Your willingness to debate is appreciated, but your claim that my argument is a straw man is a complete misreading of what I said. I said, and I stand by this, that a single press release, even from a reputable research like Battisti is not sufficient to "debunk" a (presently) accepted scientific theory.
As for westward intensification of a subtropical gyre, I'm well aware of how that works, and I made no suggestion that the subtropical gyre would be shut off. However, the heat content of the Gulf Stream and where that heat is delivered to the atmosphere can be vastly modified by changes in thermohaline circulation. Battisti is claiming, and as I said before, many other findings presently don't agree with him, that the heat delivered by the atmosphere is more important for Europe's climate. If that claim is corroborated, the paper can provide countervailing evidence that may eventually result in people changing their minds one way or another about a theory. I'm not in climate science the moment, so I have no real way of evaluating the merits of Battisti's claim. His work is welcome, and describes perfectly the now-discarded soot hypothesis that you and others keep going on about.
I also did not say that all temperature change is anthropogenic, and I don't claim that now. But the climate science community has accepted that anthropogenic carbon input has caused enough changes in the carbon content of the atmospheric (notwithstanding your claim about 95% natural carbon content, delta-carbon is what's under discussion) to provoke changes in climate that can accelerate the process of Earth's climate going from one metastable to another. And I might add, we have no idea how well our civilization will fare under this latter metatstable state, something that those paleoclimatology arguments tend to leave out. We are pushing a big lever of climate - you can deny that as long as you like, but the odds that the rest of the scientific community will come around to agreeing with you are getting longer by the minute.
who is the author of this article? (Gregg Keizer), and what is his slant/bias?
I think this is the wrong question. The question is why did he get a byline for a "story" that consisted of reading a CERT press release, counting up all the crazy crap applications listed in the Windows or not-Windows category, and writing the number. Again, I'd be highly surprised if an MS PR person didn't "suggest" to this reporter and editor that they report on CERT's list according to this angle. And who the hell is the editor that published this under the headline "Linux/Unix Vulnerabilities Outnumber Microsoft Windows' 3 To 1"? Even a brief glance at the list would tell you that this list does not refer to vulnerabilities in the OS itself, or even the core products like Exchange. I'm not old enough to know if this kind of nonsense always passed for journalism, but it sure stinks now.
I'd hardly call this "debunking". I happen to know David Battisti, and I think he's a good and credible atmospheric circulation researcher. On the other hand, plenty of other good and credible oceanographic circulation researchers I know would refute this, and have done extensive work on the amount of heat transported by the Gulf Stream, and its role in sustaining thermohaline circulation and associated climate effects. A press release about paper maketh noth scientific truth.
Not only that, but even if the Gulf Stream is not the primary deliverer of heat to northern Europe, the 20-line press release you cited does not claim that Europe's climate will not be affected by a change in thermohaline circulation.
So if you're searching for a thin vine to cling to the increasingly untenable view that carbon-loading of the atmosphere is not a major problem, better not grab too hard on this one.
This is the kind of article that drives me nuts. I'm not criticizing you for linking to it - the core idea is an interesting subject, but the article itself is totally unresearched, and the only person quoted is "MSRC program manager Stephen Toulouse". It's a great example of The Submarine.
If memory serves, this article came out in the middle of a big Microsoft push to improve its image on security, so you can bet that Mr. Toulouse and his flak (PR dude) were working hard to get stories placed in papers about Microsoft's improvements in security processes. If you look at what is contained in the article, it quite evidently relays what a Microsoft PR dude told the reporter, plus the MS contacts the flak told the reporter to call (provided that all the quotes from Toulouse didn't come from a press release).
It also includes a number of unchecked "Microsoft says" statements. For example:
Researchers have complained in the past that Microsoft routinely ignores threat warnings, which contributes to the underlying distrust, but Toulouse said the company's mission is to improve its relationship and "create a community" with grey hat hackers.
How hard would it be for a tech news reporter to call 3 or 4 security researchers and ask them their opinion of this statement? Even if they never called back the article could then have said "Bruce Schneier did return our calls".
Or:
Once the patches are shipped, the MSRC goes into "watch mode" to monitor the way researchers release their own alerts. In most cases, those alerts are accompanied by proof-of-concept code, a practice that researchers favor but Microsoft frowns on.
Again, a few quotes from security researchers regarding proof-of-concepts and quality of patches would balance Microsoft's assertions, and would make this piece into something more than transmission of choice quotes from Microsoft. Anyway, that's enough of that rant - just wanted to point out an egregious example of story-seeding.
Absolutely true. Frankly, I think this is one of the biggest challenges for government in the next century.
Free-market absolutists may think they're going to "drown government in the bathtub", but the rest of us know that grow or shrink, government is here to stay, so we'd better get cracking on figuring out how it can go about modernizing itself and shedding obsolete or useless rules and management structures. In the private sector, one of the good side effects of acquisitions is that it provides a golden opportunity to clear out some dead weight and rewrite the rules.
LANL is a poster child for the incredible accretion of useless rules through lack of strong management. A big part of this is that the original bomb effort was never conceived as the creation of a scientific institute. To my mind the quickest way to fix it would be to have the DoD absorb the "stockpile stewardship" and other classified components, and turn the remainder into a separate scientific institute, which could continue to be underwritten by DoE. That transition would provide a great opportunity to completely restructure the organization, and eliminate most of the security requirements that are used to justify paperwork. It should look for top-quality managers to run it, and provide ample room in that process for input from researchers (although I'm not sure I'd take researchers word on management as law - most of the researchers I've known aren't that good as managers).
Hell, Los Alamos, NM wouldn't make all that bad a place for a university...
My post absolutely was speculative, but my point is that Google started out by offering the net-savvy sleek non-intrusive text-only ads that are only there when you want them, and is now going to have to resort to more conventional methods like animated images and video (rather like TV). To me that's emblematic of a shift from "upmarket" (discriminating users) to "downmarket" (newbies). Maybe I'm wrong and newbies like text ads more than image-based ones, but AOL (ISP to the masses) sure doesn't seem to think so, and based on the stories coming out, Google is only doing because AOL demands it. The broader point was that Google can no longer work exclusively on hotshot new technologies - to fend of Microsoft, they're being obligated to go with more established ones (graphic ads, AOL's dwindling but still sizeable subscriber base).
