scares people like you even more than the idea that you might have to give up your gas guzzling SUV in order to stop billions of people from dying, but the story does answer your question:
Evidence shows that around 5,200 years ago, solar output first dropped precipitously and then surged over a short period. It is this huge solar energy oscillation that Thompson believes may have triggered the climate change he sees in all those records.
Does that mean that all climate change is beyond our control and that we shouldn't worry about our climate, as you so cynically imply? Quite to the contrary. The author himself continues:
"The climate system is remarkably sensitive to natural variability," he said. "It's likely that it is equally sensitive to effects brought on by human activity, changes like increased greenhouse gases, altered land-use policies and fossil-fuel dependence.
"Any prudent person would agree that we don't yet understand the complexities with the climate system and, since we don't, we should be extremely cautious in how much we 'tweak' the system," he said.
"The evidence is clear that a major climate change is underway."
That answers your question of "by 'who'?": it "was altered by increased solar output".
Ask yourself this: when 9/11 happened, did the Bush administration say "oh, well, shit happens, let's just forget about it"? Or did they start two wars costing hundreds of billions of dollars to attempt to reduce the threat by addressing those aspects of the threat they could target?
So, as summers get hotter and the polar ice caps are melting, wouldn't the prudent thing by to reduce one big factor that we know presents a threat to climate stability and that we have influence over, namely carbon emissions?
Oh, but I forget, the Bush administration only takes action if it aligns with the short-term financial interests of their donors, not if it aligns with the long-term interests of the American economy or the American people.
Did you even bother to read the story? This study shows that abrupt climate change can and does occur. Maybe it was triggered by a volcanic eruption. Maybe it was triggered by unusually strong forest fires. Maybe it was those in combination with some other factors. Maybe it was a surge in solar output, as the story suggests. The point is: short-term climate change can happen and it can have devastating consequences. As the author of the study says:
"The climate system is remarkably sensitive to natural variability," he said. "It's likely that it is equally sensitive to effects brought on by human activity, changes like increased greenhouse gases, altered land-use policies and fossil-fuel dependence.
"Any prudent person would agree that we don't yet understand the complexities with the climate system and, since we don't, we should be extremely cautious in how much we 'tweak' the system," he said.
"The evidence is clear that a major climate change is underway."
You know, people like you are one reason why the possibility of climate change wiping out the human race is perhaps not such a bad thing: investing as many resources in maintaining a big brain as the human body does is only worth it if it leads to better survival. But a species that ignores such serious warning signs as we have had about global climate change perhaps just doesn't have an evolutionary advantage compared to, say, rats or cockroaches. And they will survive climate change because their needs are more modest; they don't need to maintain big brains and all the complications that entails.
So relax, the chances of anything like this happening in your lifetime is vanishingly small.
That would be our estimate if we didn't have any additional information. But we have additional information: recent climate records and knowledge about recent changes in the composition of our atmosphere. And those tell us that something seems to be happening right now, and it even tells us what the trigger is.
In different words, the chances that you have a cold or flu on any particular day are small, but if you're sneezing and have a headache, chances are pretty good that you're having one right now, even if your temperature isn't all that high yet.
I'm gonna call bullshit on this figure. This sounds like a number someone pulled out of their ass. A rate of 20-30 bugs per 1000 lines would render most programs unusable.
Well, given that the study hasn't been released yet, we don't know what their definition of fact is.
Releasing scientific results as press releases may be questionable, but your response is also not justified.
The study hasn't been released yet. Once it has, we can check for ourselves what their methodology was, what their definition of "bug" was, etc. Then, and only then, can we discuss whether the study has merit or not. Until then, there is no reason to flame either way.
Please tell me you don't really think that professional sports wasn't commercialized before this.
Parts of it were. Commercializing more of it makes the problem worse.
By your line of arguing, the Super Bowl should be broadcast by every network and without commercial interruption.
Maybe it should be, maybe it shouldn't. I think that's something one can think about on a case-by-case basis. Just because this is a continuum of choices doesn't mean we must set the limit at one extreme or another, which is what you seem to be arguing.
Forbidding people to simulate the NFL in games goes too far for my taste.
I think rotations in depth, which is what you get with a fully 3D UI, are a gimmick in user interfaces.
However, stacking, blurring, shadowing, zooming, and translucency add useful visual cues that actually make user interfaces more usable. You might call those "2.5D desktops" (actually, animation also adds a time dimension on top of that).
Although that's been understood for many years, machines weren't fast enough to implement them, but that's changing and all major desktops are now in the process of adding those features (with the usual hype and claims of "innovation" all around).
