But the problem is that large companies have tried to laterally transplant linux into the marketplace. This won't work. What Google could do here that is radically different is start to build a groundswell of support. Think of it as politics. Large companies are like well-funded small-interest groups, Google is starting a grassroots campaign. If you want to get a specific earmark, go with the small-interest groups. But if you want to make fundamental changes in politics - or in in IT - you need a grassroots movement.
This is an interesting angle, but I think it overlooks a big problem that desktop Linux has. Windows really cemented its hold on the market somewhere between Windows95 when Microsoft made the Windows/Office/WindowsServer platform an integrated productivity environment. It was just what corporations wanted - a network setup where you knew you could plug in the pieces and they'd pretty much work together. As icing, once a decent number of businesses bought in, you also knew you could get people to run the network. Since that's already been deployed and most businesses have structured a lot of their IT operations around, there's only a few compelling reasons to uproot the whole setup, such as
a) A large reduction in cost. Basically this means giving it away for free, and charging less than MS for product support. In this case Google is well positioned, as it's basic strategy is to commoditize/demonetize a variety of products in service of driving ad revenue. Or perhaps they can partner with Novell to provide the support. In any event, the point is to make the product a viable choice for free. b) A vast improvement in reliability or security. Linux as a platform is indeed more secure than Windows, but frankly I don't think it's as head-and-shoulders above Windows as people boast, particularly as Microsoft gains experience with Windows Update. In a controlled environment like a server, Linux is still much more secure and deconstructable than Windows, and this is working in its favor. And unless something changes, people appear willing to weather the storm with Windows. c) The new environment somehow allows for new and compelling deployment methods (VPN/remote sessions over any broadband - anywhere, or wicked easy app deployment, etc.), coupled with low cost. This is an area of big opportunity. Your choices are present: Citrix or Terminal Services, and both are pretty expensive. If Google made it really easy to do a TermServ style deployment, with a slick Windows client, that could drive adoption of Linux. I've definitely given serious thought to deploying this way. Problem is, where does Google drive ad revenue this way? And then there's the application base. There's plenty of good and great end-user apps out theere for Linux, but they are not as consistently easy to deploy, update, and often to use as their Windows counterparts. Goobuntu could make a decent dent in this, given the maturity of Firefox, OpenOffice, and a number of other tools.
Basically, the OS for use on corporate desktops is mostly a settled question, barring something radically new coming along. I think there are opportunities for Google around desktop Linux, but it's not as cut and dried as trying to get people to replace Windows wholesale. And I follow Cringeley in saying that Google should not devote a lot of money to challenging Windows on its home court, as this is surely a loser.
Third, while the CO2 rises from those studies are large, they are not accompanied by a correspondingly large rise in global temperatures. In fact, I recall at least one study that expressed surprise at how small the temperature rise was compared to the rise in CO2 levels.
But they're coming. If you read the PDF linked to by the NOAA temperature data that was posted on/. last week, there's a clear explanation that a lot of the temperature change is still in the pipeline, having been staved off by early effects like ocean absorption.
Fourth, the rises in temperature since the onset of the Industrial Revolution are significantly less than those (documented in those very same studies you mention) from various periods in pre-industrial and in pre-human times
Almost all previous events were much longer in timescale than the present warming trend, and there's very few plausible non-human mechanisms for acheiving this kind of rapid increase in temperature.
So my question remains: What evidence is there that takes the factors I mentioned into account that supports the idea that humans affect global temperatures?
The entire body of literature of oceanography and atmospheric science for the past 10 years isn't enough? I smell obstruction.
The system is quite robust and has survived far more dramatic impacts than what a few million SUV's could ever cause.
What possible basis do you have for saying this? Not only are there not even "logical" arguments mustered to attempt to support your conclusion by fiat, you don't even mention data or patterns. And there's that pesky fact that 95% of the people in the world devoted to the study of climate completely and totally disagree with you. That's beyond obtuse, that's just plain arrogant.
I am just extrapolating obvious and long-standing trends - renewable prices down, petro prices up. The lines are already crossing and soon renewables will be ahead. By 2050, there will be little petro power - and the assumptions underlying the worst-case global warming are just the opposite, with big increases in CO2 output.
That is quite likely true of oil, and I think your 2050 estimate is pretty realistic. However, there's an awful lot of coal still in the ground, and it comes out basically ready to use. This means theres a lower price barrier for coal to be replaced by renewables. With coal, at least there's the advantage that it's now primarily used for power generation and not for transportation or heat, so introducing renewables into the electricity process is "modular", you just plug in a renewable factory, and the electricity consumer doesn't know the difference.
Getting heating and transportation off of petroleum and natural gas is a gargantuan task - the type of energy production is hard-coded into those systems, and not modular like electricity - and given that energy and transportation industries are so heavily invested in that infrastructure, there will be tremendous resistance to it. I fail to believe that the economic impact of getting that ball rolling will be as bad as the consequences of waiting until later.
With respect to your big problems, the evidence for more chaotic weather is rather thin, and even if it is true, nowhere as apocalyptic as you claim.
I don't think I'm arguing for apocalyptic weather, like a Katrina every day. But if you look at how beaches get wiped out, it's by winter storms as much as by daily erosion and sediment transport. And people's reactions have almost uniformly been to barricade the coast against the water, despite the long-term futility of doing so (water always wins). It would take a lot for people to get comfortable with the idea of packing up and leaving in those circumstances, and represents substantial loss of property if not life (the life part I concede is a bit more apolyptic). Florida is one ginat example of that. Q: how much does it take to persuade people that living in swamp in the track of hurricanes is not secure? A: An awful lot, apparently close to infinitely repeated loss of property and life. Most of California's population is in a small traunch between the moutains and the sea. 80ft of sea level rise would be ugly. That kind of loss on a macro scale sucks. Needlessly. Not to mention droughts and famines in countries with more tenuous economies and food supplies (Kenya and Sudan are having a droughts and corresponding famines now that are related to large-scale changes in weather patterns). My point is that while human civilization won't be "wiped out", there is a lot of suffering that can happen from these changes.
Yes, the climate is extremely non-linear, which is why the climate projections are all over the map. Yes, it is quite likely that various ocean currents will change or stop. Again, hardly the end of the world.