Financially, it's a good move. They get a lot of traffic, it's good money.
From the FT article, it's more defensive than offensive. They could not lose AOL's 10% of their advertising revenue, especially not if that meant giving Microsoft a chance to establish a real presence in the ad-driven content market.
They also have gotten themselves into some deal with AOL-TW to "jointly develop" video search with Google. That kind of "joint development" is a real loser for Google - they could just as easily build video search themselves, and own it without any encumbrance from AOL. Not only that, but they have been obligated to shift advertising back to graphic-driven ads, which strikes me a distinct downmarket move. Google's users up to now were the educated and the internet-savvy. AOL's subscribers are, en masse, essentially the opposite.
Just goes to show you - even if AOL is the dying beast it appears to be, it still commands a lot of clout. And it's a milestone in the maturation of a company when it becomes constrained by the extent of the current market. Google basically can't just leave AOL behind, so it's forced to slow down and wait for it. AOL seems to have cleaned up on this one.
Multiple open standards are good as long as they're really open. That way, the market can sort out which one is really best, and it will end up as the reference standard. But Microsoft isn't really looking like they're making OpenXML truly open. And that's the worst of all worlds.
Hopefully one of the things that comes out of this is that large IT-consumers, like the State of Massachusetts, will learn how the process of developing and open standard really works, and what's open and what's not open. Hopefully this will obligate many or most vendors to support open standards.
You make some good points based on present considerations, but I think you're overlooking some longer term considerations.
People go on and on about how the "hydrogen economy" is going to save us, when in reality it does just about nothing to reduce our dependancy on fossil fuels.
Hydrogen (or even better, electricity) abstracts the initial production source of energy away from its consumption, so that replacing a fossil fuel energy source with a non-fossil fuel one only affects power plants and not all drivers. I say electricity is better because we have all that infrastructure in place, and we use it to power nearly everything we do besides transportation and heat production. Our energy distribution systems are still written in assembly for "efficiency". It's time to upgrade them to managed code.
Everyone "knows" that recycling is good for the environment, but after doing a little digging one can find out that sending out recycling trucks to pick up the recycling requires more energy than simply using new resources.
I'd question (in a friendly way) how uniformly this is true, and I'd really like to know where you learned this - I suspect the source may have a little FUDliness to it. But even accepting it, this is only true with current production system and current availability of resources. There's no question that once you've mixed all the materials that make something together in a landfill it's harder to get them back out than if you didn't throw them in together. There's also no question that there's a finite amount of say, bauxite, kicking around the Earth's crust. Creating a recycling infrastructure may entail upfront costs, but over the longer term, it keeps from having to find out when AvailableBauxite !~= Infinity.
Yes, there are a number of misleading claims about environmental friendliness, like whether Ultra Downy in a little bottle is really more environmentally friendly than Regular Downy in a big bottle. But the bottom line is that the process of adoption of actual environmentally friendly engineering (as BMW appears to be doing) is a large step in the right direction, even if its initial output may require a few steps backwards.
This is quite a good point, but I think there's also a different angle. Part of this is the natural outgrowth of the opening of markets (political changes) and outsourcing opportunities (largely technological changes). All China had to do to start moving up the value chain was sustain a decent number of good universities, and they were bound to see pretty substantial growth. I'd look for Brazil, South Africa, and Poland to make strides in this direction soon, too. I do agree with you that the fact that China has seen explosive growth in sectors like IT supplies has a lot to do with the fact that the government just decides what's going to happen and then makes it happen, without any messy democratic process or protection of human rights or the environment.
The US, on the other hand has systematically been underfunding the entrance of its technology pipeline. Universities drive technology growth, as does having a sizeable proportion of the workforce well educated. That we've let a college education become so expensive and at the same time ramped down public funding for a lot of research programs is a terrible mistake, and one of the worst effects to come out of this country's 20 year anti-tax mania. The rest of the world was bound to start catching up, but we didn't have to slow ourselves down as they did it. The US is still the biggest driver of science and technology innovation (China still doesn't do much to foster creative thinking), but look for that to change within a decade.
Amen! My brother and I have been working for about 2 1/2 years to get Pittsburgh to deploy a region-wide trip planner, and it's like pulling teeth. Your comments exactly describe our main local transit authority's trip planner. And getting together all of the various and sundry government organizations we need onboard has been backbreaking. And it's even harder to get them to think past the kind of procurement models they're used to and towards hosted/shared/ASP models. I wouldn't yet bet much money that Google can actually get agencies other than San Franscisco, Seattle, and maybe New York or Chicago on board. Most others simply have not made information presenation a priority.
One of the principal problems that underlies this is the following: in all but a few cities, transit agencies' managers do not take transit regularly! (kudos to those that do). DC's WMATA just had an Washington Post expose revealing the extravagant amount of money the agency spends on employee parking spaces. So the agencies don't instinctively understand that a trip planner is essentially worthless unless it's very, very, usable. Transit itself faces that chicken-and-egg problem in all but the biggest cities - in order to make it worth using, you need to invest in it, and in order to get support for investing in it, it needs to be usable. I'm a little nervous about Google imminent domination as a source of public information like transit schedules (I'd rather see open standards and multiple providers), but I hope that their ability to make widely deployed and seriously usable transit systems can actually help break transit out of that bind.
What kind of "history" is this? If Microsoft "invented" XML over HTTP, what the hell is SOAP, and how come it didn't originate with Microsoft? And did Microsoft invent remote function invocation as well?
Look, XMLHttpRequest may be the most elegant implementation of that concept to date, but that's not the same as inventing the idea of web pages with subcomponents that load data using Javascript, nor of using XML as a data transfer mechanism. That's what AJAX is.
