My iPhone didn't live through it, but when I got hit by a little old lady who ran a red light, my iPhone took a direct hit. I was thrown 20 feet and broke a half dozen ribs. I had a bruise up my left side from my knee to my shoulder -- with a non-bruised rectangle where the phone was. It was at ground zero of the impact, and may have absorbed enough impact to keep my thigh from breaking. iArmour.
I first used it in a Mac-based photo portrait studio in 1990/91, my last couple years in high school. They figured it was easy to pay the minimum-wage kid to figure out this new fangled stuff than the $50 an hour air-brush artist. I didn't have to remove a whole lot of bikinis from the boss's costal postcards before they realized there was a revolution afoot.
I got run over on my bicycle by a little old lady who ran a red light. My iPhone took the hit. It exploded in my pocket (and six of my ribs exploded in my chest, but that's another issue), and had to be replaced. I went to the AT&T outlet in which I had purchased the iPhone 3G, and the 3Gs had come out. It had been a 16Gb 3g, but the 3g was only available in 8Gb. So, to keep the same capacity I had to "upgrade" to a 16Gb 3Gs. AT&T charged me over $700 for the privilege of not downgrading. Of course, I was high on painkillers because I'd just been run over, so I wasn't in any condition to argue. That, and if I wanted to argue with anyone who mattered, I was going to need a phone.
MS is, essentially, the last to the table of those I mentioned, and that's a dangerous place to be, even with a superior product. All of the others (well, possibly excepting Maemo) already have mind share and already have, more importantly, applications. The Windows 7 phone will mystifyingly not support any legacy winmo apps, so it's starting off at a massive disadvantage.
Well, it looks like a Zune clone, which is to say that it looks like it's trying to do the iPod/iPhone/iPad trick. Microsoft was really one of the first at the table with a phone OS, but it's scraping its broccoli off to the dogs and hoping no one complains while it whips up something new. Unfortunately, it doesn't look terribly new nor is it building on a wildly successful platform -- the Zune may be getting better, but it's not getting better than its competitors and the niche market it has "carved out" is also caving in -- from last fall to last winter Zune market share slipped from a wee 4% to an abysmal 2%. That's a hell of a drop for one quarter. So if Windows Phone 7 does the same, Windows could find itself just passing even more broccoli to the dog.
You're putting words in his mouth. He said he didn't like Microsoft; he said he was using BSD. He didn't say he was using BSD because of Microsoft. It's sad that you would be so defensive that you have to read it another way.
Everyone short of those suffering from very, very serious mental defects, but especially those suffering from simply serious mental defects. I mean, if you're not drooling, you're responding to advertising and marketing.
Hey, I'm all for ending the war on drugs, but Coca-Cola was not trying to taste like cocaine, it was made with cocaine -- 9 mg per glass until 1909. Coca leaves, kola nut extract, carbonated water and sugar. I can understand why they'd drink it.
But what we have now is worthless to consume and not even that pleasant. The reason we consume it is because we're told we should. By advertising. Mmmm... Slurm!
No, it works on everybody. Scientific fact. Even misanthropes are a market. A niche market, but a market. You may not respond well to mass marketing, but you do respond to some sort of marketing.
We learn language and life skills through repetition. Advertising and marketing just build on those hooks in the human psyche.
You may use the brand of deodorant that your mother bought for you when you were a kid, but some day that brand won't be made anymore. Then you're going to have to make a choice. When you go to make that choice, you'll be open to advertising. You'll be assessing brands on how you feel about them based on their past advertisements. Oh, you might go to Consumer Reports or do weeks of comparisons from trial-size samples, but even in doing those things you've still been exposed to and influenced by advertising.
I'm not saying that we're all unthinking blobs who gesticulate to the biggest billboard. I am saying that advertising (or marketing) influences everyone. I don't care if you're buying a banana, a song or health insurance -- advertising influences people. (Do you like bananas? They only exist in American markets because of heavy advertising.)
Nothing draws a crowd like a crowd. A song repeated on the radio implies that a lot of people want to hear it. That implies to a listener that it must be important. When it becomes important, it becomes ingrained. When it becomes ingrained, it becomes actually popular.
It works like this for you, for me, and for everybody. It is the basis of advertising and marketing of everything.
