Re:Essbase and PSoft Nvision support?
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Office Delayed, Too
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I'd also add that Excel is objectively a rather good piece of software. It rarely gets the kind of data corruption you see all over the rest of Office, and is usable by just about anyone from a total novice to a hardcore scientist - I've done a decent amount of physics in Excel. And its notions of data connectivity (and PivotTables) were something Microsoft pretty much introduced to the market. OOCalc is a pale shadow of this. For Pete's sake, you can't even have different data series in different formats (line vs bar vs point), or if you can my hours of searching haven't yielded it. OODraw, on the other hand, is really rather good.
Plenty of MS apps suck goats, but give Excel its due.
At it's core, the anthropogenic climate change hypothesis has relied on CO2 emissions as being causative. You have to be skeptical of a claim that an incredibly complex atmosephere which we can't fully model is being driven by variations of a single gas. A gas whose concentration is less than a tenth of one percent.
And likewise.... you have to be skeptical of a theory that says that a force so small we cannot analogize it to any other known force can shape the cosmos. We can hardly predict gravity's effect on spacetime, how can we accept that cosmic microwave background is evidence for the big bang?
Why is the fact that some coupling constant for carbon content's effects on global tempeature is large (on the scale you're choosing) a cause in itself for doubt? There have been plenty of studies on the sensitivity of earth's climate to carbon, and they all indicate that carbon is a primary forcing element (as opposed to water vapor which due to its short residence time is reactive, which cuts out a lot of the brouhaha about atmospheric aeresols). When Mann's initial "hockey stick" results came out, part of the criticism was that nobody had quantified whether external forcing could have caused the results he described. That has been done, and nothing else can come even close to the rapidity of the temperature change that's observed. I'm not necessarily a supporter of the hockey stick, but you're painting with an awfully broad brush here.
You should be skeptical of climatology in general given that it's even more removed from model failure than meteorolgy.
Again, the brush is way too broad here. Can you cite some scientific literature documenting that this problem is persistent and not a specific defect of Mann's model? Look, the models are certainly not yet exact in their weather predictions, particularly over decadal scales as opposted to centuries, but they are not, as the "skeptics" claim, inaccurate over 100 years and global spatial scales. They all say the similar things: carbon content will drive overall warming, the effect will be stronger at the Arctic than Antartica, melting sea ice will cause sea level to rise, and nobody's entirely clear on how temporary and persistent weather patterns will work.
And yet the Bush administration's political hacks continue to manipulate language in scientific reports to dilute the reports and say that science is incapable of making any predictions. How exactly is that defensible?
If you think of the names behind other DB products: MySQL, Access, Oracle, MSSQL, etc... (with MSSQL being a possible exception) the names themselves introduce no pronounciation, word association or sylabic issues.
Actually Microsoft has done even better than this. MSSQL is called Microsoft SQL Server. I can't count the number of times I've heard people say "we run SQL" meaning they use MS SQL Server. Microsoft won the naming game by a mile, and Postgres (which I run) has been determined to lose it for a long time.
My guess is that Google sees document storage as a beachhead for online word processing, etc. Convincing a business to adopt that kind of stuff will be very hard, because they have to change how their processes work. But if you're an indivudal logged into GMail, and you have a Word doc (or even better, a PDF) or some photos you want to edit and send back to someone, and a link saying "Edit this document" comes up, you might well want to do that. And because they're on Google's servers, it doesn't cannibalize their ad-based business model, and better still, it does cannibalize Microsoft's business model. Basically, by starting with documents, they can move piecemeal into application hosting without losing many options. Then if businesses are interested, they sell ad-free versions, hosted or non-hosted.
HMMM. The exact opposite of FUD. Who's getting paid here?
This is perhaps a bit blunt but basically true.
These kinds of "articles" are generally an uncritical examination of the "new features" some marketing blurb has put out, combined with a demo or demo version. For example, any tech journalist should know or know who to ask to find out that *nix has had its drivers in userland for ages, and that fact should merit a remark in the article (e.g. "userland drivers are state of the art for most other operating systems"). I'm not asking for a full-blown comparison to Linux, but that's just basic understanding of OSes.
Mod parent up and then do it again. I'm hardly an MS fanboy, and I think their tools have a long way to go in terms of openness and in enterprise systems in general. Few things are as aggravating to deal with as IIS for web development. But for small-scale data work, you can't beat Office.
1) The ease of use and development of a databse similar to Access is created. I've used a lot of databases, and none of match up feature-wise to Access. Yes, I know, there's more powerful databases out there, and ones that can do X. But none out there use the native Operating Systems widget set to build applications.
Access is at once an outstanding RAD tool and a decent, if rather limited database engine. Getting started in Access, you can have a usable database app for your little workgroup in hours, even if you know very little about programming or databases. Access' "continuous view" forms are one of the easiest ways I've ever come across to build usable parent form-subform UI's. I really don't understand why.NET does ship with a widget that does this. Sure you can build one from scratch, but why not just put the continuous view form in there for use? Access' reporting engine is still more powerful than, say, JasperReports. And Access is still the E-L-T tool of choice in a lot of workplaces - you can connect to anything you can see with an ODBC driver, and put that data into anything else you can see with an ODBC driver. I've played with nearly every Access replacement app every dreamed up for Linux and they all suck eggs, OpenOffice Base included.
2) The interoperability of the various Office programs is unmatched. The ability to use a custom Database built in Access to pull information from the corporate server, which then uses Word to display reports, and Excel to put the information into usable formats is currently unmatched, and a bigger "unnecessary feature" than OpenSource developers give it credit for.
Only sorta agreed. There are infuriating parts of the way interop stuff works in Office, like the fact that PowerPoint embeds all kinds of crazy objects instead of just taking data. But yes, overall, you can still get your tasks done in a pretty straightforward way.
You're basically claiming that FDR willfully allowed the Japanese to succeed in bombing Pearl Harbor to galvanize the US into entering the war. Frankly, that seems quite plausible, if cynical in viewpoint. Given that American entry into that armageddon did not just put a quick end to it, it's fair to argue that there may have been some kind of Wilsonian adventurism in FDR's stance.
But I hope you're not offering an equivalence between Bush's governing capacity and FDR's capacity, because those are very different. And it's hard to argue that FDR was a pretty swell figure in US history.
But U.S. workers have to some extent let them get away with it.... no one's pushing back and saying, "Enough!" And, of course, the vast majority of CEOs and upper-level managers are either too stupid to recognize what's happening or they just don't care as long as they get their fat bonus.
