A linux distribution contains much more than the operating system kernel, though. If you want to compare, take a typical Windows install, add Office, add some security tools, add some games, etc etc.
The point is, take any 50M SLOC subset of a linux distro, and compare the complexity in terms of the number of interdependencies, with the Windows codebase (or Office, or any other MS software). The comparison would be similar to a subway system versus the space shuttle. Which one is more reliable?
How is the free software/open source community dealing with the changing landscape?
(Is e.g. Linux heading into the same problems as Windows?)
Well, F/OSS grew up with the internet, for us the landscape isn't changing, rather it is tending to validate the whole approach as being essentially correct. Microsoft have always had a problem with the way they design software, as monolithic intertwined, horrendously complex packages. In the past, the marketing (and black-ops?) departments at Microsoft were enough to gloss over these problems, but as the complexity of all software systems increases, the Microsoft approach must become unworkable. The stupid car analogy would be trying to build a modern hybrid by progressively adding bits onto a model-T until it looks, to an outside observer, like a Prius.
Due to its essentially distributed nature, F/OSS software is inherently modular. This is its greatest strength, but also a problem as everyone can (and does!) choose their own slightly different way of integrating all of the parts together.
What is the future of free/open source software in a world with more and more advertisement financed, huge server based services?
Hmm, there may be a few such large servers around, but are they really going to dominate the industry? What is stopping a proliferation of home users running their own servers? 3 things: NAT, poor security, and asymmetric connections with poor upload rates. The solutions to this are, respectively, IPv6, anything-other-than-Microsoft, and customer pressure on ISP's (and to some extent technology will solve this problem anyway, as broadband rates improve generally the class of services that can be run on the bandwidth of a basic connection will increase).
Don't you think that the fact that all search engines are proprietary and closed source is as bad as the situation in the OS-sector before Linux?
Yes, it is unfortunate. It would be great if google's searching stuff was all Free Software. Imagine, instead of linking to a google.com search on your website, just use a mod_google extension to the webserver to automatically keep an up-to-date index of your website stored locally. But the history of Free Software suggests that eventually, someone will write a free replacement and, eventually, it will come to work better than the proprietary alternatives. But it isn't clear that something like a distributed database replacement for google is even technically possible, although in niche areas it surely is (for example: scholar.google.com is pretty good for searching journal articles - but this is something a consortium of universities could get together and provide themselves).
MS is searching new ways, but what are the visions of the FOSS community?
F/OSS doesn't need a vision. While programmers scratch their itch and write code, artists and designers improve the look and usability, and end-users give feedback, F/OSS will grow. It isn't any more complicated than that.
Ahh the insightful clueless;-) What do you think is the main force that causes the atoms in the bullet to repel the atoms in the gel?
I'll give you a hint: If they got really close, it would be the strong nuclear force repelling the nucleus of the two atoms. But, they never get that close. Another hint: it isn't the weak nuclear force. Yet another hint: it isn't gravity. Now, how many fundamental forces are there?
Importantly, while 15 seconds is probably not enough time for something like a high speed train to stop, I'd much rather be travelling at 50mph rather than 200mph when the earthquake hits;-)
Since when is science dependent on a majority vote ?
It isn't. I was merely replying to a troll claiming the majority opinion was divided on global warming, when in fact it is not.
But really, they fall into different classes. The arguments against plate techtonics followed, essentially, the fallacy of argument from disbelief. Some of the arguments against global warming fall into the same category, but certainly none of the arguments for it do.
Right, but McIntyre and McKitrick were arguing that that particular study was flawed, a conclusion that may well be correct. That doesn't say anything about the truth or otherwise of global warming itself, and it certainly isn't any evidence that global warming is not happening. Indeed, McIntyre and McKitrick explicitly reject any such conclusion. McIntyre's website is devoted to the admirable task of verifying published data and taking the authors' responsible to task for sloppy work - which happens occasionally in all fields; the poor quality of typical refereeing in most/all peer-reviewed journals doesn't help[*]. From McIntyre's FAQ:
Does your work disprove global warming?