It is why book publishers will buy back unsold copies of books from bookstores -- if they can get the bookstores to believe that people will buy a book, then the bookstores will buy it in bulk -- much easier to do when there is no risk. Those bulk sales are what "bestseller" lists are based on. So then you have some Sarah "Can't Write" Steele with a national best seller, even though there are huge piles of the books still on the shelf two weeks later. But it's a best seller, so some people will think maybe it has some merit and will wonder in and see the end-cap display, deeply discounted already, and buy it. That guy -- the guy who wanders in two weeks later -- is the guy they go through all the trouble for. He sees "bestseller" and buys it just to see what the fuss is about. Of course, there was no fuss. He was the first one to actually buy the book.
Coca-Cola actually tastes like sweet battery acid, but I love it. Why? Have a Coke. I'd like to buy the world a Coke. Coke is it. Repetition, repetition, repetition. Soft drink companies pay millions for the right to be the product sold in fast food chains and stadiums. They pay so they look like a popular choice. They pay to have a crowd. They pay so you'll buy.
If you hear a song and don't like it, that just means that you either 1) actually don't like it or 2) are unfamiliar with it. If 1), then there's not much repetition will do for you but annoy you. If 2), then repetition will make it grow on you. But if it doesn't drive you crazy, it will grow on you. Or maybe it will do both. But record companies don't care as long as you buy it.
Uh, yeah. So. How did you hear about that music that you want to buy? Pick it up from signals hitting your teeth? You heard about it from your friends, probably. Which is really all we're talking about. A ranking system is just a way to get information from people whom you may or may not know, but it's not that different than word-of-mouth.
Record companies do not own radio stations. Not in America, anyway. For a while they got around the law by paying third party companies ("independent music promoters") to create playlists for radio stations, and the radio stations then don't have to have a program manager. After a few multi-million dollar lawsuits in New York, the record labels stopped doing that and the radio stations stopped buying playlists from independent music promoters.
But what you have now is seriously homogenized music choices that lean towards hits of the past (safe bets to keep listeners) instead of challenging listeners with new music. So radio does very, very little to introduce new music. Less than it used to under the payola system, which was ridiculously weighted towards the established record labels instead of independent record labels or the actual musicians.
Yes, that's why iTunes is such an epic fail, costing Apple billions. Oh, wait...
Radio's strength is that DJs can repeatedly play crappy songs until you think you like them. Repetition, repetition, repetition. Ask any radio DJ. It's why payola is illegal in the U.S. -- record companies would pay radio stations to play the music which would in turn sell the albums. There was no gate keeper going on. There was no quality control, unless you consider "quality" to be the milquetoast slop that record companies want to sell.
If record companies built houses, they would build beige houses. Is beige a bad color for a house? No, it's neutral. It's not good and it's not bad. It's not challenging or interesting -- it's safe.
People are smart enough to look to a genre they like and start asking the crowds of people in that genre what is good.
Of course, how you're going to stop record companies from creating thousands of dummy accounts and flooding the ranking systems with bogus recommendations is a whole different problem.
Ratio errors and ridiculous hyperbole aside, when the Woz calls to tell you that you've got a problem, you've got a problem. It may be, ahem, 1 to 1,000,000, but there is still one you have to listen to.
Yeah, cause that can't be done by a widely accessable moderation system. Just imagine the anarchy that would happen if anyone could create anything and the only way people would know if it was any good is to look at how other people just like them ranked the work. Terrible.
Actually, my grandpa was at the real Normandy -- on Omaha Beach and through the front lines of the European invasion. You should see his reaction to my brother playing Medal of Honor. He just shakes his 90-year-old head and walks away.
I actually surprised myself last week when I went to listen to a public speaker and had to take notes on my iPhone. I wanted to take a few notes, but had a pen and no paper. So, thinking it probably wouldn't work out well but wasn't a great loss if it didn't, I pulled out my phone and started typing. As a former reporter and a person who takes official minutes at meetings, I'm used to trying to keep up with speakers with both keyboards and pen/paper. I'm not an avid texter or anything like that, but I was still able to -- without any sensory feedback -- take pretty good notes while mostly watching and listening to the speaker for nearly two hours. It's a little small to be my primary means of writing anything down, but I think a non-tactile keyboard probably isn't as horrible an idea as I used to think it was.
Someone should mod you up for this... this company's numbers are complete FUD. 60% of a small piece of a small piece of a small piece of a huge pie != 60% of a huge pie.
Unfortunately for Fox News, that would mean that they could not quote anyone or use excerpts from books or speeches without prior approval. He'll find that he can't have it both ways.
So you're saying that it takes up more space by default, but can, if one knows what one is doing, make it take up no more space... so what I said was not wrong.