I know/.ers are generally pretty anti-union, but as a note, this is what unions are supposed to do. Unfortunately, unions have not figured out how to modernize the mentality they acquired fighting for every inch on the factory floor, and still think in terms of work rules, hierarchies and fighting "management". If they can translate that to a work situation where you want to be able to take those extra pressures but then always be able use them to bargain for stuff, that's pretty appealing deal. Frankly, even as a well-treated IT worker, if the unions (or some similar professional organization) mounted a strong fight for guaranteed flexibility of time and healthcare that wasn't tied to my job, I'd consider supporting them.
The other huge problem is political. Part of the reason this kind of privacy invasion exists on the internet is that people WANT it. They are concerned about the use of internet for activities like planning attacks, child pornography, various methods of theft and extortion, etc. I think it's fair to be concerned about how easy it is for your 14-year-old to get into doing webcam sex shows, and to want some legal recourse that makes people think hard about being on either end of that transaction. And until you satisfy those kind of concerns, many, many people will trample on their own privacy rights to do what they think protects their families.
No matter what technical solution you come up with, people's willingness to participate en masse depends on a favorable legal climate for it. You need to have oversight built into the way your alternate/mesh/non-tiered network is operated, or various government entities will reactively come in and oversee if for you. That's what's happened on the internet at present, and we all know it ain't pretty.
The problems we have now: a) an overly draconian version of copyright protection is being used to justify intrusive privacy measures b) the abuse of 4th Amendment by technical means can only be resolved with a legal framework that covers when and how you can use technical means to gather information on someone (as per the 4th amendment). Otherwise you're always relying on someone's discretion as to when they cannot gather information. The issue is being framed the wrong way round in the national debate, and it is being mixed in with people's other concerns about the security of their families.
OK, I'll accept your point that in 100M years the lithospheric cycle could sequester a lot of that carbon back out of the atmosphere.
A couple points.
One is that the cycles in the Vostok data are O(100K) years long, which implies forcings (i.e. changes in atmospheric carbon content) that correspond to that timescale, basically meaning a low rate per unit time. We have changed the atmospheric carbon content over O(100) years. And we're clearly increasing that forcing - we are adding carbon faster each year. That implies a much stronger (or shorter timescale) forcing than whatever takes temperature down over 100K years. That's why 3 is much more likely than 1 or 2, at least over the next two centuries.
Second, let's say you're right, and over 100K years the temperature does go back down 8 degrees. That would mean that the intensity of the non-anthropogenic forcing over that timescale is the larger one - due, as you suggest to the kinds of processes that can sequester 4Tt in the lithosphere. At 100K years we may well have endured that damage that will happen, and thus not have mitigated any risks. Like we did with Katrina... not mitigate any risks. We survived. It sucked needlessly. As I say, I don't subscribe to the notion of a cataclysmic end to humanity due to climate change, but I do think it stands a good chance to prompt an awful lot of suffering. I continue to be baffled why a few taxes and some gov't investment in energy are such a bad thing as to warrant taking the kinds of risks posed by scenario 3.
The problem with moving to non-locked down hardware is two-fold:
1) You're playing Microsoft's game. As you and everyone else points out, Windows has driver support par excellence, and they've been working with and flogging these vendors for about 20 years, and have $40B cash to do it with. That's not a fight Apple's well poised to win.
2) Hardware margins are ridiculously (or in Slashdotese, rediculusly) low. Apple has built itself a solid niche brand with nice comfortable margins, and for growth has added a device that has close to sewed up the online music market. Why on earth would they want to cannibalize their upmarket brand when they've got great growth numbers elsewhere?
I don't know quite why Apple moved Macs to Intel. Perhaps they were worried that they were at the mercy of IBM, whereas with Intel they know the company can deliver volume and can't really lock them out (AMD would be happy to service that contract). But I'd be very surprised if they used it to get into the commodity hardware business.
You can take that to the bank. Why is it that this article only quotes one company's VP of marketing, and yet we're debating the premise that there's some wave of consolidation coming, and open source is not yet mature enough to be part of it - and oh, by the way, SAP is trying to sell some new consolidation platform. This is only news in that it's coverage of what line a company is pushing. It'd sure be nice to see some background reporting that establishes whether this claim is even reasonable, but the reporter probably isn't making enough money in this story for that.
Finally, the CO2 levels and temps in the Vostok data don't show the sort of correlation one would expect (at least, according to several papers I've read - maybe they were "cherry picked" by my search criteria? possibly) if Co2 were the only significant variable in the temp equation.
From what I know, this is a fair criticism of the Vostok data and its inferences - I've always been suspicious that the there's a lot of ceteris paribus necessary to have the temperature-driven istotope fractionation they measure at Vostok and elsewhere be a reliable estimate of global temperature, but whenever I protested I did always got detailed explanations of why it works, so maybe I just don't understand it well enough. If you've read other papers, I retract my cherry-picking comment, though you might want to pick a different pape to support that particular assertion.
As a secondary point, adding CO2 at a breakneck pace will certainly drive the climate in *some* direction faster than we would otherwise. That's pretty obvious. But will that make things more pleasant or less pleasant than the significant climate change we would have had *anyway*? No one knows. "Don't mess with that you might break it" is reliably good advice for a static system, but climate isn't static.
This is what seems so shortsighted to me. Looking at the Vostok data you cited, if we're at the top of those peaks, and adding CO2 increases temperature (which we believe, even if it's not the only factor controlling temperature), and if the magnitude of that forcing is much greater than that of other forcing factors (which we don't know for certain but is very plausible) then we're probably looking at a higher temperature state than the range the ice core data shows. And one of the things that seems very likely to happen (aside from less certain predictions like cahnges in weather patterns leading to droughts, etc) in a higher temperature climate is melting of polar ice caps and corresponding rise in sea level. And given the large and increasing fraction of the world's population that lives near the coast, that spells trouble for a lot of infrastructure. Not trouble like global nuclear war, but trouble like a lot of people losing a lot of property (even an orderly response to Katrina would have involved a lot of destruction). I agree that we are not in a position to predict that exactly, and due to the nonlinearity of the earth's climate, we may never be (nobody really understands turbulence, much less its cascade of energy across spatial scales). All of which takes this out of the realm of certainty and into the realm of risk management, and of course in that framework you generally balance the likelihood of the event with its severity. The likelihood of rising sea level is not know exactly, but given the emerging consensus of the climate community that our CO2 emissions are demonstrably a contributing factor to rising temperatures, that proposect can hardly be discounted.
