapsed into this one".
You really need to look in more detail at Dennett's work, and at the definition of free will.
You can't summarise decades of deep debate as a Wikipedia article.
You have little to no understanding of the topic of discussion, which is not surprising since you say you don't care and consider it all "mental masturbation".
Where do our desires come from? If they come from the our bodies and ultimately the universe, then that's determinism. If they come from nothingness, then you have free will. It is not a false dichotomy. There is either causality or there is not.
If you research this topic you will see that the poster was right. It is not a matter of where our desires come from, it is a matter of how we choose to react to them. It is indeed a false dichotomy. There is a well-established school of thought called the 'Compatibilists' (including the modern philosopher Daniel Dennett) who claim that free will and determinism can exist together.
Typical Slashdot parroting of horrible science reporting. One mildly interesting case does not do much to advance a theory - it may provide a starting point for further investigation, but that's about it.
Absolutely. Free will is an immensely complicated philosophical question. In a complex physical and philosophical Universe with quantum mechanics (involving spooky links across both space and time), chaos, an uncertain role for conciousness, the reality or otherwise of qualia, the idea that this article has anything major to say about free will, or implies that it 'erodes the idea of free will' is absurd. It is like saying that free will should be questioned because someone who has lost a leg loses can no longer choose to play football.
Also, in spite of what the articles says, the brain is not 'just a mechanism', or at least not until we can explain how a mechanism can be self-aware and feel sensations.
The open source community can't produce a comparable version because the goal line keeps moving. Sun keeps dumping more and more crap into J2SE, so the amount of work that open source developers would need to do keeps on increasing.
Nonsense. There would have been a significant demand for a high-performance version of Java as it was years ago - even a good Java 1.3 would have been welcomed by many. That has been stable for a very long time.
Also, much of what has been added to J2SE over the past few years has been in terms of Java libraries, not the JVM. A high performance JVM would have worked with those.
It is strange how so many in IT claim that Java is moving too slowly, but those trying to implement it claim it is moving too fast...
This does not necessarily mean that there are more brain cells. Increased volume of gray matter can result from the growth of more interconnections between existing cells. Recent studies of mammalian brains suggests that new brain cells may form in adults, but there is a lot of uncertainty about this.
Of course, if Java had been an open standard for the past 10 years, there'd be dozens of independent implementations right now. They'd be partially incompatible, and that would be a good thing.
It would have been a total disaster. One of the primary reasons for the success of Java is compatibility.
Overall, open sourcing Java was necessary for Sun to remain relevant at all; it will stabilize Java for a little longer, but unless Sun is willing to make some radical changes to the Java platform--including a massive cleanup and pruning of the libraries--Java is past its peak.
You have to be kidding. It is hard to imagine a set of statements so disconnected from IT reality.
First, you may want to take a look at recent server sales - Sun now sells more servers than Dell. Would you call Dell irrelevant or in decline?
Secondly of all, Java use is still growing - it has recently ranked above C++ on sourceforge. Java is not declining in the face of dynamic languages - in fact, one of the most exciting new implementations of a dynamic language - JRuby - is based on Java! The future is dynamic languages and Java together.
Secondly, the JRE is still relatively small. How long does a 15MB download take these days? A couple of minutes on broadband. Have you ever heard an end user of the JRE complain 'because there are too many libraries'? I haven't.
Proof? I pointed to the Language Shootout.
Yes, I have to concede you are right here. I am not impressed with the Language Shootout in general, but having looked
This is my mistake - I was remembering a report on dynamic languages on the JVM, and I remembered wrong - it was the 'Nice' language that showed good performance, not Groovy.
However, I am still not convinced that Rails is generally faster than Grails, because, as I said, Groovy is only a thin layer over an ORM which is well known for good performance.
So, I'll run some benchmarks on what I consider a reasonable object model (an actual example I wm working with) and report back.
I agree that Hibernate is better than AR for more sofisticated apps, but for what AR is intended, it's sufficient in most cases.
No, it isn't. It is only suited for the smallest and simplest of queries. Anything more than a few tables and you end up with joins, large transactions and so on.
As for complex joins, it's always better to make them on the DB side.
No, it isn't. You lose portability. You also lose the ability of the ORM to opimise such things. This kind of justification of Rails' failings is typical: "If Rails can't do it, you shouldn't be doing it".
The results are for simple scaffold on one table, but I don't think that the results for something more sofisticated (typical reports or forms, not crunching thousands of records) would be radically different.
So I proved you wrong, Grails is not faster than Rails.
No, you haven't. The results for more sophisticated forms are certainly radically different. That is what the article I pointed out to you shows - Rails is poor at complex joins.
Also, you seem to have forgotten the challenge I mentioned:
Try running a single 100,000 record transaction in Rails. (Before you try it - something more than just one or two fields! Include some BLOBS - that is what I have to cope with).
Fetching small amounts of data from one single table is meaningless.
All you are doing is picking exactly the kind of small task that Rails is designed for and declaring Rails better on that task. It is always possible to find a microbenchmark where a particular language or system is faster.
So you are saying that cold water evaporates less than the ice covered ocean? It turns out that it can be and has been accurately MEASURED exactly how much water evaporates at any given temperature and pressure. Much more water evaporates off the areas that are now water, rather than ice.
e ssure_graph.jpg
I thought it was time I put a stop to this argument.
The vapour pressure of water at or close to 0C is insignificant:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Water_vapor_pr
The statement that 'much more water evaporates off the areas that are now water, rather than ice' is wrong. Because the vapour pressure of water has been measured accurately is why we know that it is insignificant at those temperatures.