We have not made such a claim. There is considerable evidence that in many locations the late 20th century was generally warmer than the mid-19th century. However, there is also considerable evidence that in parts of the Northern Hemisphere, the mid-19th century was exceptionally cold. We think that a more interesting issue is whether the late 20th century was warmer than periods of similar length in the 11th century. We ourselves do not opine on this matter, other than to say that the MBH results relied upon so heavily by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its 2001 report are invalid.
[*] at least im my own field this is true; I have no doubt it applies everywhere. It is essentially a symptom of the 'publish or perish' push to produce N publications per year or lose funding. This itself is a side-effect of putting bean counters in charge of science funding - they don't know anything about the science itself so the only criteria they use is the raw number of publications. In the push for quantity the quality inevitably goes down, so as well as having more papers to referee, the job of refereeing each paper is harder because it is more difficult to sort out the main results from the hastily prepared and sloppy writing.
Well, this is on the same level as getting tobacco companies to stop funding reports claiming that smoking has no negative health effects. Just as in the case of the tobacco companies, such 'reports' contradict their own scientists' research.
Did you notice that Exxon is alone among the big oil corps in not investing heavily in alternative energy research in the last decade? They are morally corrupt and running scared.
Planck of course, like Einstein, fully accepted quantum mechanics as the theory and especially convincing experimental progress evolved.
Of course. Not believing that a theory is ultimately correct is a quite different thing to denying overwhelming experimental evidence.
Except for that wee little thing called the Bohr correspondence principle?
But that has very little meaning. It just says what is observationally obvious: that at macroscopic scales the laws of physics become indistinguishable from classical physics. It gives no clues as to the microscopic mechanism of how this correspondence arises. Schroedinger's cat was an example originally used specifically to point out this dichotomy.
The reality of the physics was that quantum mechanics and classical mechanics were successfully reconciled; large quantum number limits go to known classical mechanics.
Not really, there are still a large gap between the well-understood parts of quantum mechanics and classical mechanics. Measurement theory, for example. Is it an actual physical event (requiring modifications to the Schroedinger equation - Roger Penrose among others subscribe to this view) or is it, as you suggest, explainable as decoherence (which is essentially equivalent to Everett's "many-worlds" interpretation). For another example: exactly how does chaos manifest itself in quantum systems? There is a clearly recognisable phenomena of quantum chaos, but it doesn't have much relationship to the classical counterpart. In particular, the Schroedinger equation is linear; phenomena such as exponential divergence of nearby trajectories are formally impossible.
Also, your statement that large quantum number limits go to known classical mechanics is problematic. For the spin, for example, this simply isn't true. There is a good article from Penrose about this somewere, if I can find it I'll post a link.
True, quantum electrodynamics, which does reconcile completely Maxwell's electrodynamics and quantum mechanics, was fairly well established during the mid 20's. But Planck retired in 1926, I don't know how much a part in this Planck played personally. As far as I know, it wasn't much.
I am by no means a climatologist, but I have been following the debate and I am pretty sure that this value (14 deg F) is at the extreme side of the end of century prediction.
Yes, that is at the extreme side of the global prediction. But it is also known that warming will not affect all of the planet equally, the poles will increase in temperature far more than the equatorial regions.
A agree with your comment about grouping the "declining or unknown" results together, that is just sloppy reporting and should have been picked up by the referees. A first year student would get a poor grade for a lab report if they made statements like that.
Not really. Planck pointed out that the blackbody radiation law can be derived, on the assumption that the permissible energies of radiation are not continuous, but discrete. (if you have some basic math, the idea is to replace the integral, which diverges in the high frequency limit, with a discrete summation over integral multiples of the basic frequency unit (Planck's constant), and it no longer diverges). Although it was enough to get him a well-deserved Nobel prize, Planck didn't give any explanation for this phenomena, and as far as I know he didn't even believe in quantum mechanics and tried for the remainder of his life to somehow reconcile his discoveries with classical mechanics, which turned out to be impossible.