So following on that, the question is how far do you go to mitigate the risk? I'd say where we disagree is on this: is it a good move to try to force the market off CO2-emitting energy before it might do it itself? As you know, my answer is a resounding yes. Were there an endless supply of oil, and if we did not have clear models of what a source-neutral (i.e. open standards) energy system could be like (hydrogen or electricity to transport, a variety of methods to "create"), I'd feel obligated to qualify that. But we are likely to run out of oil, and we have learned better ways to put infrastructures together since people first started using oil as fuel. The market progression and regulation/government intervention are both somewhat imprecise at getting an economy into a particular state. Regulation is probably the blunter instrument of the two, but it does almost always work at getting you going in a particular direction (don't get me wrong, I'm not universally pro-regulation, but I disp
The Vostok data you cite is indeed interesting, particularly this quote in the discussion:
The strong correlation between atmospheric greenhouse-gas concentrations and Antarctic temperature, previously described by Barnola et al. (1987), is confirmed by the extension of the Vostok ice-core record (Petit et al. 1999). From the extended Vostok record, Petit et al. (1999) concluded that present-day atmospheric burdens of carbon dioxide and methane seem to have been unprecedented during the past 420,000 years.
Which doesn't exactly square with:
If you find a web site that shows the CO2 levels and temp data side by side, you might be surprised that changes in CO2 levels doesn't reliably lead temperature changes.
I'll stick with the opinion of the folks at Laboratoire de Glaciogie et Géophysique de l'Environnement, thanks. Also note that this graph and the paper itself are diagnostic - there is no mechanism postulated for the observed changes in global climate or in CO2 content of the atmosphere cited as "closely correlated" to temperature. Yet we know unquestionably that emissions are a mechanism for changing the CO2 content of the atmosphere. And allow me to take this opportunity to express my intense frustration at another trend - this is at least the 3rd time a/.er has attempted to "refute" emissions-driven climate change by cherry picking from a paper that supports the opposite conclusion. If you're going to get all snarky about science vs. "dramatics", you might do all of us a favor by reading the paper in full.
Once we have something *better* than oil, transition will happen quickly enough, just as it did with wood and with coal
You did hit the key phrase, which is quickly enough. That could happen by itself, as you suggest. Or, based on the total wealth invested in petroleum-based infrastructure (compare that to the amount invested in wood or coal infrastructure), you might reasonably conclude that it could take a while. Recall that there's a time lag to realize an ROI on an a capital investment such as a new car, new heating system for an office building, replacing a fleet of airplanes, etc., which will tend to delay reductions in emissions. Hence the need for something to incetivate people.
Neither of us is ruling out the possibility that the market could direct people away from emissions-causing energy infrastructure. The difference is that you're willing to take that possibility to the bank, and us "dramatists" are proposing attempting to mitigate that by doing something about it. Hope is not a plan.
The data clearly shows pretty dramatic temperature swings in a 100 k year cycle, with the plunge back to normal ice age temperatures happening very quickly.
I wouldn't mind seeing those data, but I've never heard a climate scientist characterize the climate as having distinct periodicity, nor say that ice ages are "due". That's where "metastable" comes in - it's in one state (e.g. one pole substantially icier than another) until something happens and it moves to another state.
"Running out of oil." suggests that one day the pumps will all run dry, and chaos will ensue.
Others reacted that way to my phrase, so perhaps I should choose a different one. My point is that a rapidly tightening oil market is not good news - viz the economic reaction to the price spike after Katrina. One of the reasons we're in Iraq is to make sure that China or someone else doesn't gain solid control over that oil supply and use it as strategic leverage against us and our economy. Oil shortages are real live risk, such that the US government actually makes plans to address them. People like me don't propose an edict that everyone has to change cars - we propose incentives for them to do it (e.g. sane CAFE standards, emission taxes). Nobody obligates you to change cars - you just do it if you don't want to pay more. Yes the government imposes that as a law, but it also imposes restrictions on the handling of hazardous chemicals as law, with the same goal: mitigate risks.
What I keep point out is that this is a textbook example of triumphalism:
If gas really does become expensive long term (i.e., if current prices are here to stay), everything that needs to change will change, because no one likes paying more than they have to. And a bunch of clever people will work out incredibly smart solutions once that becomes profitable, and people will adopt them because they're cheaper solutions.
This is what happens if absolutely everything goes right. The discoveries happen at the right times (you can't will a scientific discovery to happen at a particular moment, you merely increase the chances of it happening), the capital is there and interested in commercializing the clever discoveries, etc. You don't have to think lots of things actually will go wrong to recognize that there's a substantive chance they will go wrong, and take steps to mitigate them, namely:
a) actively incentivate (positively and negatively) people to start investing in less petroleum-dependent infrastructure
b) actively pay for, on a serious scale, the discoveries the clever people have to make to migrate off that infrastructure. You can complain about "dramatics" all you like, but there's nothing complex about this. Recognize risk, take reasonable steps to mitigate it. Nothing more, nothing less. No command economies, no edicts. The dramatics charge is a dodge to avoid discussing whether the measures on the table, or others similar in nature are really that intrusive, or whether you simply don't like paying to mitigate risks.
This is clearly false. There is no such thing as a stable climate. The climate is always changing, with or without CO2 emissions.
This combines a misstatement with a misrepresentation of my argument. I specifically did not say that our emissions were the only source of climate change. They are not, and nobody in climate sciences says this. However, the earth does seem to move into "metastable" states, and our current carbon-loading trends clearly alters those states. That's the consensus of the community, both in that our emissions are affecting global temperatures and that these effects provide a clear path for dramatically changing global climate. So the fact that the earth's climate is not a totally stable system does not refute the point that we are causing changes in climate .
This is clearly false. We can never "run out of oil". We may reach a point where people choose cheaper ways to power their cars and heat their homes, because oil is scarce and no longer economical for those purposes.
And how exactly is this different from "running out of oil"? If there's not enough for us to continue to use it in our infrastructure, we have to change that infrastructure. My point was that that's an awful big job. Not only that but if you look at the economics of resource scarcity, there is a much greater chance of price shocks as the market tightens. Unpredictable price shocks are far worse for businesses and consumers than predictable price increases. You appear to be suggesting that there's a greater supply of oil than 20-50 years worth. Perhaps this is true - the extent of the world's oil supply (and likewise demand for the stuff, I might add) are clearly not precisely known. But that's hardly the same as saying "we know we have plenty", because we don't know that.