As far as I can tell, the only new things about AJAX are:
a) the buzzword
b) the fact that a quorum of people are willing to go to the effort to make apps full of widgets load data without a page refresh
You might want to add a little more required reading to that history lesson.
I'd mod you up, but I prefer to reply instead. This is very insightful statement, and I believe it's the basis of Jakob Nielsen's complaint. Web-as-content really is distinct from web-as-application. The web browser works beautifully for web-as-content, but is rather limited for web-as-application.
Now it happens that a web browser also has two excellent characteristics as a application deployment platform. One is that it is pre-installed nearly everywhere, so as long as you can get a coherent set of standards for what it provides and how it works, it's an outstanding application deployer. It basically enforces separation of UI from logic. The second is that the web was built on an asynchronous protocol, which builds in excellent network resilience. Applications that go over a public network like the Internet must fundamentally assume that the network is of variable and unknown quality, and work gracefully in those scenarios.
AJAX is basically a hack to get the content-oriented browser to work like a proper GUI toolkit. Why should a developer work with the document (note content orientation) object model, when every sane GUI toolkit builds on windows, widgets and event listeners? AJAX is necessary largely because of MS' squashing of Java as a viable network application platform, and because the Java-makers (i.e. Sun) have never prioritized geting a really performant, usable UI toolkit for Java into widespread use. In short, what you really want to build internet apps is a sandboxed deployment environment you know will be on every machine, and that defaults to asynchronous communication for network use. AJAX basically gets you there, but it ain't pretty. My hope is that once people get used to using Internet apps there will be momentum for getting that kind deployment environment on every machine.
PS: I know Javaheads are going to flame me for that one, but compare the comfort of using your average Java app to anything written in QT/KDE,GTK, MFC,.NET, etc. Why the hell is Swing only starting to work at the level that an app like Eclipse does, when QT widgets have worked smoothly and quickly?
I'm definitely not expert enough on oil economics to say whether Hubbert was right in all the specifics, but the point remains that he was blazingly prescient in suggesting that there was a peak at all. As for oil fields being workable at $30-$50/hr as opposed to $30/day, I go back to what I said - I have no doubt that the runup in oil prices will make people look again at fields that they thought weren't economically viable, and I'd guess that that includes the Oklahoma fields you mention. Nonetheless, it's clear that the cost of production in your field went up enough for the oil folks to get out, and the energy companies were operating in the Middle East well before the 1970's, so I'm suspicious that it was just a sudden move to find lower wages. The bottom line is that all fields contain a limited amount of oil, and it is not remade in those fields at anywhere near the rate the we consume it. So whether the "used up all the oil" event is 10 years away or 50 years away (you can guess which timeline I think is more likely), it's gonna happen, we can't just ignore that because we may find additional oil resources now.
From the article you cited:
The problem for future climate is that the cooling aerosols only stay in the air for a few days, whereas the warming gases stick around for decades or centuries. [And I'd again point out that nobody really knows how the gases get out. For example is the ocean a sink of carbon or a source, and under what conditions might it change from one ot the other?] So while the cooling effect is unlikely to grow much, the gases will accumulate and have an ever-bigger effect on global temperature.
The effect of soot and reflective particulates is one of the many loops that have delayed rises in global temperatures, but the bottom line is that those delays (the other major ones being the large freshwater heat sinks at the poles, and the ocean itself) do not last as long as greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and so far we know very little about getting those gases out on a large scale.
Also from the article:
The world, says Andreae, is "driving the climate with one foot on the gas and the other on the brake. When the brake comes off, it makes a hell of a difference".
The point is that atmospheric carbon content is clearly one of the massive levers of climate, and the kind of emissions we're putting out now correspond to blindly pulling it as hard as we can. Climate change might not be so bad, but it might be like a worldwide Hurricane Katrina. Which is why we need to do something - even if it's a flawed something - to prepare and not nothing.
Note to Clint Slashbotwood - we're not cavemen! Yes, a classic Slashbot tough guy - doesn't like that we have to take the precaution of testing medicines before he takes them, or cars before he drives. Our ancestors would have been pretty goddamn psyched if they could be sure that what they ate wasn't gonna give them tuberculosis, even if that did make them "pantywaists".
Let's just deploy this untested application as it is, cause neither we nor our users would want to be accused of being pantywaists. You're brilliant, dude. Remind me to hire you to manage FEMA.
Well, you certainly have read more widely on peak oil than I have. And I certainly wouldn't put it past the global energy cartel we have to fix prices at well above market value. But isn't your experience with the Oklahoma fields consistent with the notion of fields getting exhausted to the point where the price of the oil goes up dramatically? And Hubbert was pretty spot-on in his prediction of when US production would begin to decline. I don't doubt that there is a price point at which it becomes reasonable to look afresh at almost any field or at technologies like oil sands. Also, quite aside from the climate change aspects of burning coal and oil, there are real questions about its impact on people's health.
One that human activity has very little impact on, or if any, has been slowing the rise thus far by emitting clouds of smoke thus keeping temperatures artificially low.
This argument runs completely counter to the accepted understanding of the greenhouse effect. The greenhouse effect works because at the visible and ultraviolet wavelengths where you find the vast bulk of the energy in incoming sunlight, the reflectivity of atmospheric carbon dioxide is much less than it is at infrared wavelengths where most of the energy of reflected light is found. So if soot and smoke are doing a good enough job blocking incoming energy to affect temperature, they are doing an even better job at retaining that energy.
I appreciate the paleological perspective, but do recall that the paleological climate was vastly different than the climate in which Homo Sapiens has ever lived, and very likely not the kind of climate on which Homo Sapiens has constructed its not-particularly-robust industrialized existence. As you doubtless know, there was a time when the atmosphere had vastly more carbon in it, and nobody really knows how all that carbon got out of the atmosphere in the first place (did it "crash out" or "fade out"?), and we have no idea what kind of event that would involve, or if we'd enjoy it much.