I don't think people are really much bothered by the uncanny-ness of 3D UIs, they are bothered by the fact that they don't do anything yet that 2D interfaces don't do at least as well.
This seems wrong to me. Do we really want a world in which every aspect of human activity is licensed or paid for? Sports is culture and community; we shouldn't commercialize that space.
I mean, what's left to commercialize after this? Is the next frontier to commercialize transactions within families? Honey, a roll in the hay will be $500, and do take note of the Coca Cola logo (a licensing exclusive) on the bra before your remove it. If you want a hug from your kids, that will be $5 a hug. (Well, sadly, we may be pretty far along down that road already.)
Accpacc, Great Plains, and Peachtree are accounting packages; I don't see how they compare to SAP or Peoplesoft. In fact, many organizations probably need the non-accounting functionality of SAP or Peoplesoft more urgently than the accounting stuff, since they probably already have accounting solutions in place that they trust.
when it comes to ERP and other financial packages is the shitload of regulatory requirements
Accounting is only a small part of the software SAP sells.
Also IMO you either have to be an accountant or at least have to have a good understanding of accounting or you just will not get it right.
Sure. But this kind of knowledge is no more obscure than C semantics. There are experts inside every business that know this stuff inside-and-out, and they would be involved if a company decides to participate in building an OSS project. OSS projects, like other projects, do gather requirements and talk to users.
This will extend Moore's law a little (actually, not even that; it will extend speed improvements), but it won't "perpetuate" it. Perpetuate = make perpetual; this is a one-time deal.
Oh, I forgot, I'm supposed to write it myself. My stupid.
First of all, SAP is mostly a marketing construct. If you look at their higher education product, for example, three out of the five modules already have open source implementations.
Second, SAP has a bunch of big problems: they are stuck with cumbersome technology for various reasons and their customers have big scalability demands. A low-end FOSS implementation can be kept much simpler and be based on platforms that make implementations much easier.
Give it a little more time and SAP and PeopleSoft will be replaceable by open source components for most customers.
i cannot imagine anyone doing enterprise apps for any reason other than profit
Neither can I. But companies like Oracle or PeopleSoft are eating into the profits of small companies that can barely afford them and that don't need something as big anyway.
So, small companies sooner or later will ask their own, paid employees to develop bits and pieces of such software. It won't be very scalable or featureful, but it will be good enough for many companies with simple needs. Then, they'll recognize that it will improve more if they release it OSS, and other people will start contributing. After a little while, you have a fairly featureful FOSS application.
How many programmers out there will say "Huh, I don't like this PeopleSpft stuff, I will write my own ERP software!"?
That's not how OSS works.
How it works is that some small-to-medium company says "we only need a simple ERP system and we are tired of paying big bucks or getting jerked around by our vendor, we can so something simple ourselves". Then, that company discovers that maintenance gets cheaper when they release it open source. Then, other companies start adding features.
Programmers do the work for the same reason they always have: they get paid for it.
After you have gone through a few of those, you'll come to realize the value of open source. People didn't use to think this was possible for OS'es or GUIs, but it turned out it was. They said open source wasn't reliable enough or secure enough or whatever, but they were wrong. And, yes, it is possible for the kinds of products PeopleSoft used to make as well.
Maybe your company and a bunch of other companies should get together and start working on an open source version of PeopleSoft's software. The good thing is that you don't have any legacy headaches and that you have great tools to work with.
The history of 20th century Europe, with two major wars, does not give European diplomacy much credibility.
The US fought pretty much all the local conflicts it was geographically capable of fighting and then went on occupying one island nation after another. The only reason it stopped because it ran out of enemies. That's in addition to a bloody civil war and a genocide perpetrated against native Americans. Since WWII, the US has been involved in one military conflict after another, often several simultaneously.
US diplomacy has always consisted of the US government getting its will, by any means possible. The only difference between US diplomacy and, say, France is that the US happens to have been successful with that approach in recent history.
Unless the Europeans learn how to develop multicultural societies, the social tensions built up by immigration and declining native population will tear them apart.
I don't think Europe has to fear any comparison in that regard with the US. While there is a lot of hand-wringing over racism in Europe, when you look at the economic and social facts on the ground, Europe is in a far better position than the US.
The fact that Indians are paid poorly compared to US corporate graphic designers doesn't make them "fake artists".
India is actually full of artists, craftsmen, and designers that will create whatever you like (physical or virtual) at a fraction of the cost that the US corporate designer gets paid.
Geez, the solution is right in the posting you responded to: use "xargs". Read the man page; it's one of the most useful commands of the UNIX command line.
Palm just announced that the next generation Palm environment is going to run on top of a Linux kernel with a standard (though, presumably, trimmed-down) Linux user space. They have also fixed severe problems with their database format and other parts of their system.