I go back to my basic point. The strategy climate-change-minimizers propose is "let's figure it out later, when we know it's a really big problem." And there's no getting around the fact that's basically punting on the risk of something bad happening. Katrina might well have missed New Orleans. In fact that was a pretty good probability that it would not devastate New Orleans. But fate pulled out the short straw, and we weren't prepared for that severe a scenario. So you don't have to think that the risk you're guarding against is all that probable to still want to guard against it.
If you want to make a scientific argument, try using science, not drama, as your premise.
If you have a valid counterargument, refrain from using ad-hominem invective as your method. And you might do well to listen to the consensus of people in the field.
Look, if you combine the two unassailable points that 1) injecting vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere poses a substantial risk of climate change (any "scientist" here care to deny the greenhouse effect?) and 2) we are nearly certain to run out of oil in the next 20-100 years
it makes absolutely no sense to sit on our thumbs and wait until we're really fscked to work on changing our energy infrastructure. It takes a *little while* to replace every single petroleum-fueled combustion engine car on the planet, so why would we want to do it when our backs are against the wall instead of taking steps now to deal with it?
OK, now cue the standard whining about how Kyoto will "destroy" the economy (as if the GOP's liared goons like George Deutsch haven't done enough bludgeoning of our scientific competitiveness)... except the American economy has done quite nicely during periods of much heavier taxation, thank you very much. By way of comparison to a true command economy, nobody's seriously proposing that the government outlaw gasoline cars, or even restrict the sale of any of them, or produce its own vehicles. All we're talking about here are a) some taxes on carbon emissions and b) serious investment in alternate energy (order of billions, not 10M somebody sneezed onto the budget and couldn't be bothered to wipe off).
You know you're living in dark days when common-sense statements like "we should take some steps to fix this real risk" are shouted down by cries of "No! Let's do nothing instead and wait until the problem is really a crisis!"
While I agree there's plenty of vapor around this stuff, there are some real functioning, if limited AJAX office suites out now (e.g. Zoho Writer). Not saying it will out and out obsolete Vista, but there really are some changes about to happen.
Yeah, especially since JBoss is still not profitable. We all love open source, but people have to get paid too. Frankly, this seems like the strongest negotiating position Fleury's ever going to find himself in.
Yes, but Oracle has the same problem that Microsoft has - one that IBM does not have. When IBM embraced Linux, it had a software business, but that was dwarfed by their hardware and (even at the outset of it's Linux shift) consulting businesses.
Oracle knows it need to make this shift, but its consulting businesses are not as well developed as IBM's, and it does not have the deep research arm that IBM does to create and sell things like "organizational optimization software" or UIMA. Oracle's core product is their database, and that very product is threatened by commoditization. Sure it's still several years out, but OSS databases (particularly Postgres/"Sungres"/EnterpriseDB) are marching forward there. The support market can indeed be profitable, since it's mostly a form of insurance. But Oracle will have to figure out how to take the punch from dropping its addiction to its core database revenue stream. Same way Microsoft has to kick its addiction to Windows and Office, or it will get eaten when Google or someone else finally manages to get a viable browser office suite (also a year or two out and moving steadily). My guess is that this is part defensive and part branding move to show customers and investors that Oracle is not ignoring that trend.
Active JBoss development may well die in the process, but if Oracle isn't addressing the people who download and use JBoss, someone will pick up where they left off.
I would second that. OS programming may sound glamorous, but unless you think you're gonna become the next Sun kernel architect, you might want to think carefully about jumping into full-day OS coding. Spending a full day whacking away in C at buggy filesystem code might not be as great a transition as you're thinking. You can certainly get a better idea of whether you like it by doing some open-source work.
To my mind you have asked a lesser job question before a more important one. Rather than looking at this job or that, you need to ask yourself what kind of job you most want to be in: what work do you actually want to do? How important are the coworkers, the pay, the flexibility, etc.? Asking and answering (to whatever extent you can) that question will put you further along than trying to compare facets of these two jobs. You're not cosmically obligated to do OS programming, or even programming at all just because you got a CS degree. You should do it if you think it's the job you want.
Since you sound like you're on the younger end of things, I'd think that doing interesting work might well rank about pay or telecommuting, especially if you don't have kids and/or a spouse. That's just me. But do spend some time thinking over the job you want - I really think it will pay off.
To be honest, this is an long-overdue idea. What an end user really wants is something like FreeNet (minus the creepy libertarian/spook overtones) where your data is transparently saved, unreconstructable except by you, to a whole raft of peers, with a full local copy that flushes out to the 'Net at the right times. It would be nice to have the whole OS whole OS hosted, but for the pressure that puts on having a reliable and fast internet connection.
The core technical idea of FreeNet is an excellent one, but people's interest in it has much less to do with liberty and freedom from censorship, and everything to do with robust access to data. Frankly I don't give a rip if my mom can see my bank number or even my cheesy love letters to my ex-girlfriend as long as I can relax and know that my data isn't a either a hard drive failure or a virus away from elimination or widespread dissemination to Russian teenagers who I do NOT want seeing either of the aformentioned items.
As for the article, about the only assertion one can find there is "compromization of userland matters too". Yup, it does.
It sounds like you're saying that Google's lack of a lock-in puts them in a much weaker position than Microsoft. Astute observation, though not exactly one expect from/.'s legions of open-source and openness fans. Astute, but I'm just not sure it's true.
All of what you mention is also true of Heinz Ketchup. Nonetheless, they have yet to have their business gutted by Safeway Catsup. As far as some new improved search coming out, that's certainly possible. Remember that Google would have to overlook those advances from research to startup to acquisition, and let the state of the art pass them by. Part of why MS missed Google's ascent was that they were pretty sure they'd sewed the search business up, thanks to having this incredible "why I'll just use Microsoft _____ to do that" mentality. Google could certainly make that mistake, but it's not a foregone conclusion that they will.
Hmmm.. I can't say I disagree that the potential is there. I probably could have taken our 10-person biotech to the Linux desktop but for a couple factors: 1) Our CEO is an early adopter, and wants all the features she knows in Outlook, plus things like compatibility with Treo's. Linux is a year or two behind on that.
2) Our main database is built on Access (against Postgres). As a longtime small business database developer, I can tell you that there really isn't an Access-killer out there yet, and Access as a starter database product is incredibly useful. OOCalc is also distinctly less mature than Excel (which, IHMO is by MS' best product, and a groundbreaker to boot). We're scaling well past Access size now, and I'll have a choice of platforms for my clients, but it's awfully hard to kick that
3) A Windows domain to handle logon is still a fair sight easier to set up than a full Kerberos/NIS/other *nix authentication scheme. I hope Novell will step in here, as the benefits of having a truly open standards-based login system are substantial.