From your own Wikipedia link:
However, Einstein's hypothesis of light quanta (photons), based on Philipp Lenard's 1902 discovery of the photoelectric effect, was initially rejected by Planck; he was unwilling to discard completely Maxwell's theory of electrodynamics. "The theory of light would be thrown back not by decades, but by centuries, into the age when Christian Huygens dared to fight against the mighty emission theory of Isaac Newton..."
Well done, that post is a masterpiece of exactly the kind of disinformation that is causing all the problems in this debate!
You overplayed you hand slightly though, in the last paragraph. Until that point, it was the perfect troll: biased, but factually correct and completely plausible. But then you blew it with a statement that is simply wrong! The opposite is true: there is an overwhelming concensus among climatologists that global warming is real, and humans are contributing to it. There is some debate as to whether there are other factors that are contributing (solar output etc), but that is just window dressing on the main result.
It might be true that much of journalism has lost its way, to some extent, in ignoring facts in preference to some imagined 'balance' (which usually amounts to equal time: someone explains the real facts, then equal time is given to someone else who is lying through their teeth). But accepting this situation with a defeatest attitude is not going to help. If this continues, in the long term objective reality simply won't exist anymore - it is obvious that some important decisions are being made by our leaders on the basis of flawed logic. Do you really want that? Can you imagine what the future will look like?
Well, unless the comment was a total fake, the weblink is for a different person. He claims in the post to have lost his tenure, which would imply he once had a rather senior position as a university professor. But Ryan Bray says "I am 24 years old. I go to school at Mesa Junior College in San Diego, CA. I am majoring in History."
Except you missed out the important bit: the thorough debunking of Monckton's article on realclimate.org.
Even a non-expert can see that there are real problems with Monckton's article. The `smoking gun' Battle of the Graphs compares global average temperatures versus with temperatures in Europe alone, for example. It is known that the European `little ice age' was caused by slowing of the Gulf Stream current (although why the current slowed down is still a mystery), which makes this effect very specific to Europe and certainly does not contractict other studies that measure global climate at the same period that don't show a similar cooling.
For another example, his claim that a Chinese naval squadron sailed around the north pole in 1421 and found no ice, has been debunked by historians for a long time. Did you notice, even the timing of this event (1421) falls within the European Little Ice Age cooling period he shows in the graph just above it? It seems he didn't even notice his own contradiction!
That is really interesting. In which field did you work? In my field (theoretical condensed matter physics) claims that something is not so important are very hard to judge. It tends to be either testable via an experiment (and therefore right or wrong, in which case the importance is obvious), or untestable, in which case the importance is indeterminate but needs to be judged on its theoretical usefulness.
But I can imagine that a field of researchers, as a collective group, would be rather hostile to a claim that their entire field of study is not important. If you have built your career on a particular study, and it turns out that that study doesn't mean what you originally thought it did, then it is a life-changing moment. Did you plan for it? ie. were you planning to then move into some related (or unrelated) field? If not, how were you going to avoid going down with the sinking ship?
I know that there have been many examples of this in the past, but I am struggling to remember even a single instance just now: science is very harsh in that research that does not end up forming the body of work upon which future research depends, is very quickly forgotten.
There is of course a very large potential catastrophe looming, if it turns out in the end that string theory is a dead end. That would account for almost an entire generation of particle physicists!
LOL, you are new at this internet thing, right? Exactly how far do you think you have to go to find claims that globalwarmingisahoax?
Pointing out that the overwhelming majority of such articles in the popular press have zero scientific credibility is merely a public service, and it has NOTHING to do with what the BBC is looking for. The BCC are looking for real, scientific arguments against global warming that have been suppressed by the scientific establishment. You won't find it on some internet tabloid, if it exists at all. It is more likely to be on the homepage of some fringe university researcher in danger of getting fired.
Right, but acute poisoning is completely different from cancer. A cancer can form from just a single mutation. It doesn't come from an accumulation of anything, rather whenever you smoke a cigarette you have a small chance of a cancer forming as a direct result of that cigarette; the risk each time is miniscule, but summed over a lifetime it becomes appreciable.