I can't disagree that it won't be apocalyptic. Per my previous points, I think you're being willfully naive about the costs. And on a moral level, I think it's kind of a callous move for humans to just blithely screw around with the planet and life at this scale, especially as we begin to understand the consequences. And I fail to be convinced the economic "loss" incurred by regulations (inefficient and aggravating though they may be) which force industries to modernize a little earlier than they might otherwise have done are comparable to wiping out numerous species because we didn't care enough to take the hit. Sure, some large-scale climate changes like changes in ocean circulaton could well happen otherwise, but at least we wouldn't be the ones who did it out of carelessness.
The problem is that the proposed "cures" are both ineffectual AND cost us far, far more t
It is a huge mistake to continue to pump carbon into the atmosphere, period.
That really depends on what we're doing that produces all this carbon, now, doesn't it?
Not sure I follow. The climate system doesn't care why the extra carbon is there. If your point is that there's an economic cost-benefit balance, that's certainly true (though there are also moral questions about the extent to which one should treat the entire earth merely as an economic resource). In this context I'm just arguing that over decade scales the costs are staggering, and that ought to be taken into account. I mean, if it costs $50-$500 billion to rebuild one city after one hurricane...
Mod parent up. The link was a set of temperature anomaly graphs from satellite temperature collected directly by the organization making the graphs (NOAA), with discussion of the trends observed in those graphs. How much more raw science can you get?
Plus, this is a general science-ey blog, not a climate science blog. General discussion of this topic naturally includes discussion of the consequences of the referenced science, just like discussion of a link about IBM open-sourcing some piece of software doesn't revolve solely around what's in the code or how it was built, it's mostly about how the market and players will react. If you're interested in the specifics of the climate science debate, read the papers and their authors' blogs. But enough mit da grousing about discussion of the consequences of this emerging set of science just because it happens to spark intense debate.
Well, you have a lot more faith than me, and I'm a scientist too - ocean physics, as it happens. I do believe that somewhere in the next century and change, we will finally shed the industrial era "brute-force and the externalities be damned" approach to industry, and move in earnest to one where inputs and outputs, as well as the marketable product are carefully considered. And I believe that as part of that, we will finally move off of burning fossil fuels, or at least doing so in a way that carbon-loads the atmosphere. Likewise I'm hopeful that we can make mining, manufacturing, etc. a lot less destructive. So in that sense I share your faith.
But there's a lot of work to do, and there's a lot that can happen between here and there. If we manage to let the Artic ice caps melt even 30% of the way off, there would be a huge amount of human misery provoked. All Katrina-style devastation of cities, all the time. That's not a cataclysm, but it's pretty bad. We might well figure out a way to move people and cities inland as the seas rose, but there would be much life, property and well-being lost along the way. The rises in sea level would almost certainly involve catastrophic weather events, and it seems clear that we are now driving the Earth's climate system at far greater intensities than forcings that caused previous events like Ice Ages. So changes could occur pretty fast, and that doesn't bode well for us adapting to them, or developing industries and business practices that deeply internalize the risk of a tragedy of the commons.
The other problem is this. It's clearly important for our current global climate balance to have two cold poles drive ocean circulation, not just one. But if you follow any of the "big amplifier" theories, it's quite possible that we have triggered (or vastly accelerated) a situation where only the Antartic drives ocean circulation. And given how nonlinear the earth's climate is, we may not be able to go back there.
So inaction in the face of anthropogenic climate change does not likely mean the end of the world, but it is nothign to sneeze at. The futurism that you and I espouse should not be mistaken for triumphalism.
The question is not the present economics, which undoubtedly offer big initial costs to make any dent in global climate, nor about the potential present gains from climate change (e.g. longer growing season in temperate latitudes). The question is what happens in a century or two. The scientific community now speaks basically in unison saying it looks pretty grim. People can point to the various uncertainties in models all they like, but the driving mechanisms are rock-solid. It is a huge mistake to continue to pump carbon into the atmosphere, period. By whatever metric, this is not a "good" for humanity. If this massive forcing is stopped, the earth could well move itself into another mode, but the cost of dealing merely with rising sea level will be staggering.
John Lott is not a professor - he is a right wing hack given a cushy job by the American Enterprise Institute. He was long since discredited in the academic community for, among other things, fabricating data, and impersonating a student (and lest you think that comes from us nasty terrorist-lovin' Democrats, it was the Cato Institute who tracked down his impersonating-a-student shenigans). Let's not make the mistake of comparing this "research" with real, peer-reviewed academic research.
Ethically it's certainly a wrong for the robber to rob you.
Is it a good idea to pull a gun on a robber? I'm not so sure, practically or ethically. What if you miss and hit the pregnant store clerk instead, thus taking another life (or lives, depending on your view on abortion), and not accomplishing the goal of stopping the robbery. What if both you and the robber die? What if the robber's gun wasn't actually loaded? Is justice served in these case?
I just don't think owning, carrying, and pulling the gun at the first sign of a robbery fixes what is unquestionably an ethical wrong by the robber. And your "logic" looks an awful lot like that partisan reasoning: you know what you think is right, and any other line of argument is of course foolish.
Your theory in a nutshell: "the good people only use guns at the right time, and only the bad people use them for bad things". I don't really want to debate that statement, as that's a philosophical and moral framework, not a question about the effect of guns.
Here are facts: It's undeniable that a substantial fraction of the people who use guns are 18 or under. It's undeniable that the likelihood of someone dying is greater in a gunfight than in a knifefight. It's undeniable that guns carry with them risks like improper use, mistaken identity, and use by unauthorized persons such as children. And it's undeniable that Great Britain, which does not permit individual gun ownership, has long had a much lower homicide rate than the US. Kids with guns, fights turned deadly, higher homicide rate? The facts don't entirely support your proposition that "if you allow guns to be sold to anyone,... then it's a win."
The debate over gun control is not fundamentally fact-based, it is philosophy-based, and it often tends toward cultural issues ("are we defend-ourselves-with-a-gun type people or not?").
First - ever think that the primary job of the ombudsman is to find somebody a Bud when things get bad?