So, while we are undoubtably warming, it also undoubtably is something that would happen Homo Sapiens or not.
I would not argue that we are the only source of climate change, but that by not dealing with emissions we are effectively pushing the accelerator while driving down a mountainside. If we interpret the paleoclimatology graph you cite as evidence of some sort of cyclical nature to long-term climate variation - bearing in mind that this is there is no known dynamical reason why the earth's long-term climate must behave cyclically, then we are already headed into higher temperatures anyway and are woefully underprepared for that as it is, so vastly accelerating the process by rapidly injecting a large carbon load into the atmosphere seems extremely unwise. Think about ~.1-.4C change over 2 decades vs 5C in 1M years on the paleoclimate graph. That could be noise, but it could also well be the start of a very fast trend.
The climate does change on its own (we need to prepare for that anyway), but we also really gotta stop these practices that muck around with the system so extensively. I'd sure rather prepare in an alarmist mentality and be chagrined to find out that I was blowing things out of proportion than vice-versa. Kyoto may or may not have been the right way about reducing emissions, but the fat lotta nothing that's being done now is surely worse, not only because of the potentially grave consequences, but because the people who own the next round of energy source will make planetloads of money. Not to mention that many of the emissions-rich sources we use for carbon are nearing depletion. When you hear oil geologists and execs speak seriously and on the record about Peak Oil, you know things are serious. Which is why this notion that we should wait to make any economic sacrifices until we know for sure that we are the prime cause of climate change strikes me as incredibly risky. For example, most of our agricultural supply relies on the large temperate regions made possible by cold global temperatures, as do our fisheries. I'm all for a scientific debate, but let's do something in the meantime.
At one point in time (1975) we were told we should consider spreading soot all over the artic to increase heat retention. This "technological" fix was designed to decrease the dangers of "global cooling".
Who mods this kind of comment "Informative"? Can you imagine if someone suggested reviving one of the more asinine suggestions for processor design in the 70s? What happened to "Nerds" reading enough comments to learn from informed commenters like other "Nerds" that work in climate science? Every story that's posted on Slashdot seems to draw these kind of "oh yeah, well scientists thought something different before, so they must be wrong now too" kind of comments. Yes, we are in an area of very rapid learning and advancement in climate sciences, and not everything about climate change is totally hashed out. However, do please note before posting scientific muddle like this that we are now 30 decades and a world-changing computer revolution in communications, processing and automation away from 1975.
It's been well established for 2+ decades that the primary mechanisms for altering the Gulf Stream are a) change in heat entering and leaving the water (a la greenhouse effect), and change in North Atlantic salinity (with the obvious source of that change been the fresh water stored as ice on top of the Arctic ocean. And the "Little Ice Age" in question has quite clearly been described as a lowering of temperatures across the northern parts of the American and European continents, and the shutoff of the Gulf Stream is clearly identified as the driver of this change. What's unclear about that?
This is not unusual -- if you know everything works with OS Y version X, then you simply do not upgrade just because X+1 comes out without doing massive testing.
That's very true, and I'd add a caveat. Tthe amount of testing and overall rate of change from X to X+1 should be proportional to how critical the resource is that the server provides. If it's some kind of departmental database where being down for a day doesn't really affect too much (as one might guess on a single-proc SLES box running MySQL), then one can upgrade with some basic testing. If, on the other hand, the server runs the organization's primary customer-facing resource, then it needs to be tested "massively" as you say. And that brings the "criticality of patches" issue back into focus - if patches really are critical, then the protocols for testing patches should be in line with the initial OS testing, and the rate of critical patch releases doesn't particularly Microsoft at the moment - at present it seems like kind of a problem for both OSes, and can be a compelling case for going with something like Solaris (depending on its patch release rate, of course).
All that is basically to say I agree with your assessment that it comes down to the merits of the configuration control policy. There are some cases where that the particular policy used makes sense, and plenty where it's overly rigid.
Excellent point. In fact, I'd be awfully surprised if some of these experienced Linux admins didn't point that out. Even if there hadn't been these glibc issues, I'd be awfully tempted to upgrade to a newer OS to avoid the potential for having that same problem with other components. Nor are such compatibility traps between a particular platform (e.g. OS + database) and an application particularly specific to Linux, in fact SAP and Peoplesoft installations are legendary for this sort of cross-application compatibility trap. I'd be very curious to hear what the admins' reaction to the scenario was.
This study covers an area where Microsoft has invested substantial effort in making a specific set of migration pathways. Microsoft's design method has always been to streamline certain task pathways, and (by design and/or side effect) make work outside those pathways much more difficult. For example, trying to get data out of Exchange and into any database other than SQL server requires a very complex set of programming with CDO and other objects. The effort to get data out of a mail-storage system on Linux would pale in comparison, regardless of the RDBMS used. Another example in the migration area is legacy OSes. If a Microsoft operating system reaches its end of life, not only are there no further patches or upgrades issued by the vendor, but it cannot be patched by anyone outside of Microsoft. So how about a test of modifying an application on an NT4 server versus RedHat 6?
The findings of this study do seem legitimate, and its credibility is certainly enhanced by the author's willingness to open its methodology to scrutiny. And unsurprisingly, Microsoft asked for a study in an area where they already thought their product was better. I'd call it one state of a large ensemble.
There are two big problems with this. One is that in many regions of North America (i.e., the Southwest and the West Coast, except in Washington and Oregon right on the coast) there is much less fresh water than there is demand for it. Hence the competing demands on the Colorado's water.