You are spot-on that it will take specialists, and in particular it takes systems and network administrators. They're there, but the pipelines for Windows admins are still much fuller. If I were starting a business with none of these requirements pre-existing, I could well have chosen to go Linux. And I agree with you that there will be a decent number of SMB's who take advantage of Vista's launch to do just that - esp. in Europe, where you have additional resentment of Microsoft.
And certainly among home users, Goobuntu could get a lot of traction quickly if it brought a starter PC down to $300-$500 w/ monitor and shipped with a comfortable setup for browsing the web via Google's services.
I'll officially apologize on the record for any of the times I've invoked catastrophic destruction scenarios like a million Katrinas. However, I think that your take is a bit blasee, for the following reasons.
1) Your argument that CO2 levels were 10 times higher in the Silurain period doesn't square with the recent finding that carbon levels are higher than they've been in the last 650 Million years. I'd also ask how thorough a global sampling we have of carbon levels in the Silurian period - we've got a pretty good mesh these days. I honestly don't know enough about the Silurian era to evaluate either claim, but there's something substantial to be reconciled there. 2) Not only have we reached levels of CO2 that are near paleological levels, but we are still increasing the rate at which we add CO2 to the atmosphere, with no real moves to change this rate. Following this pattern, it won't take us all that long to reach the levels you describe.
2) The kind of changes in climate predicted by these kinds of changes in CO2 (e.g. present era -> Silurian type world climate) were historically accompanied by vast die-offs. The fact that humans might manage to initiate such die-offs because we couldn't be bothered to change is a deeply wasteful approach to the world. Yes, climate may change anyway, but I'd argue that having it be with our knowledge is a very different story.
3) The Silurian period also did not have a large human people with deeply fixed infrastructure. Barring questions of weather events like hurricanes, if we get anywhere near the 20-80 feet of sea level rise predicted for the next century, there will be a huge drain on world resources as we figure out how to relocate populations back from the shore. Even a cursory examination of building in response to sea level shows how hard it is to persuade people to move structures they've built back off the coast. In the US this could mean either building seawalls and dikes around thousands of miles of coast, or paying reparations to people whose houses are damaged by rising water. Either way, it's an enormous undertaking, and one that can potentially be accompanied by a vast amount of human misery.
I don't think humanity will be wiped out, and I'm hopeful that we can perhaps offer people serious assistance in dealing with the results changed weather patterns, such as droughts and freezes. But I'd call being simply "not worried" very, very naive. And realistically, I just don't see that many reasons not to act: there's a pretty good change we'll run out of the most convenient fossil fuels in the next 50-80 years, so we're pretty much due for a change in energy infrastructure anyway. If countries like China could develop a roaring, world-leading economy in-spite of being ruled under a fully commanded economy for a decent fraction of this period, market economies can handle carbon taxes and regulations on a limited scale, particularly if they're aimed at drive future innovation.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd also add that Excel is objectively a rather good piece of software. It rarely gets the kind of data corruption you see all over the rest of Office, and is usable by just about anyone from a total novice to a hardcore scientist - I've done a decent amount of physics in Excel. And its notions of data connectivity (and PivotTables) were something Microsoft pretty much introduced to the market. OOCalc is a pale shadow of this. For Pete's sake, you can't even have different data series in different formats (line vs bar vs point), or if you can my hours of searching haven't yielded it. OODraw, on the other hand, is really rather good.
Plenty of MS apps suck goats, but give Excel its due.
And likewise.... you have to be skeptical of a theory that says that a force so small we cannot analogize it to any other known force can shape the cosmos. We can hardly predict gravity's effect on spacetime, how can we accept that cosmic microwave background is evidence for the big bang?
Why is the fact that some coupling constant for carbon content's effects on global tempeature is large (on the scale you're choosing) a cause in itself for doubt? There have been plenty of studies on the sensitivity of earth's climate to carbon, and they all indicate that carbon is a primary forcing element (as opposed to water vapor which due to its short residence time is reactive, which cuts out a lot of the brouhaha about atmospheric aeresols). When Mann's initial "hockey stick" results came out, part of the criticism was that nobody had quantified whether external forcing could have caused the results he described. That has been done, and nothing else can come even close to the rapidity of the temperature change that's observed. I'm not necessarily a supporter of the hockey stick, but you're painting with an awfully broad brush here.
Again, the brush is way too broad here. Can you cite some scientific literature documenting that this problem is persistent and not a specific defect of Mann's model? Look, the models are certainly not yet exact in their weather predictions, particularly over decadal scales as opposted to centuries, but they are not, as the "skeptics" claim, inaccurate over 100 years and global spatial scales. They all say the similar things: carbon content will drive overall warming, the effect will be stronger at the Arctic than Antartica, melting sea ice will cause sea level to rise, and nobody's entirely clear on how temporary and persistent weather patterns will work.
And yet the Bush administration's political hacks continue to manipulate language in scientific reports to dilute the reports and say that science is incapable of making any predictions. How exactly is that defensible?
My guess is that Google sees document storage as a beachhead for online word processing, etc. Convincing a business to adopt that kind of stuff will be very hard, because they have to change how their processes work. But if you're an indivudal logged into GMail, and you have a Word doc (or even better, a PDF) or some photos you want to edit and send back to someone, and a link saying "Edit this document" comes up, you might well want to do that. And because they're on Google's servers, it doesn't cannibalize their ad-based business model, and better still, it does cannibalize Microsoft's business model. Basically, by starting with documents, they can move piecemeal into application hosting without losing many options. Then if businesses are interested, they sell ad-free versions, hosted or non-hosted.
These kinds of "articles" are generally an uncritical examination of the "new features" some marketing blurb has put out, combined with a demo or demo version. For example, any tech journalist should know or know who to ask to find out that *nix has had its drivers in userland for ages, and that fact should merit a remark in the article (e.g. "userland drivers are state of the art for most other operating systems"). I'm not asking for a full-blown comparison to Linux, but that's just basic understanding of OSes.