Frankly, that's what I find so unpalatable about this whole nonsense. How the hell does the Post have an ombudsman (1. A man who investigates complaints and mediates fair settlements, especially between aggrieved parties such as consumers or students and an institution or organization.) who writes editorials about politics? How can anyone believe that their complaint about the paper's reporting will be heard fairly if the person has already announced, in the most public way possible, that his or her opinion on the subject? Her job is to listen to me and others, represent us to the management, and possibly write about the gist of what she's hearing. That's the job. That the Post thinks that it's OK to mix the two speaks volumes about the weakness of their management.
Interestingly, I think the only way out of this for Microsoft is to advocate truly open standards for DRM and for a full podcasting/music-buying API. This is very hard for Microsoft to conceptualize, as they have all built their careers around owning standards. However, here Microsoft is in IBM's role: they want to sell ancillary products and services.
An open standard lets the manufacturers in on the party early, with the explicit knowledge that they'll be competing in a commodity market. In other words, it advances the time when *Pods become commidities. Given Microsoft's existing relationship with embedded hardware manufacturers, they would be well positioned to offer WINCE on these devices. It's also pretty key from driving sales of Media Center type devices - incompatibility with the iPod would really be a blow to the whole Media Center concept. It would also give the record companies their leverage back, because they would have more pricing control with multiple stores than if there's only a single road to digital music sales. The record companies will also have a very hard time understanding this, because they too want a standard they control lock stock and barrel.
As long as Microsoft's DRM is a "competing version" owned by Microsoft, hardware manufacturers know that they're vulnerable to a squeeze from Apple or Microsoft or both. With an open standard, they have at least a modicum of control.
For Microsoft, I think the hardest question will be organizing "up-stack" versus "down-stack" pieces - they've always sold more along a "buy the whole experience model" rather than an explicity value-add. This will be a very interesting fight.
Re:I don't think many people too Gibson seriously.
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WMF Flaw not a Backdoor
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Another thing this points out is just how much Microsoft resists open standards. As far as I can tell, the chief reason WMF was and is still widely supported in Windows is that it effectively emulates vector graphics. How many opportunities did Microsoft turn down to put in SVG, PDF, or similar support?
As a bonafide teenager I can tell you that the things driving teenage sex are the sex hormones testosterone and estrogen.
Touché.
Fair enough, that is of course true as it's always been. But there still an air of mystery about sex among teenagers that is not there among 25 year-olds, and though I'm not a teenager now, I'd be hard pressed to believe that mystery's not still a big driver.
OK, let's say that for argument's sake I accept the notion that you were wise beyond your years at 12 years old, and were in fact prepared to have sex with a 25 year old. That still leaves wide open the question of why the hell that 25 year-old wants to have sex with a 12 year-old kid? And I again submit that barring a vanishingly few exceptions, most 12-year-olds are not prepared for an adult who is looking for something completely different than just physical intercourse.
At 16 and above, I certainly agree that the lines are much more blurry, though I still would want to ask hard questions of a 25 year old who's chasing after 16 year olds (and be ready for reasonable answers, a guy I know who's 24 is and has been dating a now-18 year old woman for several years, and it's a great match).
Your ageism argument is passionately argued, but there's a couple big problems. One is that there's a generally accepted principle that parents are the custodians of their children until some age of majority The whole child pornography discussion revolves around minors and filmed sexual acts. You may want to dispute when exactly the age of majority should be, and under what circumstances, but you'll have an awfully hard time arguing it as a principle. The notion that people under the age of majority have different rights follows from this principle, unlike your example of race. The second is that, informed by the principle of parental custodianship, it's hard to see how restricting a minor from having certain kinds of sex constitutes lasting damage to that person, as would denying someone employment.
Yes, in the sense that as a threat, I believe it's overblown. Much like child abduction - dangerous, but relatively rare.
It's very telling that people get worked up about "child porn" but not "child rape"-- i.e. something which actually is universally WRONG.
I'd guess this is by virtue of being one of those topics that still exceeds polite conversation. Child abuse of any type is universally publicly deplored.
Participation in child "porn" can be voluntary, forced, or somewhere in between (coerced?); the actual sex depicted can be consensual, rape, or somewhere in between (i.e. with a child incapable of truly giving "informed consent").
I can't agree with that. A child of 12 simply does not posssess the judgement (nothing to do with intelligence) to understand and accept the consequences of being filmed having sex with someone else, or themselves for that matter. Participation in porn goes way beyond put that thing in here, no matter how it's done. And it's hard to avoid asking the question: why does an adult want to see a child in sexual poses, when the adult knows or should know that children simply don't understand sex? Have you ever hooked up with someone a good bit younger than you? You know how they interpret everything you do with meanings far different and greater than what you intended? If an adult goes specifically looking for that kind of reaction, a la child porn, it's hard not to conclude that the adult is looking for control/power/manipulation through a sexual lens.
And as a 12-year-old-- a "child"-- I wanted sex and would have welcomed sex.
I believe you felt/feel that way. But if you look at the people who did do that, it generally turned out much worse than they expected. Sex is potent stuff, and it takes a fair bit of self-knowledge to learn how to handle the physical, emotional, and relationship elements of it, and make it something good for you. People learn to use sex for all different kinds of purposes in their lives, and as adults, they're welcome to whatever they do, but at 12 or 13, once again, someone simply doesn't have the judgment to make those distinctions. It's a tricky balance - no parent I know wants to stop their 12 year old from checking out members of the opposite sex, making out, maybe taking a few halting steps forward from there, but none that I know wants to find out their kids have been sleeping around just to prove they can have sex (which IMO is almost universally what drives teenage sex).
So yes, you can call the child pr0n scare a whipping boy, and a trojan horse for all kinds of government intrusion into people's privacy and expression, and I believe it is that. But that doesn't make child pornography itself a good thing.
One major security difference between Windows and *nix is the need for many userland programs to run as Administrator. Clearly this enlarges the attackable surface area of the Windows platform by allowing attacks via applications that run as Administrator. Presumably this accounts for the decision to have XP Home users be Administrators by default.
What is Microsoft's plan for eliminating this problem? How will Vista address the tasks that require higher levels of privileges? What restrictions does this place on normal users? How do focus group users respond to these restrictions? Has there been communication with applications vendors to ensure that they are making the necessary changes?