Even if the vapour pressure was higher, it would be insignificant compared to the water vapour already in the atmosphere resulting from evaporation of warmer sources. The temperature of those warmer sources is not rising so fast, so you can't use that increase to suggest enough additional cloud cover to block sunlight in the Arctic.
The water resulting from melting ice in the Artic does not contribute significantly to global cloud cover, and so does not change the reflection back of solar radation.
This is why the positive feedback of ice melting, leading to more exposed water areas, absorbing more head and melting more ice, happens: negative feedback effects that would block sunlight hitting the Arctic are totally insignificant.
Honestly I don't see why HP's argument is flawed, without an OS the PC is useless for things that consumer's want to do.
So is a PC WITH an OS. Most consumers want to do things like use office software or play games. Those aren't pre-installed.
Basically the computer they're selling is largely useless to the average consumer without an OS pre-installed.
No. All the consumer has to do if things are set up right for the hardware is to boot up the PC with the OS install CD in.
It's like telling McDonalds to stop putting their food in bags
It is like telling McDonalds to stop only putting super size cheeseburgers in all bags.
So you are saying that cold water evaporates less than the ice covered ocean? It turns out that it can be and has been accurately MEASURED exactly how much water evaporates at any given temperature and pressure. Much more water evaporates off the areas that are now water, rather than ice. This extra moisture has to and eventually and indeed does precipitate.
Sure, some of it does. But positive feedback could only be avoided if large areas of high-altitude reflective clouds sat over the poles to cover the area where the ice was. They obviously don't.
You do realise that those who model climate and talk about positive feedback systems do understand all this?
There is no need to conjecture about volcanic eruptions. Even the arctic and Antarctic waters, barely above freezing evaporate a huge amount of water, compared to the ice covered ocean and ice on land. Even ice and snow evaporate. The process is called sublimation, where a solid passed directly from solid to vapor, without becoming liquid.
Yes, I know.
The problem is that you keep ignoring the fact that your supposed negative feedback mechanisms haven't worked in the past. We have had massive ice ages and times where there was no ice at all.
Why should negative feedback magically overcome global warming now when it has failed to do so often in the past.
Even TEN YEARS after he had proposed it, including what I think you will agree are rather good reasons, the scientific community refused to accept it. In 1921 when Einstein received the Nobel prize, relativity was not menationed at all!
This is a very tired old argument. It goes like this:
(1) Science often progresses through a few individuals who disagree with the mainstream.
(2) I disagree with the mainstream.
(3) Therefore I am right.
Unfortunately, virtually all who disagree with the mainstream are wrong. There are few Einsteins. You don't get to pick and choose those who are Einsteins beforehand - you have to wait until their ideas are tested long term.
Also....
It would seem that one person can convince the scientific community if their arguments are good enough.
Yes, but your arguments aren't. You keep showing you either don't understand the physics of the situation (such as arguing that increased atmospheric vapour would counteract the effects of ice loss at the poles). Or you actually reject evidence, such as the well-established climatic effects of the Toba eruption.
Francis Bacon was unable to convince the scientistists of his time that the speed of light is finite.
Well that is hardly surprising, as there was at the time no way to measure the speed of light. Bacon died in 1626. The first practical measurements were in 1667.
Even TEN YEARS after he had proposed it, including what I think you will agree are rather good reasons, the scientific community refused to accept it.
Nonsense. Special Relativity was accepted immediately. General Relativity had to wait for evidence.
In 1921 when Einstein received the Nobel prize, relativity was not menationed at all!
The reason why it wasn't mentioned is that that particular Nobel Prize was not awarded for relativity. It was awarded for his work on quantum theory.
The last verification was in 2003, yet scientists still refuse to accept it. Why? Because it is real evidence that demolishes some key aspects of the "Big Bang" theory and the supposed age of the Universe.
No. They refuse to accept it because the evidence for it isn't clear. It certainly has not been "verified 4 times". In 2005 data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey was checked for evidence of periodicity and none was found (Tang and Zang, 2005). Also check the review of Bajan et al from this year: "in our opinion the existence of redshift periodicity among galaxies is not well established.".
You are simply cherry-picking scraps of ideas.
An off that non-reflecting water more moisture evaporates which falls as more snow on the land, making more ice. Thus the negative feedback keeps the water level the same or makes it even less.
No, it doesn't, because it is too cold. Remember that water produced by ice melting is at the same temperature as the ice - you need to study the principles of latent heat. You aren't talking sense in terms of physics here.
Stop conjecturing about how things were ages ago when nobody was around to actually OBSSERVE what really happened. How does anyone know that it was that volcanic eruption and not one of many other causes that made a mini ice age?
Because the records of what happened are clear, and well understood. The eruption produced substantial quantities of ash and sulphates which blocked sunlight. This is all in the records of sedimentary deposits. It isn't controversial!
The humbling fact is that we humans simply cannot predict the future accurately, and that includes the weather, for tomorrow, the next year or the next millennium.
Sorry, but I am afraid we can. Predicting the weather for tomorrow is not the same as predicting long-term climate.
Also, we aren't talking about accuracy - but about trends.
Just because the majority of any group, including scientists, believes something is true, does not make it so.
Yes, I am afraid it does. That is the way science works, and has always worked.
Just because you, in a minority, believe differently, does not make what you believe right.
You can't have things both ways - try and provide me with evidence that positive feedback doesn't happen, but when I show you are wrong, you try and dismiss the subject altogether.
I am sorry for you. You are trying to hide behind so much false science and personal belief. The truth is hard to face, I know, but we have to face it.