The second is that because all of our water is drained into one single sewer system, your house's urine and excrement are joined by toothpaste, laundry detergent, motor oil, street runoff (every wonder what happens to the stuff that was shed as your tires wore down?), industrial solvents, agricultural chemicals, etc. At that point it must be thoroughly cleaned by a sewage treatment plant just to be re-released into the water table, where dilution and filtration through soil tends to remove residual pollutants. That's a lot of work to get the water back to being potable. And if the water happens to escape out of the sewer system before it is cleaned all of the nasties in it are dumped into rivers, streams, and the water table and eventually make their way back into the things that draw from that ground water. in older US cities, a storm will flush all the excess water out of the sewer system untreated (so-called "combined sewage outfalls"). So while "wasting" water does not destroy it, it makes the supply of clean water smaller and the amount of mixed-dirty water waiting to be cleaned (or to escape out of the sewer system) bigger. In countries where sewer systems do not adequately clean water and/or many residents aren't on sewer lines, cities very quickly contaminate their water supplies - this is part of the reason why so many kids die annually from diarrhea.
One of the best things we could do to conserve water would be to separate and reclaim household grey water without combining it with nastier pollutants (although there's some unlovely stuff in laundry soap). A few places are starting to do this with filtration systems in the basement, but doing it on a larger scale would help alleviate the water crunch in a lot of places.
The XML support is cool, and definitely will gain traction. If nothing else, think storing (?:.*)Office documents directly in database and searching via XQuery...
If it's not a pricey boondoggle, this Information Virtualization Server could be pretty clever, a sort of auto-Hibernate + web services kind of platform. I'm hopeful that JBoss can respond faily easily to this - at first blush, it's basically just a question of figuring out how to comprehensively auto-update the mappings for database objects, as well as dealing with transactions and performance issues.
The nice thing about IBM's version is that they can control the database-Virtualization Server communication, so they can really optimize perfomance out of the box.
It looks like we may finally be reaching some meaningful convergence of object models and storage models.
The problem with music is that the valuation is essentially subjective - there's no objective value on a song other than how people perceive it. Consumers are will to pay for something of "value", but when they think an item is not valuable, it takes a really low price to make them consider it. This is why the "price signaling" Joel mentions is so important in this case - the item's price has to be pushed up, or it will surely sink very low.
The record industry (and analogously the publishing industry) has always had non-commodity profit margins because of vertical integration: production --> promotion & marketing --> distribution.
Their dominance of these three was largely built on the high startup costs of all these industries. This meant the larger recording companies could basically corral artists into accepting disadvantageous terms in production in order to get access to the other two parts of the business. In both production and distribution, software and the Internet have caused those startup costs to plummet, and real competition threatens to break out.
Apple is the most prominent of many to figure this out, and they may just have enough clout to take a nice bite out of the recording companies' distribution business. This could well hasten the de-integration of the business and commoditize the whole lot. That's why the record companies are going bonkers over p2p and iTunes - if these succeed, they have only marketing and promotion to sell, and while they definitely have credible experience at that, they're by no means the only fish in that pond. If I were a marketing company with any experince in the entertainment industry I'd be calling Apple (and Google and Microsoft) now, lining up to get in on the new opportunities when record companies' vertical integration comes apart. Of course they may try to do like telcos (who have exaggerated profit margins for exactly the same reason) and try to get the (so-called free market) Congress to intervene to preserve their dated business model.
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Your willingness to debate is appreciated, but your claim that my argument is a straw man is a complete misreading of what I said. I said, and I stand by this, that a single press release, even from a reputable research like Battisti is not sufficient to "debunk" a (presently) accepted scientific theory.
As for westward intensification of a subtropical gyre, I'm well aware of how that works, and I made no suggestion that the subtropical gyre would be shut off. However, the heat content of the Gulf Stream and where that heat is delivered to the atmosphere can be vastly modified by changes in thermohaline circulation. Battisti is claiming, and as I said before, many other findings presently don't agree with him, that the heat delivered by the atmosphere is more important for Europe's climate. If that claim is corroborated, the paper can provide countervailing evidence that may eventually result in people changing their minds one way or another about a theory. I'm not in climate science the moment, so I have no real way of evaluating the merits of Battisti's claim. His work is welcome, and describes perfectly the now-discarded soot hypothesis that you and others keep going on about.
I also did not say that all temperature change is anthropogenic, and I don't claim that now. But the climate science community has accepted that anthropogenic carbon input has caused enough changes in the carbon content of the atmospheric (notwithstanding your claim about 95% natural carbon content, delta-carbon is what's under discussion) to provoke changes in climate that can accelerate the process of Earth's climate going from one metastable to another. And I might add, we have no idea how well our civilization will fare under this latter metatstable state, something that those paleoclimatology arguments tend to leave out. We are pushing a big lever of climate - you can deny that as long as you like, but the odds that the rest of the scientific community will come around to agreeing with you are getting longer by the minute.
I'd hardly call this "debunking". I happen to know David Battisti, and I think he's a good and credible atmospheric circulation researcher. On the other hand, plenty of other good and credible oceanographic circulation researchers I know would refute this, and have done extensive work on the amount of heat transported by the Gulf Stream, and its role in sustaining thermohaline circulation and associated climate effects. A press release about paper maketh noth scientific truth.
Not only that, but even if the Gulf Stream is not the primary deliverer of heat to northern Europe, the 20-line press release you cited does not claim that Europe's climate will not be affected by a change in thermohaline circulation.
So if you're searching for a thin vine to cling to the increasingly untenable view that carbon-loading of the atmosphere is not a major problem, better not grab too hard on this one.
Fortunately that has left us the opportunity to invent "foxen" now. As in:
"Check out those foxen. I'll bet at least one of them's a model."
If memory serves, this article came out in the middle of a big Microsoft push to improve its image on security, so you can bet that Mr. Toulouse and his flak (PR dude) were working hard to get stories placed in papers about Microsoft's improvements in security processes. If you look at what is contained in the article, it quite evidently relays what a Microsoft PR dude told the reporter, plus the MS contacts the flak told the reporter to call (provided that all the quotes from Toulouse didn't come from a press release).
It also includes a number of unchecked "Microsoft says" statements. For example:
How hard would it be for a tech news reporter to call 3 or 4 security researchers and ask them their opinion of this statement? Even if they never called back the article could then have said "Bruce Schneier did return our calls".