Whoa, take a breath. I seem to have pissed everyone off with a poor way of describing my three basic points:
1) Ain't it great that we're finally past the page-reload-required-for-everything stage of internet applications?
2) Wouldn't the web as application platform be better with a full programming language(s) on the client side, deployed in/by/with the browser? I merely brought up.NET as a concrete example of how complete languages can be pretty durn useful in writing applications. And yes, I agree that Java applets ain't that language - they are unbearably slow to load and usually sucky to boot, thanks to Java's not-that-useable GUI toolkits, and the fact that they don't rely on the browser at all for rendering.
3) The main change in architecture is towards invoking functions to populate individual widgets' data rather than retrieving a full layout + data page. Your point about SOAP vs. XMLHttpRequest is a good one - I've never understood why exactly one can't use SOAP calls to populate widgets' data, and I'd be interested to hear why this is?
Overall, I get the sense we pretty much agree that 1,2, and 3 are great progress.
I was further suggesting that once users get used to data coming at a widget level rather than a page level, there could well be momentum to do two things:
a) Move from apps written in scripting language to apps written in a more complete app language
b) turn the browser into the cross-platform rendering layer that Java does poorly
Finally, I agree with you that.NET in its present form isn't the applet-killer either, mainly due (as you say) to its tight coupling with Windows. C#, which is my only experience with.NET, gives me this funny feeling that Microsoft is conflicted between writing a truly component-oriented language like Java, and the old Windows lock-in.
Re:More like 0.2 than 2.0
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Web 3.0
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Gmail may or may not be the best living example of AJAX. But the bottom line is that AJAX is an attempt to use a scripting language inside a document model. Conceptually not unlike using VBA to program a UI inside a Word document.
The grandparent's point that most of that functionality should be pushed down below the scripting level is spot-on. There's a reason why UI development kits like.NET are popular: they are far more complete and robust than a scripting language attached to a markup renderer. For example, how do you lock the behavior of your AJAX application so it cannot be modified by the end-user? The Asynchronous part of AJAX is the big advance. The XML part is a modern, smart and, basically standards-compliant way to do RMI. But it's hard to see how the JavaScript part can substitute for a full-fledged UI programming language.
I still welcome our new AJAX overlords - they will get people doing what Java was originally supposed to do, which is to allow a browser to serve as a deployment platform for an application. Once end-users are used to that and demand it, people will gradually, as you and the grandparent point out, rewrite the browser to be a proper UI rendering toolkit.
Sure, C# as an individual language is better than Java. And certainly for any UI applications, C#/.NET rocks Java's world. Absolutely, Java should have a linker and "registry" of sorts - certainly this classpath nonsense is way too much work as it stands.
On the other hand, Java is still waaaay more modular for almost any server application than.NET. In Java, you call components which are add-on libraries (hence the incredible aggravation of 10 million directories, XML config files and classpath entries), any of which can be removed, re-implemented, locked down, etc. In fact, many of the enterprise (or close) grade solutions are open source (Tomcat, JBoss, Hibernate, Struts and everything else Jakarta), so you have complete implementation details to boot. With.NET, as with all Microsoft products, everything is "integrated", and all the documentation points you at the Microsoft solution. And typically you have little information about the architecture and internals of the.NET libraries provided by MS: no UML diagrams, no published interface specs, just tech docs, albeit thorough and well-written ones.
Finally, the only thing that will make VB.NET programmers as good at making robust architectures as Java programmers is disciplined OO design of the type Java essentially mandates..NET will probably catch up in this department, but it will be up to Microsoft to push that kind of development in its tech docs, rather than "here's how build a form with all the logic inside widget event code"..NET is definitely a step in the right direction, and as a language C# definitely improves on many aspects of Java. But the overall.NET development ecosystem and the houses that do it have yet to get the kind of robust that you find in Java. Where Java was a giant leap forward in development languages because it brought OO, managed code compile-time safety to the masses,.NET is merely an evolutionary improvement on those concepts. Many of Java's defects could be remedied with a little standardization and simplification. It will be interesting to see how these two languages mature.
Agreed. The article author needs to dump the straw man and brush up on his historical narrative skills. The trends vs. individuals is an important part of any sort history. Of course there are large historical trends, and they put people in a position to do many of the important things they do. At the same time, there's no doubt individuals move history forward in big leaps, by intelligence, originality, insight, or sometimes just by luck. And there are a lot of mutually inclusive narratives about those events as they happen, most of which are neither right nor wrong. The view that the Open Source movement didn't draw on those individual people or the narratives they employ is plainly foolish, and he doesn't need to make that argument in order to introduce the notion that the internet opened new possibilites for pro-am interaction (not a new idea either, BTW). A movement can't succeed without a fertile environment for that movement, but it also can't succeed without leaders. How hard is that?
Mod TheFlyingGoat up! What you describe is pluralism with respect to science.
My main problem with ID is not that it posits any sort of alternate theory of how we came to be or how we ought to interpret the world around us - frankly I think there's a lot of value in that. It's that ID insists that that kind of learning and reflection be taught in lieu of science.
Science's "mission statement" has always been to apply analysis to understand the mechanics of how the natural phenoma work. Nothing more, nothing less. It does not and should not tell you how to interpret that, much less to ponder the imponderables: "why is there grief and death in the world?", "what is wisdom?", "is it right for me to fire an employee?", etc. I do think that the understanding provided by science can require some rethinking of how the precepts of religion are intepreted, and that troubles people who view the knowledge provided by religion as eternal and immutable.
I wouldn't dismiss the notion that religion can provide eternal or immutable knowledge, but I do believe a lot of this is an end run around pluralism. Pluralism in this case entails accepting someone saying, "I think a heavily scientific worldview is a bad one, and while I won't attempt to disprove it, I simply won't believe it". That's roughly akin to saying, "I can accept that you think Mohammed was the Messenger of God, even though I don't" and still think that we can agree on some moral precepts. But ID's basic goal is anti-pluralistic, it is to use present deficiencies in scientific knowledge to challenge anyone's use of science as a worldview.