It is TERRIBLE UI. Confusing, large, dumb, convoluted, and lacks any advantages. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
Here's the deal: If you can't copy or paste, then it's grayed out but in the same place every time. That tell's you that you can't do it. If it's only there in a contextual sense, then it's just not there. That doesn't tell the user that they were looking for it in the right place and it's just not available. It's like trying to go buy ice cream at 2 a.m. and discovering that there is an empty lot where the store was at 9 a.m. Will it be there at some other time? The user has no way of knowing.
I don't care about some talented UI person's idea of a great system. Because for every talented UI person there are 10,000 idiots who think they are talented UI people but just making a mess. And if you can't travel from app to app with the same UI, then you'll never be able to casually use any app on your system. The world is rife with examples of all of this. I guess, to make the clearest point possible, I'll point to any platform-neutral Java app ever released on Mac OS and say, "There's a UI that doesn't work as well as the standard OS UI, and notice how it isn't as popular as other apps that do the same thing in the standard OS UI." (This, I believe, is also a huge barrier to the widespread home-user adoption of Linux.) Even something as simple as OpenOffice moving the app "Preferences" to the Tools menu and calling it "Customize..." throws people. However, MS Office's Ribbon is even worse, and Ribbon is probably a contributing reason for why OpenOffice has seen so much recent growth.
And, no, it really doesn't make any more sense than Edit->Preferences (you are editing your preferences, after all). Copy and paste (like most things on an Apple app's Edit menu) are app (and system) wide, not just the document. And I can't even come up with a rationale for preferences to be under "Help." That just makes no sense.
Menus don't make sense on an iPhone and the like because you really do not have space for them. But that doesn't mean that the system doesn't have a standard UI. Breaking from the standard UI is the danger. It causes user confusion. It kills products and can kill platforms.
Menus exist for a reason (they are useful and organized), and the "Ribbon" takes up more space than the menus. The Ribbon's "Contextual" interface just means that things aren't in the same place all the time. It means that action A is not always in action A's spot, and sometimes action B is in action A's spot. It's just terrible. I guess that's the last I'll be using of Firefox.
No, I'm not reading too much into what you said. You said that the phrase "CO2 emissions *must* be reduced at *any* cost" "completely misrepresents the opinion of climatologists." No, it doesn't. Climatologists are basically saying, "Reduce CO2, or we are going to die." What cost would most people pay for not dying? Any cost.
And more farmland in northern Canada is not a net-positive outcome when added to rising sea levels and desertification. It's one step forward, two steps back.
And you still haven't shown a climatologist saying that there is some overall neutral or positive result of global warming.
The city of San Francisco says that it is a no data rights agreement. From the article:
Muni spokesperson Judson True says... that, no, Muni owns the data in question and that the public is, of course, entitled to access it. In fact, he went even further: Muni isn't just giving us all permission to access the data, they're also committed to finding ways to make it easier to get to it.
"That completely misrepresents the opinion of climatologists." Really? Like James E. Hansen, Nasa's lead climatologist. Oh, no, I guess not. How about atmospheric scientists from the University of Oxford? Hmm. No. Or maybe you mean Jonathan Overpeck, the director for the University of Arizona's Institute for the Study of Planet Earth who once said of climate change, "The results suggest the threshold is close to the end of this century, and it could come sooner. The Arctic is already warming much faster than we thought it would. To think we're not going to get 4 to 5 degrees warmer in another 50 years is wishful thinking." Oh, no, you don't mean him. How about Damon Matthews, from Concordia University in Canada, or Ken Caldeira, from the Carnegie Institution for Science, Stanford... no, not them. Perhaps you mean Roger Pielke Sr. of ClimateScience.org, who does at least say, "Policies that focus on CO2 by itself are ignoring definitive research results... that humans have a much broader influence on the climate system."
I've not found a climatologist who has said that raising CO2 levels are a good thing or even a neutral thing.
I can find meteorologists, economists, physicists, and many other very clever people who say such things, but if there are climatologists out there saying "Ah, nevermind the CO2, it's no big thing," then they are outnumbered 100 to 1 at best. Is that "far less" consensus than the rest? No, I don't think so. Maybe a little less. But I'm giving you a hypothetical. I still haven't even seen one of these mythical pro-CO2 climatologists of which you write. Please enlighten.
The developer, at least in the linked articles, does not claim that it has lost money on the system. It simply claims to own the data and that it has licensed the exclusive rights (from another private company) to develop with the data. The question becomes, "So, OK, you have paid to develop this data, but why? It is, after all, public data."