Possible, but the amounts are so miniscule and so easy to hide that there are plenty of other, safer, ways to smuggle the stuff if you wanted to. You could hide it in practically anything.
'It looks to me at about the same level as I have a sensor on my garage door at the lower hinge... and the raccoons are eating it. So I think of the brainstorm of putting it on the upper hinge.'
I havn't visited her old rooms (in the basement of the Sorbonne) myself, but I've met a few people who have. If you turn off all the lights, you can see the walls, glowing in the dark.
They had a big scare a few years ago, when they were auctioning off some old furniture. Turned out some of it dangerously radioactive.
Slashdot Mirror
A linux distribution contains much more than the operating system kernel, though. If you want to compare, take a typical Windows install, add Office, add some security tools, add some games, etc etc.
The point is, take any 50M SLOC subset of a linux distro, and compare the complexity in terms of the number of interdependencies, with the Windows codebase (or Office, or any other MS software). The comparison would be similar to a subway system versus the space shuttle. Which one is more reliable?
Well, F/OSS grew up with the internet, for us the landscape isn't changing, rather it is tending to validate the whole approach as being essentially correct. Microsoft have always had a problem with the way they design software, as monolithic intertwined, horrendously complex packages. In the past, the marketing (and black-ops?) departments at Microsoft were enough to gloss over these problems, but as the complexity of all software systems increases, the Microsoft approach must become unworkable. The stupid car analogy would be trying to build a modern hybrid by progressively adding bits onto a model-T until it looks, to an outside observer, like a Prius.
Due to its essentially distributed nature, F/OSS software is inherently modular. This is its greatest strength, but also a problem as everyone can (and does!) choose their own slightly different way of integrating all of the parts together.
Hmm, there may be a few such large servers around, but are they really going to dominate the industry? What is stopping a proliferation of home users running their own servers? 3 things: NAT, poor security, and asymmetric connections with poor upload rates. The solutions to this are, respectively, IPv6, anything-other-than-Microsoft, and customer pressure on ISP's (and to some extent technology will solve this problem anyway, as broadband rates improve generally the class of services that can be run on the bandwidth of a basic connection will increase).
Yes, it is unfortunate. It would be great if google's searching stuff was all Free Software. Imagine, instead of linking to a google.com search on your website, just use a mod_google extension to the webserver to automatically keep an up-to-date index of your website stored locally. But the history of Free Software suggests that eventually, someone will write a free replacement and, eventually, it will come to work better than the proprietary alternatives. But it isn't clear that something like a distributed database replacement for google is even technically possible, although in niche areas it surely is (for example: scholar.google.com is pretty good for searching journal articles - but this is something a consortium of universities could get together and provide themselves).
F/OSS doesn't need a vision. While programmers scratch their itch and write code, artists and designers improve the look and usability, and end-users give feedback, F/OSS will grow. It isn't any more complicated than that.
Ahh the insightful clueless ;-) What do you think is the main force that causes the atoms in the bullet to repel the atoms in the gel?
I'll give you a hint: If they got really close, it would be the strong nuclear force repelling the nucleus of the two atoms. But, they never get that close. Another hint: it isn't the weak nuclear force. Yet another hint: it isn't gravity. Now, how many fundamental forces are there?
Importantly, while 15 seconds is probably not enough time for something like a high speed train to stop, I'd much rather be travelling at 50mph rather than 200mph when the earthquake hits ;-)
I take it, logic was never your strong point?
Umm yeah, whatever. But that sub-thread was nothing to do with climate research.
It isn't. I was merely replying to a troll claiming the majority opinion was divided on global warming, when in fact it is not.
But really, they fall into different classes. The arguments against plate techtonics followed, essentially, the fallacy of argument from disbelief. Some of the arguments against global warming fall into the same category, but certainly none of the arguments for it do.