I know I'm not the only one that finds the notion that science is a framework for all belief troubling, and I'm not even religious - I'm an agnostic. But I don't think the answer is to go advancing theories that say that science is flawed if it doesn't agree with a particular tenet of faith, and particularly not to represent those same theories as science.
Wow, this is a very succinct statement of one of the points I was struggling to make. I observe this non-componentization every time I used KDE - there are 5 or more programs shipped with KDE (on Suse 10) for viewing/editing images, and none make use of the same components. I'm all for variety, but that's ridiculous, and it's indicative of the fact that dropping in a library is still too hard. I also agree very strongly with your point on Java. Since Java is de facto the language of enterprise, code that comes out of such projects tends to be well designed and audited. Making it readily available for use in other software would a huge win.
All that said, I don't really agree that KDE vs. GNOME is a bad thing. I'm all for people putting together their own DE's as they please, as long as all the elements can play nice together.
Has anyone considered the notion that Mono should be implemented because a Common Language Runtime is actually a good idea?
Microsoft put a lot of effort into.NET for a single reason - to get managed language support deep into their OS without supporting Java. Even a cursory learning of C# (what I've done) leaves no doubt that it is the marriage of Java with Microsoft's UI API talents. And I'd guess that while their non-support of Java does include a big lock-in component (after all, how hard would it have been to fix their JVM and add the features they wanted in C#?), it also is emblematic of the not-built-here mentality that's so aggravating.
I think Mono's best bet is not to chase.NET compatibility, but rather to take a page from Microsoft's playbook - emulate and learn from Microsoft's skill at designing a UI API, and then use it to provide broad managed language support - including good Java support. Sort of like marrying Java and.NET again, but making it easy to port from any major Unix toolkit: GTK, QT, Motif (uughgh), TCL, and especially web-friendly languages. Basically make it what Java should be UI-wise. For example, the DataSet support for client-side data operations that can be flushed back to the server via a set of transformations is a great idea. Implement stuff like that.
Mono will never run as quickly on Windows as.NET. Frankly it will likely never be as peformant as.NET even on *nix - Microsoft spends a lot money and a lot of talent on optimization, but hardware can cover for merely adequate performance of the library.
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a) A large reduction in cost. Basically this means giving it away for free, and charging less than MS for product support. In this case Google is well positioned, as it's basic strategy is to commoditize/demonetize a variety of products in service of driving ad revenue. Or perhaps they can partner with Novell to provide the support. In any event, the point is to make the product a viable choice for free.
b) A vast improvement in reliability or security. Linux as a platform is indeed more secure than Windows, but frankly I don't think it's as head-and-shoulders above Windows as people boast, particularly as Microsoft gains experience with Windows Update. In a controlled environment like a server, Linux is still much more secure and deconstructable than Windows, and this is working in its favor. And unless something changes, people appear willing to weather the storm with Windows.
c) The new environment somehow allows for new and compelling deployment methods (VPN/remote sessions over any broadband - anywhere, or wicked easy app deployment, etc.), coupled with low cost. This is an area of big opportunity. Your choices are present: Citrix or Terminal Services, and both are pretty expensive. If Google made it really easy to do a TermServ style deployment, with a slick Windows client, that could drive adoption of Linux. I've definitely given serious thought to deploying this way. Problem is, where does Google drive ad revenue this way? And then there's the application base. There's plenty of good and great end-user apps out theere for Linux, but they are not as consistently easy to deploy, update, and often to use as their Windows counterparts. Goobuntu could make a decent dent in this, given the maturity of Firefox, OpenOffice, and a number of other tools.
Basically, the OS for use on corporate desktops is mostly a settled question, barring something radically new coming along. I think there are opportunities for Google around desktop Linux, but it's not as cut and dried as trying to get people to replace Windows wholesale. And I follow Cringeley in saying that Google should not devote a lot of money to challenging Windows on its home court, as this is surely a loser.
The entire body of literature of oceanography and atmospheric science for the past 10 years isn't enough? I smell obstruction.
That is quite likely true of oil, and I think your 2050 estimate is pretty realistic. However, there's an awful lot of coal still in the ground, and it comes out basically ready to use. This means theres a lower price barrier for coal to be replaced by renewables. With coal, at least there's the advantage that it's now primarily used for power generation and not for transportation or heat, so introducing renewables into the electricity process is "modular", you just plug in a renewable factory, and the electricity consumer doesn't know the difference.
Getting heating and transportation off of petroleum and natural gas is a gargantuan task - the type of energy production is hard-coded into those systems, and not modular like electricity - and given that energy and transportation industries are so heavily invested in that infrastructure, there will be tremendous resistance to it. I fail to believe that the economic impact of getting that ball rolling will be as bad as the consequences of waiting until later.
I don't think I'm arguing for apocalyptic weather, like a Katrina every day. But if you look at how beaches get wiped out, it's by winter storms as much as by daily erosion and sediment transport. And people's reactions have almost uniformly been to barricade the coast against the water, despite the long-term futility of doing so (water always wins). It would take a lot for people to get comfortable with the idea of packing up and leaving in those circumstances, and represents substantial loss of property if not life (the life part I concede is a bit more apolyptic). Florida is one ginat example of that. Q: how much does it take to persuade people that living in swamp in the track of hurricanes is not secure? A: An awful lot, apparently close to infinitely repeated loss of property and life. Most of California's population is in a small traunch between the moutains and the sea. 80ft of sea level rise would be ugly. That kind of loss on a macro scale sucks. Needlessly. Not to mention droughts and famines in countries with more tenuous economies and food supplies (Kenya and Sudan are having a droughts and corresponding famines now that are related to large-scale changes in weather patterns). My point is that while human civilization won't be "wiped out", there is a lot of suffering that can happen from these changes.
I can't disagree that it won't be apocalyptic. Per my previous points, I think you're being willfully naive about the costs. And on a moral level, I think it's kind of a callous move for humans to just blithely screw around with the planet and life at this scale, especially as we begin to understand the consequences. And I fail to be convinced the economic "loss" incurred by regulations (inefficient and aggravating though they may be) which force industries to modernize a little earlier than they might otherwise have done are comparable to wiping out numerous species because we didn't care enough to take the hit. Sure, some large-scale climate changes like changes in ocean circulaton could well happen otherwise, but at least we wouldn't be the ones who did it out of carelessness.