Or:Again, a few quotes from security researchers regarding proof-of-concepts and quality of patches would balance Microsoft's assertions, and would make this piece into something more than transmission of choice quotes from Microsoft. Anyway, that's enough of that rant - just wanted to point out an egregious example of story-seeding.
Absolutely true. Frankly, I think this is one of the biggest challenges for government in the next century.
Free-market absolutists may think they're going to "drown government in the bathtub", but the rest of us know that grow or shrink, government is here to stay, so we'd better get cracking on figuring out how it can go about modernizing itself and shedding obsolete or useless rules and management structures. In the private sector, one of the good side effects of acquisitions is that it provides a golden opportunity to clear out some dead weight and rewrite the rules.
LANL is a poster child for the incredible accretion of useless rules through lack of strong management. A big part of this is that the original bomb effort was never conceived as the creation of a scientific institute. To my mind the quickest way to fix it would be to have the DoD absorb the "stockpile stewardship" and other classified components, and turn the remainder into a separate scientific institute, which could continue to be underwritten by DoE. That transition would provide a great opportunity to completely restructure the organization, and eliminate most of the security requirements that are used to justify paperwork. It should look for top-quality managers to run it, and provide ample room in that process for input from researchers (although I'm not sure I'd take researchers word on management as law - most of the researchers I've known aren't that good as managers).
Hell, Los Alamos, NM wouldn't make all that bad a place for a university...
Easy with the invective there, amigo.
As for Google users being more educated and internet-savvy is from Slashdot, and is not intended as condescending.
My post absolutely was speculative, but my point is that Google started out by offering the net-savvy sleek non-intrusive text-only ads that are only there when you want them, and is now going to have to resort to more conventional methods like animated images and video (rather like TV). To me that's emblematic of a shift from "upmarket" (discriminating users) to "downmarket" (newbies). Maybe I'm wrong and newbies like text ads more than image-based ones, but AOL (ISP to the masses) sure doesn't seem to think so, and based on the stories coming out, Google is only doing because AOL demands it. The broader point was that Google can no longer work exclusively on hotshot new technologies - to fend of Microsoft, they're being obligated to go with more established ones (graphic ads, AOL's dwindling but still sizeable subscriber base).
From the FT article, it's more defensive than offensive. They could not lose AOL's 10% of their advertising revenue, especially not if that meant giving Microsoft a chance to establish a real presence in the ad-driven content market.
They also have gotten themselves into some deal with AOL-TW to "jointly develop" video search with Google. That kind of "joint development" is a real loser for Google - they could just as easily build video search themselves, and own it without any encumbrance from AOL. Not only that, but they have been obligated to shift advertising back to graphic-driven ads, which strikes me a distinct downmarket move. Google's users up to now were the educated and the internet-savvy. AOL's subscribers are, en masse, essentially the opposite.
Just goes to show you - even if AOL is the dying beast it appears to be, it still commands a lot of clout. And it's a milestone in the maturation of a company when it becomes constrained by the extent of the current market. Google basically can't just leave AOL behind, so it's forced to slow down and wait for it. AOL seems to have cleaned up on this one.
Multiple open standards are good as long as they're really open. That way, the market can sort out which one is really best, and it will end up as the reference standard. But Microsoft isn't really looking like they're making OpenXML truly open. And that's the worst of all worlds.
Hopefully one of the things that comes out of this is that large IT-consumers, like the State of Massachusetts, will learn how the process of developing and open standard really works, and what's open and what's not open. Hopefully this will obligate many or most vendors to support open standards.
Hydrogen (or even better, electricity) abstracts the initial production source of energy away from its consumption, so that replacing a fossil fuel energy source with a non-fossil fuel one only affects power plants and not all drivers. I say electricity is better because we have all that infrastructure in place, and we use it to power nearly everything we do besides transportation and heat production. Our energy distribution systems are still written in assembly for "efficiency". It's time to upgrade them to managed code.
I'd question (in a friendly way) how uniformly this is true, and I'd really like to know where you learned this - I suspect the source may have a little FUDliness to it. But even accepting it, this is only true with current production system and current availability of resources. There's no question that once you've mixed all the materials that make something together in a landfill it's harder to get them back out than if you didn't throw them in together. There's also no question that there's a finite amount of say, bauxite, kicking around the Earth's crust. Creating a recycling infrastructure may entail upfront costs, but over the longer term, it keeps from having to find out when AvailableBauxite !~= Infinity.
Yes, there are a number of misleading claims about environmental friendliness, like whether Ultra Downy in a little bottle is really more environmentally friendly than Regular Downy in a big bottle. But the bottom line is that the process of adoption of actual environmentally friendly engineering (as BMW appears to be doing) is a large step in the right direction, even if its initial output may require a few steps backwards.
This is quite a good point, but I think there's also a different angle. Part of this is the natural outgrowth of the opening of markets (political changes) and outsourcing opportunities (largely technological changes). All China had to do to start moving up the value chain was sustain a decent number of good universities, and they were bound to see pretty substantial growth. I'd look for Brazil, South Africa, and Poland to make strides in this direction soon, too. I do agree with you that the fact that China has seen explosive growth in sectors like IT supplies has a lot to do with the fact that the government just decides what's going to happen and then makes it happen, without any messy democratic process or protection of human rights or the environment.
The US, on the other hand has systematically been underfunding the entrance of its technology pipeline. Universities drive technology growth, as does having a sizeable proportion of the workforce well educated. That we've let a college education become so expensive and at the same time ramped down public funding for a lot of research programs is a terrible mistake, and one of the worst effects to come out of this country's 20 year anti-tax mania. The rest of the world was bound to start catching up, but we didn't have to slow ourselves down as they did it. The US is still the biggest driver of science and technology innovation (China still doesn't do much to foster creative thinking), but look for that to change within a decade.
Amen! My brother and I have been working for about 2 1/2 years to get Pittsburgh to deploy a region-wide trip planner, and it's like pulling teeth. Your comments exactly describe our main local transit authority's trip planner. And getting together all of the various and sundry government organizations we need onboard has been backbreaking. And it's even harder to get them to think past the kind of procurement models they're used to and towards hosted/shared/ASP models. I wouldn't yet bet much money that Google can actually get agencies other than San Franscisco, Seattle, and maybe New York or Chicago on board. Most others simply have not made information presenation a priority.