Slashdot Mirror
My iPhone didn't live through it, but when I got hit by a little old lady who ran a red light, my iPhone took a direct hit. I was thrown 20 feet and broke a half dozen ribs. I had a bruise up my left side from my knee to my shoulder -- with a non-bruised rectangle where the phone was. It was at ground zero of the impact, and may have absorbed enough impact to keep my thigh from breaking. iArmour.
I first used it in a Mac-based photo portrait studio in 1990/91, my last couple years in high school. They figured it was easy to pay the minimum-wage kid to figure out this new fangled stuff than the $50 an hour air-brush artist. I didn't have to remove a whole lot of bikinis from the boss's costal postcards before they realized there was a revolution afoot.
I got run over on my bicycle by a little old lady who ran a red light. My iPhone took the hit. It exploded in my pocket (and six of my ribs exploded in my chest, but that's another issue), and had to be replaced. I went to the AT&T outlet in which I had purchased the iPhone 3G, and the 3Gs had come out. It had been a 16Gb 3g, but the 3g was only available in 8Gb. So, to keep the same capacity I had to "upgrade" to a 16Gb 3Gs. AT&T charged me over $700 for the privilege of not downgrading. Of course, I was high on painkillers because I'd just been run over, so I wasn't in any condition to argue. That, and if I wanted to argue with anyone who mattered, I was going to need a phone.
So, yeah, maybe a few have been microwaved. Good.
MS is, essentially, the last to the table of those I mentioned, and that's a dangerous place to be, even with a superior product. All of the others (well, possibly excepting Maemo) already have mind share and already have, more importantly, applications. The Windows 7 phone will mystifyingly not support any legacy winmo apps, so it's starting off at a massive disadvantage.
Well, it looks like a Zune clone, which is to say that it looks like it's trying to do the iPod/iPhone/iPad trick. Microsoft was really one of the first at the table with a phone OS, but it's scraping its broccoli off to the dogs and hoping no one complains while it whips up something new. Unfortunately, it doesn't look terribly new nor is it building on a wildly successful platform -- the Zune may be getting better, but it's not getting better than its competitors and the niche market it has "carved out" is also caving in -- from last fall to last winter Zune market share slipped from a wee 4% to an abysmal 2%. That's a hell of a drop for one quarter. So if Windows Phone 7 does the same, Windows could find itself just passing even more broccoli to the dog.
You're putting words in his mouth. He said he didn't like Microsoft; he said he was using BSD. He didn't say he was using BSD because of Microsoft. It's sad that you would be so defensive that you have to read it another way.
Everyone short of those suffering from very, very serious mental defects, but especially those suffering from simply serious mental defects. I mean, if you're not drooling, you're responding to advertising and marketing.
Hey, I'm all for ending the war on drugs, but Coca-Cola was not trying to taste like cocaine, it was made with cocaine -- 9 mg per glass until 1909. Coca leaves, kola nut extract, carbonated water and sugar. I can understand why they'd drink it.
But what we have now is worthless to consume and not even that pleasant. The reason we consume it is because we're told we should. By advertising. Mmmm... Slurm!
No, it works on everybody. Scientific fact. Even misanthropes are a market. A niche market, but a market. You may not respond well to mass marketing, but you do respond to some sort of marketing.
We learn language and life skills through repetition. Advertising and marketing just build on those hooks in the human psyche.
You may use the brand of deodorant that your mother bought for you when you were a kid, but some day that brand won't be made anymore. Then you're going to have to make a choice. When you go to make that choice, you'll be open to advertising. You'll be assessing brands on how you feel about them based on their past advertisements. Oh, you might go to Consumer Reports or do weeks of comparisons from trial-size samples, but even in doing those things you've still been exposed to and influenced by advertising.
I'm not saying that we're all unthinking blobs who gesticulate to the biggest billboard. I am saying that advertising (or marketing) influences everyone. I don't care if you're buying a banana, a song or health insurance -- advertising influences people. (Do you like bananas? They only exist in American markets because of heavy advertising.)
Nothing draws a crowd like a crowd. A song repeated on the radio implies that a lot of people want to hear it. That implies to a listener that it must be important. When it becomes important, it becomes ingrained. When it becomes ingrained, it becomes actually popular.
It works like this for you, for me, and for everybody. It is the basis of advertising and marketing of everything.