Mod parent up. The link was a set of temperature anomaly graphs from satellite temperature collected directly by the organization making the graphs (NOAA), with discussion of the trends observed in those graphs. How much more raw science can you get?
Plus, this is a general science-ey blog, not a climate science blog. General discussion of this topic naturally includes discussion of the consequences of the referenced science, just like discussion of a link about IBM open-sourcing some piece of software doesn't revolve solely around what's in the code or how it was built, it's mostly about how the market and players will react. If you're interested in the specifics of the climate science debate, read the papers and their authors' blogs. But enough mit da grousing about discussion of the consequences of this emerging set of science just because it happens to spark intense debate.
Well, you have a lot more faith than me, and I'm a scientist too - ocean physics, as it happens. I do believe that somewhere in the next century and change, we will finally shed the industrial era "brute-force and the externalities be damned" approach to industry, and move in earnest to one where inputs and outputs, as well as the marketable product are carefully considered. And I believe that as part of that, we will finally move off of burning fossil fuels, or at least doing so in a way that carbon-loads the atmosphere. Likewise I'm hopeful that we can make mining, manufacturing, etc. a lot less destructive. So in that sense I share your faith.
But there's a lot of work to do, and there's a lot that can happen between here and there. If we manage to let the Artic ice caps melt even 30% of the way off, there would be a huge amount of human misery provoked. All Katrina-style devastation of cities, all the time. That's not a cataclysm, but it's pretty bad. We might well figure out a way to move people and cities inland as the seas rose, but there would be much life, property and well-being lost along the way. The rises in sea level would almost certainly involve catastrophic weather events, and it seems clear that we are now driving the Earth's climate system at far greater intensities than forcings that caused previous events like Ice Ages. So changes could occur pretty fast, and that doesn't bode well for us adapting to them, or developing industries and business practices that deeply internalize the risk of a tragedy of the commons.
The other problem is this. It's clearly important for our current global climate balance to have two cold poles drive ocean circulation, not just one. But if you follow any of the "big amplifier" theories, it's quite possible that we have triggered (or vastly accelerated) a situation where only the Antartic drives ocean circulation. And given how nonlinear the earth's climate is, we may not be able to go back there.
So inaction in the face of anthropogenic climate change does not likely mean the end of the world, but it is nothign to sneeze at. The futurism that you and I espouse should not be mistaken for triumphalism.
The question is not the present economics, which undoubtedly offer big initial costs to make any dent in global climate, nor about the potential present gains from climate change (e.g. longer growing season in temperate latitudes). The question is what happens in a century or two. The scientific community now speaks basically in unison saying it looks pretty grim. People can point to the various uncertainties in models all they like, but the driving mechanisms are rock-solid. It is a huge mistake to continue to pump carbon into the atmosphere, period. By whatever metric, this is not a "good" for humanity. If this massive forcing is stopped, the earth could well move itself into another mode, but the cost of dealing merely with rising sea level will be staggering.
John Lott is not a professor - he is a right wing hack given a cushy job by the American Enterprise Institute. He was long since discredited in the academic community for, among other things, fabricating data, and impersonating a student (and lest you think that comes from us nasty terrorist-lovin' Democrats, it was the Cato Institute who tracked down his impersonating-a-student shenigans). Let's not make the mistake of comparing this "research" with real, peer-reviewed academic research.
Ethically it's certainly a wrong for the robber to rob you.
Is it a good idea to pull a gun on a robber? I'm not so sure, practically or ethically. What if you miss and hit the pregnant store clerk instead, thus taking another life (or lives, depending on your view on abortion), and not accomplishing the goal of stopping the robbery. What if both you and the robber die? What if the robber's gun wasn't actually loaded? Is justice served in these case?
I just don't think owning, carrying, and pulling the gun at the first sign of a robbery fixes what is unquestionably an ethical wrong by the robber. And your "logic" looks an awful lot like that partisan reasoning: you know what you think is right, and any other line of argument is of course foolish.
Your theory in a nutshell: "the good people only use guns at the right time, and only the bad people use them for bad things". I don't really want to debate that statement, as that's a philosophical and moral framework, not a question about the effect of guns.
... then it's a win."
Here are facts: It's undeniable that a substantial fraction of the people who use guns are 18 or under. It's undeniable that the likelihood of someone dying is greater in a gunfight than in a knifefight. It's undeniable that guns carry with them risks like improper use, mistaken identity, and use by unauthorized persons such as children. And it's undeniable that Great Britain, which does not permit individual gun ownership, has long had a much lower homicide rate than the US. Kids with guns, fights turned deadly, higher homicide rate? The facts don't entirely support your proposition that "if you allow guns to be sold to anyone,
The debate over gun control is not fundamentally fact-based, it is philosophy-based, and it often tends toward cultural issues ("are we defend-ourselves-with-a-gun type people or not?").
Frankly, that's what I find so unpalatable about this whole nonsense. How the hell does the Post have an ombudsman (1. A man who investigates complaints and mediates fair settlements, especially between aggrieved parties such as consumers or students and an institution or organization.) who writes editorials about politics? How can anyone believe that their complaint about the paper's reporting will be heard fairly if the person has already announced, in the most public way possible, that his or her opinion on the subject? Her job is to listen to me and others, represent us to the management, and possibly write about the gist of what she's hearing. That's the job. That the Post thinks that it's OK to mix the two speaks volumes about the weakness of their management.
Interestingly, I think the only way out of this for Microsoft is to advocate truly open standards for DRM and for a full podcasting/music-buying API. This is very hard for Microsoft to conceptualize, as they have all built their careers around owning standards. However, here Microsoft is in IBM's role: they want to sell ancillary products and services.
An open standard lets the manufacturers in on the party early, with the explicit knowledge that they'll be competing in a commodity market. In other words, it advances the time when *Pods become commidities. Given Microsoft's existing relationship with embedded hardware manufacturers, they would be well positioned to offer WINCE on these devices. It's also pretty key from driving sales of Media Center type devices - incompatibility with the iPod would really be a blow to the whole Media Center concept. It would also give the record companies their leverage back, because they would have more pricing control with multiple stores than if there's only a single road to digital music sales. The record companies will also have a very hard time understanding this, because they too want a standard they control lock stock and barrel.