Right, but McIntyre and McKitrick were arguing that that particular study was flawed, a conclusion that may well be correct. That doesn't say anything about the truth or otherwise of global warming itself, and it certainly isn't any evidence that global warming is not happening. Indeed, McIntyre and McKitrick explicitly reject any such conclusion. McIntyre's website is devoted to the admirable task of verifying published data and taking the authors' responsible to task for sloppy work - which happens occasionally in all fields; the poor quality of typical refereeing in most/all peer-reviewed journals doesn't help[*]. From McIntyre's FAQ:
[*] at least im my own field this is true; I have no doubt it applies everywhere. It is essentially a symptom of the 'publish or perish' push to produce N publications per year or lose funding. This itself is a side-effect of putting bean counters in charge of science funding - they don't know anything about the science itself so the only criteria they use is the raw number of publications. In the push for quantity the quality inevitably goes down, so as well as having more papers to referee, the job of refereeing each paper is harder because it is more difficult to sort out the main results from the hastily prepared and sloppy writing.
Ahh, I missed that detail! Thanks.
Well, this is on the same level as getting tobacco companies to stop funding reports claiming that smoking has no negative health effects. Just as in the case of the tobacco companies, such 'reports' contradict their own scientists' research.
Did you notice that Exxon is alone among the big oil corps in not investing heavily in alternative energy research in the last decade? They are morally corrupt and running scared.
Of course. Not believing that a theory is ultimately correct is a quite different thing to denying overwhelming experimental evidence.
But that has very little meaning. It just says what is observationally obvious: that at macroscopic scales the laws of physics become indistinguishable from classical physics. It gives no clues as to the microscopic mechanism of how this correspondence arises. Schroedinger's cat was an example originally used specifically to point out this dichotomy.
Not really, there are still a large gap between the well-understood parts of quantum mechanics and classical mechanics. Measurement theory, for example. Is it an actual physical event (requiring modifications to the Schroedinger equation - Roger Penrose among others subscribe to this view) or is it, as you suggest, explainable as decoherence (which is essentially equivalent to Everett's "many-worlds" interpretation). For another example: exactly how does chaos manifest itself in quantum systems? There is a clearly recognisable phenomena of quantum chaos, but it doesn't have much relationship to the classical counterpart. In particular, the Schroedinger equation is linear; phenomena such as exponential divergence of nearby trajectories are formally impossible.
Also, your statement that large quantum number limits go to known classical mechanics is problematic. For the spin, for example, this simply isn't true. There is a good article from Penrose about this somewere, if I can find it I'll post a link.
True, quantum electrodynamics, which does reconcile completely Maxwell's electrodynamics and quantum mechanics, was fairly well established during the mid 20's. But Planck retired in 1926, I don't know how much a part in this Planck played personally. As far as I know, it wasn't much.
It is pretty hard to argue that scientists who can get published in Environmental Geology are being repressed.
But I wouldn't take too much notice of that web site, it is mostly (if not entirely) propaganda.
Yes, that is at the extreme side of the global prediction. But it is also known that warming will not affect all of the planet equally, the poles will increase in temperature far more than the equatorial regions.
A agree with your comment about grouping the "declining or unknown" results together, that is just sloppy reporting and should have been picked up by the referees. A first year student would get a poor grade for a lab report if they made statements like that.
Not really. Planck pointed out that the blackbody radiation law can be derived, on the assumption that the permissible energies of radiation are not continuous, but discrete. (if you have some basic math, the idea is to replace the integral, which diverges in the high frequency limit, with a discrete summation over integral multiples of the basic frequency unit (Planck's constant), and it no longer diverges). Although it was enough to get him a well-deserved Nobel prize, Planck didn't give any explanation for this phenomena, and as far as I know he didn't even believe in quantum mechanics and tried for the remainder of his life to somehow reconcile his discoveries with classical mechanics, which turned out to be impossible.
From your own Wikipedia link:
Well done, that post is a masterpiece of exactly the kind of disinformation that is causing all the problems in this debate!