It is why book publishers will buy back unsold copies of books from bookstores -- if they can get the bookstores to believe that people will buy a book, then the bookstores will buy it in bulk -- much easier to do when there is no risk. Those bulk sales are what "bestseller" lists are based on. So then you have some Sarah "Can't Write" Steele with a national best seller, even though there are huge piles of the books still on the shelf two weeks later. But it's a best seller, so some people will think maybe it has some merit and will wonder in and see the end-cap display, deeply discounted already, and buy it. That guy -- the guy who wanders in two weeks later -- is the guy they go through all the trouble for. He sees "bestseller" and buys it just to see what the fuss is about. Of course, there was no fuss. He was the first one to actually buy the book.
Coca-Cola actually tastes like sweet battery acid, but I love it. Why? Have a Coke. I'd like to buy the world a Coke. Coke is it. Repetition, repetition, repetition. Soft drink companies pay millions for the right to be the product sold in fast food chains and stadiums. They pay so they look like a popular choice. They pay to have a crowd. They pay so you'll buy.
If you hear a song and don't like it, that just means that you either 1) actually don't like it or 2) are unfamiliar with it. If 1), then there's not much repetition will do for you but annoy you. If 2), then repetition will make it grow on you. But if it doesn't drive you crazy, it will grow on you. Or maybe it will do both. But record companies don't care as long as you buy it.
Uh, yeah. So. How did you hear about that music that you want to buy? Pick it up from signals hitting your teeth? You heard about it from your friends, probably. Which is really all we're talking about. A ranking system is just a way to get information from people whom you may or may not know, but it's not that different than word-of-mouth.
Record companies do not own radio stations. Not in America, anyway. For a while they got around the law by paying third party companies ("independent music promoters") to create playlists for radio stations, and the radio stations then don't have to have a program manager. After a few multi-million dollar lawsuits in New York, the record labels stopped doing that and the radio stations stopped buying playlists from independent music promoters.
But what you have now is seriously homogenized music choices that lean towards hits of the past (safe bets to keep listeners) instead of challenging listeners with new music. So radio does very, very little to introduce new music. Less than it used to under the payola system, which was ridiculously weighted towards the established record labels instead of independent record labels or the actual musicians.
Yes, that's why iTunes is such an epic fail, costing Apple billions. Oh, wait...
Radio's strength is that DJs can repeatedly play crappy songs until you think you like them. Repetition, repetition, repetition. Ask any radio DJ. It's why payola is illegal in the U.S. -- record companies would pay radio stations to play the music which would in turn sell the albums. There was no gate keeper going on. There was no quality control, unless you consider "quality" to be the milquetoast slop that record companies want to sell.
If record companies built houses, they would build beige houses. Is beige a bad color for a house? No, it's neutral. It's not good and it's not bad. It's not challenging or interesting -- it's safe.
People are smart enough to look to a genre they like and start asking the crowds of people in that genre what is good.
Of course, how you're going to stop record companies from creating thousands of dummy accounts and flooding the ranking systems with bogus recommendations is a whole different problem.
Tru dat.
Ratio errors and ridiculous hyperbole aside, when the Woz calls to tell you that you've got a problem, you've got a problem. It may be, ahem, 1 to 1,000,000, but there is still one you have to listen to.
Yeah, cause that can't be done by a widely accessable moderation system. Just imagine the anarchy that would happen if anyone could create anything and the only way people would know if it was any good is to look at how other people just like them ranked the work. Terrible.
Actually, my grandpa was at the real Normandy -- on Omaha Beach and through the front lines of the European invasion. You should see his reaction to my brother playing Medal of Honor. He just shakes his 90-year-old head and walks away.
I actually surprised myself last week when I went to listen to a public speaker and had to take notes on my iPhone. I wanted to take a few notes, but had a pen and no paper. So, thinking it probably wouldn't work out well but wasn't a great loss if it didn't, I pulled out my phone and started typing. As a former reporter and a person who takes official minutes at meetings, I'm used to trying to keep up with speakers with both keyboards and pen/paper. I'm not an avid texter or anything like that, but I was still able to -- without any sensory feedback -- take pretty good notes while mostly watching and listening to the speaker for nearly two hours. It's a little small to be my primary means of writing anything down, but I think a non-tactile keyboard probably isn't as horrible an idea as I used to think it was.
Someone should mod you up for this ... this company's numbers are complete FUD. 60% of a small piece of a small piece of a small piece of a huge pie != 60% of a huge pie.