As long as Microsoft's DRM is a "competing version" owned by Microsoft, hardware manufacturers know that they're vulnerable to a squeeze from Apple or Microsoft or both. With an open standard, they have at least a modicum of control.
For Microsoft, I think the hardest question will be organizing "up-stack" versus "down-stack" pieces - they've always sold more along a "buy the whole experience model" rather than an explicity value-add. This will be a very interesting fight.
Another thing this points out is just how much Microsoft resists open standards. As far as I can tell, the chief reason WMF was and is still widely supported in Windows is that it effectively emulates vector graphics. How many opportunities did Microsoft turn down to put in SVG, PDF, or similar support?
Fair enough, that is of course true as it's always been. But there still an air of mystery about sex among teenagers that is not there among 25 year-olds, and though I'm not a teenager now, I'd be hard pressed to believe that mystery's not still a big driver.
OK, let's say that for argument's sake I accept the notion that you were wise beyond your years at 12 years old, and were in fact prepared to have sex with a 25 year old. That still leaves wide open the question of why the hell that 25 year-old wants to have sex with a 12 year-old kid? And I again submit that barring a vanishingly few exceptions, most 12-year-olds are not prepared for an adult who is looking for something completely different than just physical intercourse.
At 16 and above, I certainly agree that the lines are much more blurry, though I still would want to ask hard questions of a 25 year old who's chasing after 16 year olds (and be ready for reasonable answers, a guy I know who's 24 is and has been dating a now-18 year old woman for several years, and it's a great match).
Your ageism argument is passionately argued, but there's a couple big problems. One is that there's a generally accepted principle that parents are the custodians of their children until some age of majority The whole child pornography discussion revolves around minors and filmed sexual acts. You may want to dispute when exactly the age of majority should be, and under what circumstances, but you'll have an awfully hard time arguing it as a principle. The notion that people under the age of majority have different rights follows from this principle, unlike your example of race. The second is that, informed by the principle of parental custodianship, it's hard to see how restricting a minor from having certain kinds of sex constitutes lasting damage to that person, as would denying someone employment.
I'd guess this is by virtue of being one of those topics that still exceeds polite conversation. Child abuse of any type is universally publicly deplored.
I can't agree with that. A child of 12 simply does not posssess the judgement (nothing to do with intelligence) to understand and accept the consequences of being filmed having sex with someone else, or themselves for that matter. Participation in porn goes way beyond put that thing in here, no matter how it's done. And it's hard to avoid asking the question: why does an adult want to see a child in sexual poses, when the adult knows or should know that children simply don't understand sex? Have you ever hooked up with someone a good bit younger than you? You know how they interpret everything you do with meanings far different and greater than what you intended? If an adult goes specifically looking for that kind of reaction, a la child porn, it's hard not to conclude that the adult is looking for control/power/manipulation through a sexual lens.
I believe you felt/feel that way. But if you look at the people who did do that, it generally turned out much worse than they expected. Sex is potent stuff, and it takes a fair bit of self-knowledge to learn how to handle the physical, emotional, and relationship elements of it, and make it something good for you. People learn to use sex for all different kinds of purposes in their lives, and as adults, they're welcome to whatever they do, but at 12 or 13, once again, someone simply doesn't have the judgment to make those distinctions. It's a tricky balance - no parent I know wants to stop their 12 year old from checking out members of the opposite sex, making out, maybe taking a few halting steps forward from there, but none that I know wants to find out their kids have been sleeping around just to prove they can have sex (which IMO is almost universally what drives teenage sex).
So yes, you can call the child pr0n scare a whipping boy, and a trojan horse for all kinds of government intrusion into people's privacy and expression, and I believe it is that. But that doesn't make child pornography itself a good thing.
One major security difference between Windows and *nix is the need for many userland programs to run as Administrator. Clearly this enlarges the attackable surface area of the Windows platform by allowing attacks via applications that run as Administrator. Presumably this accounts for the decision to have XP Home users be Administrators by default.
What is Microsoft's plan for eliminating this problem? How will Vista address the tasks that require higher levels of privileges? What restrictions does this place on normal users? How do focus group users respond to these restrictions? Has there been communication with applications vendors to ensure that they are making the necessary changes?
Whoa, take a breath. I seem to have pissed everyone off with a poor way of describing my three basic points:
.NET as a concrete example of how complete languages can be pretty durn useful in writing applications. And yes, I agree that Java applets ain't that language - they are unbearably slow to load and usually sucky to boot, thanks to Java's not-that-useable GUI toolkits, and the fact that they don't rely on the browser at all for rendering.
.NET in its present form isn't the applet-killer either, mainly due (as you say) to its tight coupling with Windows. C#, which is my only experience with .NET, gives me this funny feeling that Microsoft is conflicted between writing a truly component-oriented language like Java, and the old Windows lock-in.
1) Ain't it great that we're finally past the page-reload-required-for-everything stage of internet applications?
2) Wouldn't the web as application platform be better with a full programming language(s) on the client side, deployed in/by/with the browser? I merely brought up
3) The main change in architecture is towards invoking functions to populate individual widgets' data rather than retrieving a full layout + data page. Your point about SOAP vs. XMLHttpRequest is a good one - I've never understood why exactly one can't use SOAP calls to populate widgets' data, and I'd be interested to hear why this is?
Overall, I get the sense we pretty much agree that 1,2, and 3 are great progress.
I was further suggesting that once users get used to data coming at a widget level rather than a page level, there could well be momentum to do two things:
a) Move from apps written in scripting language to apps written in a more complete app language
b) turn the browser into the cross-platform rendering layer that Java does poorly
Finally, I agree with you that
Gmail may or may not be the best living example of AJAX. But the bottom line is that AJAX is an attempt to use a scripting language inside a document model. Conceptually not unlike using VBA to program a UI inside a Word document.
.NET are popular: they are far more complete and robust than a scripting language attached to a markup renderer. For example, how do you lock the behavior of your AJAX application so it cannot be modified by the end-user? The Asynchronous part of AJAX is the big advance. The XML part is a modern, smart and, basically standards-compliant way to do RMI. But it's hard to see how the JavaScript part can substitute for a full-fledged UI programming language.