Access is at once an outstanding RAD tool and a decent, if rather limited database engine. Getting started in Access, you can have a usable database app for your little workgroup in hours, even if you know very little about programming or databases. Access' "continuous view" forms are one of the easiest ways I've ever come across to build usable parent form-subform UI's. I really don't understand why
Only sorta agreed. There are infuriating parts of the way interop stuff works in Office, like the fact that PowerPoint embeds all kinds of crazy objects instead of just taking data. But yes, overall, you can still get your tasks done in a pretty straightforward way.
You're basically claiming that FDR willfully allowed the Japanese to succeed in bombing Pearl Harbor to galvanize the US into entering the war. Frankly, that seems quite plausible, if cynical in viewpoint. Given that American entry into that armageddon did not just put a quick end to it, it's fair to argue that there may have been some kind of Wilsonian adventurism in FDR's stance.
But I hope you're not offering an equivalence between Bush's governing capacity and FDR's capacity, because those are very different. And it's hard to argue that FDR was a pretty swell figure in US history.
The other huge problem is political. Part of the reason this kind of privacy invasion exists on the internet is that people WANT it. They are concerned about the use of internet for activities like planning attacks, child pornography, various methods of theft and extortion, etc. I think it's fair to be concerned about how easy it is for your 14-year-old to get into doing webcam sex shows, and to want some legal recourse that makes people think hard about being on either end of that transaction. And until you satisfy those kind of concerns, many, many people will trample on their own privacy rights to do what they think protects their families.
No matter what technical solution you come up with, people's willingness to participate en masse depends on a favorable legal climate for it. You need to have oversight built into the way your alternate/mesh/non-tiered network is operated, or various government entities will reactively come in and oversee if for you. That's what's happened on the internet at present, and we all know it ain't pretty.
The problems we have now: a) an overly draconian version of copyright protection is being used to justify intrusive privacy measures
b) the abuse of 4th Amendment by technical means
can only be resolved with a legal framework that covers when and how you can use technical means to gather information on someone (as per the 4th amendment). Otherwise you're always relying on someone's discretion as to when they cannot gather information. The issue is being framed the wrong way round in the national debate, and it is being mixed in with people's other concerns about the security of their families.
OK, I'll accept your point that in 100M years the lithospheric cycle could sequester a lot of that carbon back out of the atmosphere.
A couple points.
One is that the cycles in the Vostok data are O(100K) years long, which implies forcings (i.e. changes in atmospheric carbon content) that correspond to that timescale, basically meaning a low rate per unit time. We have changed the atmospheric carbon content over O(100) years. And we're clearly increasing that forcing - we are adding carbon faster each year. That implies a much stronger (or shorter timescale) forcing than whatever takes temperature down over 100K years. That's why 3 is much more likely than 1 or 2, at least over the next two centuries.
Second, let's say you're right, and over 100K years the temperature does go back down 8 degrees. That would mean that the intensity of the non-anthropogenic forcing over that timescale is the larger one - due, as you suggest to the kinds of processes that can sequester 4Tt in the lithosphere. At 100K years we may well have endured that damage that will happen, and thus not have mitigated any risks. Like we did with Katrina... not mitigate any risks. We survived. It sucked needlessly. As I say, I don't subscribe to the notion of a cataclysmic end to humanity due to climate change, but I do think it stands a good chance to prompt an awful lot of suffering. I continue to be baffled why a few taxes and some gov't investment in energy are such a bad thing as to warrant taking the kinds of risks posed by scenario 3.
The problem with moving to non-locked down hardware is two-fold:
1) You're playing Microsoft's game. As you and everyone else points out, Windows has driver support par excellence, and they've been working with and flogging these vendors for about 20 years, and have $40B cash to do it with. That's not a fight Apple's well poised to win.
2) Hardware margins are ridiculously (or in Slashdotese, rediculusly) low. Apple has built itself a solid niche brand with nice comfortable margins, and for growth has added a device that has close to sewed up the online music market. Why on earth would they want to cannibalize their upmarket brand when they've got great growth numbers elsewhere?
I don't know quite why Apple moved Macs to Intel. Perhaps they were worried that they were at the mercy of IBM, whereas with Intel they know the company can deliver volume and can't really lock them out (AMD would be happy to service that contract). But I'd be very surprised if they used it to get into the commodity hardware business.
From what I know, this is a fair criticism of the Vostok data and its inferences - I've always been suspicious that the there's a lot of ceteris paribus necessary to have the temperature-driven istotope fractionation they measure at Vostok and elsewhere be a reliable estimate of global temperature, but whenever I protested I did always got detailed explanations of why it works, so maybe I just don't understand it well enough. If you've read other papers, I retract my cherry-picking comment, though you might want to pick a different pape to support that particular assertion.
This is what seems so shortsighted to me. Looking at the Vostok data you cited, if we're at the top of those peaks, and adding CO2 increases temperature (which we believe, even if it's not the only factor controlling temperature), and if the magnitude of that forcing is much greater than that of other forcing factors (which we don't know for certain but is very plausible) then we're probably looking at a higher temperature state than the range the ice core data shows. And one of the things that seems very likely to happen (aside from less certain predictions like cahnges in weather patterns leading to droughts, etc) in a higher temperature climate is melting of polar ice caps and corresponding rise in sea level. And given the large and increasing fraction of the world's population that lives near the coast, that spells trouble for a lot of infrastructure. Not trouble like global nuclear war, but trouble like a lot of people losing a lot of property (even an orderly response to Katrina would have involved a lot of destruction). I agree that we are not in a position to predict that exactly, and due to the nonlinearity of the earth's climate, we may never be (nobody really understands turbulence, much less its cascade of energy across spatial scales). All of which takes this out of the realm of certainty and into the realm of risk management, and of course in that framework you generally balance the likelihood of the event with its severity. The likelihood of rising sea level is not know exactly, but given the emerging consensus of the climate community that our CO2 emissions are demonstrably a contributing factor to rising temperatures, that proposect can hardly be discounted.