Unfortunately for Fox News, that would mean that they could not quote anyone or use excerpts from books or speeches without prior approval. He'll find that he can't have it both ways.
So you're saying that it takes up more space by default, but can, if one knows what one is doing, make it take up no more space ... so what I said was not wrong.
It is TERRIBLE UI. Confusing, large, dumb, convoluted, and lacks any advantages. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
Here's the deal: If you can't copy or paste, then it's grayed out but in the same place every time. That tell's you that you can't do it. If it's only there in a contextual sense, then it's just not there. That doesn't tell the user that they were looking for it in the right place and it's just not available. It's like trying to go buy ice cream at 2 a.m. and discovering that there is an empty lot where the store was at 9 a.m. Will it be there at some other time? The user has no way of knowing.
I don't care about some talented UI person's idea of a great system. Because for every talented UI person there are 10,000 idiots who think they are talented UI people but just making a mess. And if you can't travel from app to app with the same UI, then you'll never be able to casually use any app on your system. The world is rife with examples of all of this. I guess, to make the clearest point possible, I'll point to any platform-neutral Java app ever released on Mac OS and say, "There's a UI that doesn't work as well as the standard OS UI, and notice how it isn't as popular as other apps that do the same thing in the standard OS UI." (This, I believe, is also a huge barrier to the widespread home-user adoption of Linux.) Even something as simple as OpenOffice moving the app "Preferences" to the Tools menu and calling it "Customize ..." throws people. However, MS Office's Ribbon is even worse, and Ribbon is probably a contributing reason for why OpenOffice has seen so much recent growth.
And, no, it really doesn't make any more sense than Edit->Preferences (you are editing your preferences, after all). Copy and paste (like most things on an Apple app's Edit menu) are app (and system) wide, not just the document. And I can't even come up with a rationale for preferences to be under "Help." That just makes no sense.
Menus don't make sense on an iPhone and the like because you really do not have space for them. But that doesn't mean that the system doesn't have a standard UI. Breaking from the standard UI is the danger. It causes user confusion. It kills products and can kill platforms.
Menus exist for a reason (they are useful and organized), and the "Ribbon" takes up more space than the menus. The Ribbon's "Contextual" interface just means that things aren't in the same place all the time. It means that action A is not always in action A's spot, and sometimes action B is in action A's spot. It's just terrible. I guess that's the last I'll be using of Firefox.
No, I'm not reading too much into what you said. You said that the phrase "CO2 emissions *must* be reduced at *any* cost" "completely misrepresents the opinion of climatologists." No, it doesn't. Climatologists are basically saying, "Reduce CO2, or we are going to die." What cost would most people pay for not dying? Any cost.
And more farmland in northern Canada is not a net-positive outcome when added to rising sea levels and desertification. It's one step forward, two steps back.
And you still haven't shown a climatologist saying that there is some overall neutral or positive result of global warming.
"That completely misrepresents the opinion of climatologists." Really? Like James E. Hansen, Nasa's lead climatologist. Oh, no, I guess not. How about atmospheric scientists from the University of Oxford? Hmm. No. Or maybe you mean Jonathan Overpeck, the director for the University of Arizona's Institute for the Study of Planet Earth who once said of climate change, "The results suggest the threshold is close to the end of this century, and it could come sooner. The Arctic is already warming much faster than we thought it would. To think we're not going to get 4 to 5 degrees warmer in another 50 years is wishful thinking." Oh, no, you don't mean him. How about Damon Matthews, from Concordia University in Canada, or Ken Caldeira, from the Carnegie Institution for Science, Stanford ... no, not them. Perhaps you mean Roger Pielke Sr. of ClimateScience.org, who does at least say, "Policies that focus on CO2 by itself are ignoring definitive research results ... that humans have a much broader influence on the climate system."
I've not found a climatologist who has said that raising CO2 levels are a good thing or even a neutral thing.
I can find meteorologists, economists, physicists, and many other very clever people who say such things, but if there are climatologists out there saying "Ah, nevermind the CO2, it's no big thing," then they are outnumbered 100 to 1 at best. Is that "far less" consensus than the rest? No, I don't think so. Maybe a little less. But I'm giving you a hypothetical. I still haven't even seen one of these mythical pro-CO2 climatologists of which you write. Please enlighten.
The developer, at least in the linked articles, does not claim that it has lost money on the system. It simply claims to own the data and that it has licensed the exclusive rights (from another private company) to develop with the data. The question becomes, "So, OK, you have paid to develop this data, but why? It is, after all, public data."