One of the principal problems that underlies this is the following: in all but a few cities, transit agencies' managers do not take transit regularly! (kudos to those that do). DC's WMATA just had an Washington Post expose revealing the extravagant amount of money the agency spends on employee parking spaces. So the agencies don't instinctively understand that a trip planner is essentially worthless unless it's very, very, usable. Transit itself faces that chicken-and-egg problem in all but the biggest cities - in order to make it worth using, you need to invest in it, and in order to get support for investing in it, it needs to be usable. I'm a little nervous about Google imminent domination as a source of public information like transit schedules (I'd rather see open standards and multiple providers), but I hope that their ability to make widely deployed and seriously usable transit systems can actually help break transit out of that bind.
What kind of "history" is this? If Microsoft "invented" XML over HTTP, what the hell is SOAP, and how come it didn't originate with Microsoft? And did Microsoft invent remote function invocation as well?
Look, XMLHttpRequest may be the most elegant implementation of that concept to date, but that's not the same as inventing the idea of web pages with subcomponents that load data using Javascript, nor of using XML as a data transfer mechanism. That's what AJAX is.
As far as I can tell, the only new things about AJAX are:
a) the buzzword
b) the fact that a quorum of people are willing to go to the effort to make apps full of widgets load data without a page refresh
You might want to add a little more required reading to that history lesson.
I'd mod you up, but I prefer to reply instead. This is very insightful statement, and I believe it's the basis of Jakob Nielsen's complaint. Web-as-content really is distinct from web-as-application. The web browser works beautifully for web-as-content, but is rather limited for web-as-application.
Now it happens that a web browser also has two excellent characteristics as a application deployment platform. One is that it is pre-installed nearly everywhere, so as long as you can get a coherent set of standards for what it provides and how it works, it's an outstanding application deployer. It basically enforces separation of UI from logic. The second is that the web was built on an asynchronous protocol, which builds in excellent network resilience. Applications that go over a public network like the Internet must fundamentally assume that the network is of variable and unknown quality, and work gracefully in those scenarios.
AJAX is basically a hack to get the content-oriented browser to work like a proper GUI toolkit. Why should a developer work with the document (note content orientation) object model, when every sane GUI toolkit builds on windows, widgets and event listeners? AJAX is necessary largely because of MS' squashing of Java as a viable network application platform, and because the Java-makers (i.e. Sun) have never prioritized geting a really performant, usable UI toolkit for Java into widespread use. In short, what you really want to build internet apps is a sandboxed deployment environment you know will be on every machine, and that defaults to asynchronous communication for network use. AJAX basically gets you there, but it ain't pretty. My hope is that once people get used to using Internet apps there will be momentum for getting that kind deployment environment on every machine.
PS: I know Javaheads are going to flame me for that one, but compare the comfort of using your average Java app to anything written in QT/KDE,GTK, MFC,.NET, etc. Why the hell is Swing only starting to work at the level that an app like Eclipse does, when QT widgets have worked smoothly and quickly?
From the article you cited:
The effect of soot and reflective particulates is one of the many loops that have delayed rises in global temperatures, but the bottom line is that those delays (the other major ones being the large freshwater heat sinks at the poles, and the ocean itself) do not last as long as greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and so far we know very little about getting those gases out on a large scale.
Also from the article:The point is that atmospheric carbon content is clearly one of the massive levers of climate, and the kind of emissions we're putting out now correspond to blindly pulling it as hard as we can. Climate change might not be so bad, but it might be like a worldwide Hurricane Katrina. Which is why we need to do something - even if it's a flawed something - to prepare and not nothing.
Note to Clint Slashbotwood - we're not cavemen! Yes, a classic Slashbot tough guy - doesn't like that we have to take the precaution of testing medicines before he takes them, or cars before he drives. Our ancestors would have been pretty goddamn psyched if they could be sure that what they ate wasn't gonna give them tuberculosis, even if that did make them "pantywaists".
Let's just deploy this untested application as it is, cause neither we nor our users would want to be accused of being pantywaists. You're brilliant, dude. Remind me to hire you to manage FEMA.
This argument runs completely counter to the accepted understanding of the greenhouse effect. The greenhouse effect works because at the visible and ultraviolet wavelengths where you find the vast bulk of the energy in incoming sunlight, the reflectivity of atmospheric carbon dioxide is much less than it is at infrared wavelengths where most of the energy of reflected light is found. So if soot and smoke are doing a good enough job blocking incoming energy to affect temperature, they are doing an even better job at retaining that energy.
I would not argue that we are the only source of climate change, but that by not dealing with emissions we are effectively pushing the accelerator while driving down a mountainside. If we interpret the paleoclimatology graph you cite as evidence of some sort of cyclical nature to long-term climate variation - bearing in mind that this is there is no known dynamical reason why the earth's long-term climate must behave cyclically, then we are already headed into higher temperatures anyway and are woefully underprepared for that as it is, so vastly accelerating the process by rapidly injecting a large carbon load into the atmosphere seems extremely unwise. Think about ~.1-.4C change over 2 decades vs 5C in 1M years on the paleoclimate graph. That could be noise, but it could also well be the start of a very fast trend.
The climate does change on its own (we need to prepare for that anyway), but we also really gotta stop these practices that muck around with the system so extensively. I'd sure rather prepare in an alarmist mentality and be chagrined to find out that I was blowing things out of proportion than vice-versa. Kyoto may or may not have been the right way about reducing emissions, but the fat lotta nothing that's being done now is surely worse, not only because of the potentially grave consequences, but because the people who own the next round of energy source will make planetloads of money. Not to mention that many of the emissions-rich sources we use for carbon are nearing depletion. When you hear oil geologists and execs speak seriously and on the record about Peak Oil, you know things are serious. Which is why this notion that we should wait to make any economic sacrifices until we know for sure that we are the prime cause of climate change strikes me as incredibly risky. For example, most of our agricultural supply relies on the large temperate regions made possible by cold global temperatures, as do our fisheries. I'm all for a scientific debate, but let's do something in the meantime.