So following on that, the question is how far do you go to mitigate the risk? I'd say where we disagree is on this: is it a good move to try to force the market off CO2-emitting energy before it might do it itself? As you know, my answer is a resounding yes. Were there an endless supply of oil, and if we did not have clear models of what a source-neutral (i.e. open standards) energy system could be like (hydrogen or electricity to transport, a variety of methods to "create"), I'd feel obligated to qualify that. But we are likely to run out of oil, and we have learned better ways to put infrastructures together since people first started using oil as fuel. The market progression and regulation/government intervention are both somewhat imprecise at getting an economy into a particular state. Regulation is probably the blunter instrument of the two, but it does almost always work at getting you going in a particular direction (don't get me wrong, I'm not universally pro-regulation, but I disp
Which doesn't exactly square with:I'll stick with the opinion of the folks at Laboratoire de Glaciogie et Géophysique de l'Environnement, thanks. Also note that this graph and the paper itself are diagnostic - there is no mechanism postulated for the observed changes in global climate or in CO2 content of the atmosphere cited as "closely correlated" to temperature. Yet we know unquestionably that emissions are a mechanism for changing the CO2 content of the atmosphere. And allow me to take this opportunity to express my intense frustration at another trend - this is at least the 3rd time a
You did hit the key phrase, which is quickly enough. That could happen by itself, as you suggest. Or, based on the total wealth invested in petroleum-based infrastructure (compare that to the amount invested in wood or coal infrastructure), you might reasonably conclude that it could take a while. Recall that there's a time lag to realize an ROI on an a capital investment such as a new car, new heating system for an office building, replacing a fleet of airplanes, etc., which will tend to delay reductions in emissions. Hence the need for something to incetivate people.
Neither of us is ruling out the possibility that the market could direct people away from emissions-causing energy infrastructure. The difference is that you're willing to take that possibility to the bank, and us "dramatists" are proposing attempting to mitigate that by doing something about it. Hope is not a plan.
Others reacted that way to my phrase, so perhaps I should choose a different one. My point is that a rapidly tightening oil market is not good news - viz the economic reaction to the price spike after Katrina. One of the reasons we're in Iraq is to make sure that China or someone else doesn't gain solid control over that oil supply and use it as strategic leverage against us and our economy. Oil shortages are real live risk, such that the US government actually makes plans to address them. People like me don't propose an edict that everyone has to change cars - we propose incentives for them to do it (e.g. sane CAFE standards, emission taxes). Nobody obligates you to change cars - you just do it if you don't want to pay more. Yes the government imposes that as a law, but it also imposes restrictions on the handling of hazardous chemicals as law, with the same goal: mitigate risks.
What I keep point out is that this is a textbook example of triumphalism:
This is what happens if absolutely everything goes right. The discoveries happen at the right times (you can't will a scientific discovery to happen at a particular moment, you merely increase the chances of it happening), the capital is there and interested in commercializing the clever discoveries, etc. You don't have to think lots of things actually will go wrong to recognize that there's a substantive chance they will go wrong, and take steps to mitigate them, namely:
a) actively incentivate (positively and negatively) people to start investing in less petroleum-dependent infrastructure
b) actively pay for, on a serious scale, the discoveries the clever people have to make to migrate off that infrastructure.
You can complain about "dramatics" all you like, but there's nothing complex about this. Recognize risk, take reasonable steps to mitigate it. Nothing more, nothing less. No command economies, no edicts. The dramatics charge is a dodge to avoid discussing whether the measures on the table, or others similar in nature are really that intrusive, or whether you simply don't like paying to mitigate risks.
And how exactly is this different from "running out of oil"? If there's not enough for us to continue to use it in our infrastructure, we have to change that infrastructure. My point was that that's an awful big job. Not only that but if you look at the economics of resource scarcity, there is a much greater chance of price shocks as the market tightens. Unpredictable price shocks are far worse for businesses and consumers than predictable price increases. You appear to be suggesting that there's a greater supply of oil than 20-50 years worth. Perhaps this is true - the extent of the world's oil supply (and likewise demand for the stuff, I might add) are clearly not precisely known. But that's hardly the same as saying "we know we have plenty", because we don't know that.
I go back to my basic point. The strategy climate-change-minimizers propose is "let's figure it out later, when we know it's a really big problem." And there's no getting around the fact that's basically punting on the risk of something bad happening. Katrina might well have missed New Orleans. In fact that was a pretty good probability that it would not devastate New Orleans. But fate pulled out the short straw, and we weren't prepared for that severe a scenario. So you don't have to think that the risk you're guarding against is all that probable to still want to guard against it.
If you have a valid counterargument, refrain from using ad-hominem invective as your method. And you might do well to listen to the consensus of people in the field.
Mod parent up. This is exactly the point.
Look, if you combine the two unassailable points that
1) injecting vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere poses a substantial risk of climate change
(any "scientist" here care to deny the greenhouse effect?)
and
2) we are nearly certain to run out of oil in the next 20-100 years
it makes absolutely no sense to sit on our thumbs and wait until we're really fscked to work on changing our energy infrastructure. It takes a *little while* to replace every single petroleum-fueled combustion engine car on the planet, so why would we want to do it when our backs are against the wall instead of taking steps now to deal with it?
OK, now cue the standard whining about how Kyoto will "destroy" the economy (as if the GOP's liared goons like George Deutsch haven't done enough bludgeoning of our scientific competitiveness)... except the American economy has done quite nicely during periods of much heavier taxation, thank you very much. By way of comparison to a true command economy, nobody's seriously proposing that the government outlaw gasoline cars, or even restrict the sale of any of them, or produce its own vehicles. All we're talking about here are a) some taxes on carbon emissions and b) serious investment in alternate energy (order of billions, not 10M somebody sneezed onto the budget and couldn't be bothered to wipe off).
You know you're living in dark days when common-sense statements like "we should take some steps to fix this real risk" are shouted down by cries of "No! Let's do nothing instead and wait until the problem is really a crisis!"
While I agree there's plenty of vapor around this stuff, there are some real functioning, if limited AJAX office suites out now (e.g. Zoho Writer). Not saying it will out and out obsolete Vista, but there really are some changes about to happen.
Yeah, especially since JBoss is still not profitable. We all love open source, but people have to get paid too. Frankly, this seems like the strongest negotiating position Fleury's ever going to find himself in.
Yes, but Oracle has the same problem that Microsoft has - one that IBM does not have. When IBM embraced Linux, it had a software business, but that was dwarfed by their hardware and (even at the outset of it's Linux shift) consulting businesses.
Oracle knows it need to make this shift, but its consulting businesses are not as well developed as IBM's, and it does not have the deep research arm that IBM does to create and sell things like "organizational optimization software" or UIMA. Oracle's core product is their database, and that very product is threatened by commoditization. Sure it's still several years out, but OSS databases (particularly Postgres/"Sungres"/EnterpriseDB) are marching forward there. The support market can indeed be profitable, since it's mostly a form of insurance. But Oracle will have to figure out how to take the punch from dropping its addiction to its core database revenue stream. Same way Microsoft has to kick its addiction to Windows and Office, or it will get eaten when Google or someone else finally manages to get a viable browser office suite (also a year or two out and moving steadily). My guess is that this is part defensive and part branding move to show customers and investors that Oracle is not ignoring that trend.