The grandparent's point that most of that functionality should be pushed down below the scripting level is spot-on. There's a reason why UI development kits like
I still welcome our new AJAX overlords - they will get people doing what Java was originally supposed to do, which is to allow a browser to serve as a deployment platform for an application. Once end-users are used to that and demand it, people will gradually, as you and the grandparent point out, rewrite the browser to be a proper UI rendering toolkit.
Sure, C# as an individual language is better than Java. And certainly for any UI applications, C#/.NET rocks Java's world. Absolutely, Java should have a linker and "registry" of sorts - certainly this classpath nonsense is way too much work as it stands.
.NET. In Java, you call components which are add-on libraries (hence the incredible aggravation of 10 million directories, XML config files and classpath entries), any of which can be removed, re-implemented, locked down, etc. In fact, many of the enterprise (or close) grade solutions are open source (Tomcat, JBoss, Hibernate, Struts and everything else Jakarta), so you have complete implementation details to boot. With .NET, as with all Microsoft products, everything is "integrated", and all the documentation points you at the Microsoft solution. And typically you have little information about the architecture and internals of the .NET libraries provided by MS: no UML diagrams, no published interface specs, just tech docs, albeit thorough and well-written ones.
.NET will probably catch up in this department, but it will be up to Microsoft to push that kind of development in its tech docs, rather than "here's how build a form with all the logic inside widget event code". .NET is definitely a step in the right direction, and as a language C# definitely improves on many aspects of Java. But the overall .NET development ecosystem and the houses that do it have yet to get the kind of robust that you find in Java. Where Java was a giant leap forward in development languages because it brought OO, managed code compile-time safety to the masses, .NET is merely an evolutionary improvement on those concepts. Many of Java's defects could be remedied with a little standardization and simplification. It will be interesting to see how these two languages mature.
On the other hand, Java is still waaaay more modular for almost any server application than
Finally, the only thing that will make VB.NET programmers as good at making robust architectures as Java programmers is disciplined OO design of the type Java essentially mandates.
Agreed. The article author needs to dump the straw man and brush up on his historical narrative skills. The trends vs. individuals is an important part of any sort history. Of course there are large historical trends, and they put people in a position to do many of the important things they do. At the same time, there's no doubt individuals move history forward in big leaps, by intelligence, originality, insight, or sometimes just by luck. And there are a lot of mutually inclusive narratives about those events as they happen, most of which are neither right nor wrong. The view that the Open Source movement didn't draw on those individual people or the narratives they employ is plainly foolish, and he doesn't need to make that argument in order to introduce the notion that the internet opened new possibilites for pro-am interaction (not a new idea either, BTW). A movement can't succeed without a fertile environment for that movement, but it also can't succeed without leaders. How hard is that?
Mod TheFlyingGoat up! What you describe is pluralism with respect to science.
My main problem with ID is not that it posits any sort of alternate theory of how we came to be or how we ought to interpret the world around us - frankly I think there's a lot of value in that. It's that ID insists that that kind of learning and reflection be taught in lieu of science.
Science's "mission statement" has always been to apply analysis to understand the mechanics of how the natural phenoma work. Nothing more, nothing less. It does not and should not tell you how to interpret that, much less to ponder the imponderables: "why is there grief and death in the world?", "what is wisdom?", "is it right for me to fire an employee?", etc. I do think that the understanding provided by science can require some rethinking of how the precepts of religion are intepreted, and that troubles people who view the knowledge provided by religion as eternal and immutable.
I wouldn't dismiss the notion that religion can provide eternal or immutable knowledge, but I do believe a lot of this is an end run around pluralism. Pluralism in this case entails accepting someone saying, "I think a heavily scientific worldview is a bad one, and while I won't attempt to disprove it, I simply won't believe it". That's roughly akin to saying, "I can accept that you think Mohammed was the Messenger of God, even though I don't" and still think that we can agree on some moral precepts. But ID's basic goal is anti-pluralistic, it is to use present deficiencies in scientific knowledge to challenge anyone's use of science as a worldview.
I know I'm not the only one that finds the notion that science is a framework for all belief troubling, and I'm not even religious - I'm an agnostic. But I don't think the answer is to go advancing theories that say that science is flawed if it doesn't agree with a particular tenet of faith, and particularly not to represent those same theories as science.
Wow, this is a very succinct statement of one of the points I was struggling to make. I observe this non-componentization every time I used KDE - there are 5 or more programs shipped with KDE (on Suse 10) for viewing/editing images, and none make use of the same components. I'm all for variety, but that's ridiculous, and it's indicative of the fact that dropping in a library is still too hard. I also agree very strongly with your point on Java. Since Java is de facto the language of enterprise, code that comes out of such projects tends to be well designed and audited. Making it readily available for use in other software would a huge win.
All that said, I don't really agree that KDE vs. GNOME is a bad thing. I'm all for people putting together their own DE's as they please, as long as all the elements can play nice together.
Has anyone considered the notion that Mono should be implemented because a Common Language Runtime is actually a good idea?
.NET for a single reason - to get managed language support deep into their OS without supporting Java. Even a cursory learning of C# (what I've done) leaves no doubt that it is the marriage of Java with Microsoft's UI API talents. And I'd guess that while their non-support of Java does include a big lock-in component (after all, how hard would it have been to fix their JVM and add the features they wanted in C#?), it also is emblematic of the not-built-here mentality that's so aggravating.
.NET compatibility, but rather to take a page from Microsoft's playbook - emulate and learn from Microsoft's skill at designing a UI API, and then use it to provide broad managed language support - including good Java support. Sort of like marrying Java and .NET again, but making it easy to port from any major Unix toolkit: GTK, QT, Motif (uughgh), TCL, and especially web-friendly languages. Basically make it what Java should be UI-wise. For example, the DataSet support for client-side data operations that can be flushed back to the server via a set of transformations is a great idea. Implement stuff like that.
.NET. Frankly it will likely never be as peformant as .NET even on *nix - Microsoft spends a lot money and a lot of talent on optimization, but hardware can cover for merely adequate performance of the library.
Microsoft put a lot of effort into
I think Mono's best bet is not to chase
Mono will never run as quickly on Windows as