It's been well established for 2+ decades that the primary mechanisms for altering the Gulf Stream are a) change in heat entering and leaving the water (a la greenhouse effect), and change in North Atlantic salinity (with the obvious source of that change been the fresh water stored as ice on top of the Arctic ocean. And the "Little Ice Age" in question has quite clearly been described as a lowering of temperatures across the northern parts of the American and European continents, and the shutoff of the Gulf Stream is clearly identified as the driver of this change. What's unclear about that?
All that is basically to say I agree with your assessment that it comes down to the merits of the configuration control policy. There are some cases where that the particular policy used makes sense, and plenty where it's overly rigid.
Excellent point. In fact, I'd be awfully surprised if some of these experienced Linux admins didn't point that out. Even if there hadn't been these glibc issues, I'd be awfully tempted to upgrade to a newer OS to avoid the potential for having that same problem with other components. Nor are such compatibility traps between a particular platform (e.g. OS + database) and an application particularly specific to Linux, in fact SAP and Peoplesoft installations are legendary for this sort of cross-application compatibility trap. I'd be very curious to hear what the admins' reaction to the scenario was.
This study covers an area where Microsoft has invested substantial effort in making a specific set of migration pathways. Microsoft's design method has always been to streamline certain task pathways, and (by design and/or side effect) make work outside those pathways much more difficult. For example, trying to get data out of Exchange and into any database other than SQL server requires a very complex set of programming with CDO and other objects. The effort to get data out of a mail-storage system on Linux would pale in comparison, regardless of the RDBMS used. Another example in the migration area is legacy OSes. If a Microsoft operating system reaches its end of life, not only are there no further patches or upgrades issued by the vendor, but it cannot be patched by anyone outside of Microsoft. So how about a test of modifying an application on an NT4 server versus RedHat 6?
The findings of this study do seem legitimate, and its credibility is certainly enhanced by the author's willingness to open its methodology to scrutiny. And unsurprisingly, Microsoft asked for a study in an area where they already thought their product was better. I'd call it one state of a large ensemble.
There are two big problems with this. One is that in many regions of North America (i.e., the Southwest and the West Coast, except in Washington and Oregon right on the coast) there is much less fresh water than there is demand for it. Hence the competing demands on the Colorado's water.
The second is that because all of our water is drained into one single sewer system, your house's urine and excrement are joined by toothpaste, laundry detergent, motor oil, street runoff (every wonder what happens to the stuff that was shed as your tires wore down?), industrial solvents, agricultural chemicals, etc. At that point it must be thoroughly cleaned by a sewage treatment plant just to be re-released into the water table, where dilution and filtration through soil tends to remove residual pollutants. That's a lot of work to get the water back to being potable. And if the water happens to escape out of the sewer system before it is cleaned all of the nasties in it are dumped into rivers, streams, and the water table and eventually make their way back into the things that draw from that ground water. in older US cities, a storm will flush all the excess water out of the sewer system untreated (so-called "combined sewage outfalls"). So while "wasting" water does not destroy it, it makes the supply of clean water smaller and the amount of mixed-dirty water waiting to be cleaned (or to escape out of the sewer system) bigger. In countries where sewer systems do not adequately clean water and/or many residents aren't on sewer lines, cities very quickly contaminate their water supplies - this is part of the reason why so many kids die annually from diarrhea.
One of the best things we could do to conserve water would be to separate and reclaim household grey water without combining it with nastier pollutants (although there's some unlovely stuff in laundry soap). A few places are starting to do this with filtration systems in the basement, but doing it on a larger scale would help alleviate the water crunch in a lot of places.
The XML support is cool, and definitely will gain traction. If nothing else, think storing (?:.*)Office documents directly in database and searching via XQuery...
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There is a very interesting product in the pipeline:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1889012,00.a
If it's not a pricey boondoggle, this Information Virtualization Server could be pretty clever, a sort of auto-Hibernate + web services kind of platform. I'm hopeful that JBoss can respond faily easily to this - at first blush, it's basically just a question of figuring out how to comprehensively auto-update the mappings for database objects, as well as dealing with transactions and performance issues.
The nice thing about IBM's version is that they can control the database-Virtualization Server communication, so they can really optimize perfomance out of the box.
It looks like we may finally be reaching some meaningful convergence of object models and storage models.
The problem with music is that the valuation is essentially subjective - there's no objective value on a song other than how people perceive it. Consumers are will to pay for something of "value", but when they think an item is not valuable, it takes a really low price to make them consider it. This is why the "price signaling" Joel mentions is so important in this case - the item's price has to be pushed up, or it will surely sink very low.
The record industry (and analogously the publishing industry) has always had non-commodity profit margins because of vertical integration:
production --> promotion & marketing --> distribution.
Their dominance of these three was largely built on the high startup costs of all these industries. This meant the larger recording companies could basically corral artists into accepting disadvantageous terms in production in order to get access to the other two parts of the business. In both production and distribution, software and the Internet have caused those startup costs to plummet, and real competition threatens to break out.
Apple is the most prominent of many to figure this out, and they may just have enough clout to take a nice bite out of the recording companies' distribution business. This could well hasten the de-integration of the business and commoditize the whole lot. That's why the record companies are going bonkers over p2p and iTunes - if these succeed, they have only marketing and promotion to sell, and while they definitely have credible experience at that, they're by no means the only fish in that pond. If I were a marketing company with any experince in the entertainment industry I'd be calling Apple (and Google and Microsoft) now, lining up to get in on the new opportunities when record companies' vertical integration comes apart. Of course they may try to do like telcos (who have exaggerated profit margins for exactly the same reason) and try to get the (so-called free market) Congress to intervene to preserve their dated business model.