Active JBoss development may well die in the process, but if Oracle isn't addressing the people who download and use JBoss, someone will pick up where they left off.
I would second that. OS programming may sound glamorous, but unless you think you're gonna become the next Sun kernel architect, you might want to think carefully about jumping into full-day OS coding. Spending a full day whacking away in C at buggy filesystem code might not be as great a transition as you're thinking. You can certainly get a better idea of whether you like it by doing some open-source work.
To my mind you have asked a lesser job question before a more important one. Rather than looking at this job or that, you need to ask yourself what kind of job you most want to be in: what work do you actually want to do? How important are the coworkers, the pay, the flexibility, etc.? Asking and answering (to whatever extent you can) that question will put you further along than trying to compare facets of these two jobs. You're not cosmically obligated to do OS programming, or even programming at all just because you got a CS degree. You should do it if you think it's the job you want.
Since you sound like you're on the younger end of things, I'd think that doing interesting work might well rank about pay or telecommuting, especially if you don't have kids and/or a spouse. That's just me. But do spend some time thinking over the job you want - I really think it will pay off.
To be honest, this is an long-overdue idea. What an end user really wants is something like FreeNet (minus the creepy libertarian/spook overtones) where your data is transparently saved, unreconstructable except by you, to a whole raft of peers, with a full local copy that flushes out to the 'Net at the right times. It would be nice to have the whole OS whole OS hosted, but for the pressure that puts on having a reliable and fast internet connection.
The core technical idea of FreeNet is an excellent one, but people's interest in it has much less to do with liberty and freedom from censorship, and everything to do with robust access to data. Frankly I don't give a rip if my mom can see my bank number or even my cheesy love letters to my ex-girlfriend as long as I can relax and know that my data isn't a either a hard drive failure or a virus away from elimination or widespread dissemination to Russian teenagers who I do NOT want seeing either of the aformentioned items.
As for the article, about the only assertion one can find there is "compromization of userland matters too". Yup, it does.
It sounds like you're saying that Google's lack of a lock-in puts them in a much weaker position than Microsoft. Astute observation, though not exactly one expect from /.'s legions of open-source and openness fans. Astute, but I'm just not sure it's true.
All of what you mention is also true of Heinz Ketchup. Nonetheless, they have yet to have their business gutted by Safeway Catsup. As far as some new improved search coming out, that's certainly possible. Remember that Google would have to overlook those advances from research to startup to acquisition, and let the state of the art pass them by. Part of why MS missed Google's ascent was that they were pretty sure they'd sewed the search business up, thanks to having this incredible "why I'll just use Microsoft _____ to do that" mentality. Google could certainly make that mistake, but it's not a foregone conclusion that they will.
Hmmm.. I can't say I disagree that the potential is there. I probably could have taken our 10-person biotech to the Linux desktop but for a couple factors:
1) Our CEO is an early adopter, and wants all the features she knows in Outlook, plus things like compatibility with Treo's. Linux is a year or two behind on that.
2) Our main database is built on Access (against Postgres). As a longtime small business database developer, I can tell you that there really isn't an Access-killer out there yet, and Access as a starter database product is incredibly useful. OOCalc is also distinctly less mature than Excel (which, IHMO is by MS' best product, and a groundbreaker to boot). We're scaling well past Access size now, and I'll have a choice of platforms for my clients, but it's awfully hard to kick that
3) A Windows domain to handle logon is still a fair sight easier to set up than a full Kerberos/NIS/other *nix authentication scheme. I hope Novell will step in here, as the benefits of having a truly open standards-based login system are substantial.
You are spot-on that it will take specialists, and in particular it takes systems and network administrators. They're there, but the pipelines for Windows admins are still much fuller. If I were starting a business with none of these requirements pre-existing, I could well have chosen to go Linux. And I agree with you that there will be a decent number of SMB's who take advantage of Vista's launch to do just that - esp. in Europe, where you have additional resentment of Microsoft.
And certainly among home users, Goobuntu could get a lot of traction quickly if it brought a starter PC down to $300-$500 w/ monitor and shipped with a comfortable setup for browsing the web via Google's services.
I'll officially apologize on the record for any of the times I've invoked catastrophic destruction scenarios like a million Katrinas. However, I think that your take is a bit blasee, for the following reasons.
1) Your argument that CO2 levels were 10 times higher in the Silurain period doesn't square with the recent finding that carbon levels are higher than they've been in the last 650 Million years. I'd also ask how thorough a global sampling we have of carbon levels in the Silurian period - we've got a pretty good mesh these days. I honestly don't know enough about the Silurian era to evaluate either claim, but there's something substantial to be reconciled there.
2) Not only have we reached levels of CO2 that are near paleological levels, but we are still increasing the rate at which we add CO2 to the atmosphere, with no real moves to change this rate. Following this pattern, it won't take us all that long to reach the levels you describe.
2) The kind of changes in climate predicted by these kinds of changes in CO2 (e.g. present era -> Silurian type world climate) were historically accompanied by vast die-offs. The fact that humans might manage to initiate such die-offs because we couldn't be bothered to change is a deeply wasteful approach to the world. Yes, climate may change anyway, but I'd argue that having it be with our knowledge is a very different story.
3) The Silurian period also did not have a large human people with deeply fixed infrastructure. Barring questions of weather events like hurricanes, if we get anywhere near the 20-80 feet of sea level rise predicted for the next century, there will be a huge drain on world resources as we figure out how to relocate populations back from the shore. Even a cursory examination of building in response to sea level shows how hard it is to persuade people to move structures they've built back off the coast. In the US this could mean either building seawalls and dikes around thousands of miles of coast, or paying reparations to people whose houses are damaged by rising water. Either way, it's an enormous undertaking, and one that can potentially be accompanied by a vast amount of human misery.
I don't think humanity will be wiped out, and I'm hopeful that we can perhaps offer people serious assistance in dealing with the results changed weather patterns, such as droughts and freezes. But I'd call being simply "not worried" very, very naive. And realistically, I just don't see that many reasons not to act: there's a pretty good change we'll run out of the most convenient fossil fuels in the next 50-80 years, so we're pretty much due for a change in energy infrastructure anyway. If countries like China could develop a roaring, world-leading economy in-spite of being ruled under a fully commanded economy for a decent fraction of this period, market economies can handle carbon taxes and regulations on a limited scale, particularly if they're aimed at drive future innovation.