You overplayed you hand slightly though, in the last paragraph. Until that point, it was the perfect troll: biased, but factually correct and completely plausible. But then you blew it with a statement that is simply wrong! The opposite is true: there is an overwhelming concensus among climatologists that global warming is real, and humans are contributing to it. There is some debate as to whether there are other factors that are contributing (solar output etc), but that is just window dressing on the main result.
It might be true that much of journalism has lost its way, to some extent, in ignoring facts in preference to some imagined 'balance' (which usually amounts to equal time: someone explains the real facts, then equal time is given to someone else who is lying through their teeth). But accepting this situation with a defeatest attitude is not going to help. If this continues, in the long term objective reality simply won't exist anymore - it is obvious that some important decisions are being made by our leaders on the basis of flawed logic. Do you really want that? Can you imagine what the future will look like?
Well, unless the comment was a total fake, the weblink is for a different person. He claims in the post to have lost his tenure, which would imply he once had a rather senior position as a university professor. But Ryan Bray says "I am 24 years old. I go to school at Mesa Junior College in San Diego, CA. I am majoring in History."
Except you missed out the important bit: the thorough debunking of Monckton's article on realclimate.org.
Even a non-expert can see that there are real problems with Monckton's article. The `smoking gun' Battle of the Graphs compares global average temperatures versus with temperatures in Europe alone, for example. It is known that the European `little ice age' was caused by slowing of the Gulf Stream current (although why the current slowed down is still a mystery), which makes this effect very specific to Europe and certainly does not contractict other studies that measure global climate at the same period that don't show a similar cooling.
For another example, his claim that a Chinese naval squadron sailed around the north pole in 1421 and found no ice, has been debunked by historians for a long time. Did you notice, even the timing of this event (1421) falls within the European Little Ice Age cooling period he shows in the graph just above it? It seems he didn't even notice his own contradiction!
That is really interesting. In which field did you work? In my field (theoretical condensed matter physics) claims that something is not so important are very hard to judge. It tends to be either testable via an experiment (and therefore right or wrong, in which case the importance is obvious), or untestable, in which case the importance is indeterminate but needs to be judged on its theoretical usefulness.
But I can imagine that a field of researchers, as a collective group, would be rather hostile to a claim that their entire field of study is not important. If you have built your career on a particular study, and it turns out that that study doesn't mean what you originally thought it did, then it is a life-changing moment. Did you plan for it? ie. were you planning to then move into some related (or unrelated) field? If not, how were you going to avoid going down with the sinking ship?
I know that there have been many examples of this in the past, but I am struggling to remember even a single instance just now: science is very harsh in that research that does not end up forming the body of work upon which future research depends, is very quickly forgotten.
There is of course a very large potential catastrophe looming, if it turns out in the end that string theory is a dead end. That would account for almost an entire generation of particle physicists!
LOL, you are new at this internet thing, right? Exactly how far do you think you have to go to find claims that global warming is a hoax?
Pointing out that the overwhelming majority of such articles in the popular press have zero scientific credibility is merely a public service, and it has NOTHING to do with what the BBC is looking for. The BCC are looking for real, scientific arguments against global warming that have been suppressed by the scientific establishment. You won't find it on some internet tabloid, if it exists at all. It is more likely to be on the homepage of some fringe university researcher in danger of getting fired.
Right, but acute poisoning is completely different from cancer. A cancer can form from just a single mutation. It doesn't come from an accumulation of anything, rather whenever you smoke a cigarette you have a small chance of a cancer forming as a direct result of that cigarette; the risk each time is miniscule, but summed over a lifetime it becomes appreciable.
Possible, but the amounts are so miniscule and so easy to hide that there are plenty of other, safer, ways to smuggle the stuff if you wanted to. You could hide it in practically anything.
Too late dude, I already patented that.
You would be right, except for: nationalism, racism, eugenics, and possibly anti-communism. So about 50% ;-)
I havn't visited her old rooms (in the basement of the Sorbonne) myself, but I've met a few people who have. If you turn off all the lights, you can see the walls, glowing in the dark.
They had a big scare a few years ago, when they were auctioning off some old furniture. Turned out some of it dangerously radioactive.