If they don't go bankrupt before shipping the Palm/Linux environment, that should turn out to be a good handheld.
Sorry, but it doesn't work that way. No matter whether the US was right or wrong in specific instances (and we won't ever know whether that was the best course of action anyway), the US still acted unilaterally. Cooperation sometimes means following a course of action that you may not think is right but that others do.
So, your examples are just further examples of US unilateralism. The fact that the US may have been right in hindsight on some of these doesn't change that. The US has, after all, also been wrong on many other of its unilateral actions.
Did you know the USA gives more in the way of (government & non-government) aid to other countries than ALL other countries combined?
Your numbers are wrong. Even in terms of absolute dollars, the US had moved to first place in recent years because of a strong dollar, but even then it has given less than Japan and France together. With the weak dollar, it will probably lose that position altogether.
But absolute dollars don't matter, what matters is amount of money given relative to population size or GNP, and on both measures, the US is stingy. Furthermore, much of the US "aid" is actually political pay-offs or military aid, tied to US purchases, and is really just a subsidy in disguise.
is the number of people who believe the world is a totally safe place, and if it isn't so, then America must have made it that way.
Quite to the contrary: Europeans know first hand that the world is a dangerous place. The US population only seems to have woken up to this uncomfortable fact on 9/11 and still seems to have trouble dealing with it. If every nation started wars when there was a terrorist attack on its soil, civilization would have ended long ago.
The problem is that the US thinks it can make the world safe for its citizens, and that the US government doesn't give a damn what it is doing to other nations in the process.
Metadata will be integrated into the file system, and authors will be able to describe their own metadata to the OS.
File types that benefit from metadata already have space for it (Word, OOo, PDF, MP3, TIFF, JPEG, etc.). But most people just don't bother putting anything there.
Adding metadata to the file system just causes gratuitous incompatibilities; there is no real benefit. Be tried it, Microsoft tried it, and Apple is trying it as well. In fact, this idea goes way, way back. In part, UNIX was intended to clean up this kind of mess.
find / |grep' doesn't do any of that.... even "find / -exec grep foo {} \;" is much slower then an indexed database engine
Forget about the "-exec" flag; it is almost always the wrong thing to use, and it's dreadfully slow.
"locate... | xargs grep..." or "find... | xargs grep..." is quite fast. Not as fast as something that's indexed, but it's fast enough and always up-to-date.
That's probably the main reason people on UNIX just haven't bothered. But there are text indexing systems that you can use as well if you like.
Actually, there are already several open source text indexing engines. Lucene is pretty popular. Putting a user interface and a plug-in architecture around it is not so difficult. The main problem with it is that it's written in Java, but it can be compiled with gcj and the UI could be written in SWT.
Slashdot Mirror
Does that mean that all climate change is beyond our control and that we shouldn't worry about our climate, as you so cynically imply? Quite to the contrary. The author himself continues:That answers your question of "by 'who'?": it "was altered by increased solar output".
Ask yourself this: when 9/11 happened, did the Bush administration say "oh, well, shit happens, let's just forget about it"? Or did they start two wars costing hundreds of billions of dollars to attempt to reduce the threat by addressing those aspects of the threat they could target?
So, as summers get hotter and the polar ice caps are melting, wouldn't the prudent thing by to reduce one big factor that we know presents a threat to climate stability and that we have influence over, namely carbon emissions?
Oh, but I forget, the Bush administration only takes action if it aligns with the short-term financial interests of their donors, not if it aligns with the long-term interests of the American economy or the American people.
So relax, the chances of anything like this happening in your lifetime is vanishingly small.
That would be our estimate if we didn't have any additional information. But we have additional information: recent climate records and knowledge about recent changes in the composition of our atmosphere. And those tell us that something seems to be happening right now, and it even tells us what the trigger is.
In different words, the chances that you have a cold or flu on any particular day are small, but if you're sneezing and have a headache, chances are pretty good that you're having one right now, even if your temperature isn't all that high yet.
I'm gonna call bullshit on this figure. This sounds like a number someone pulled out of their ass. A rate of 20-30 bugs per 1000 lines would render most programs unusable.
Well, given that the study hasn't been released yet, we don't know what their definition of fact is.
Releasing scientific results as press releases may be questionable, but your response is also not justified.
Wait for the facts.
The study hasn't been released yet. Once it has, we can check for ourselves what their methodology was, what their definition of "bug" was, etc. Then, and only then, can we discuss whether the study has merit or not. Until then, there is no reason to flame either way.
Please tell me you don't really think that professional sports wasn't commercialized before this.
Parts of it were. Commercializing more of it makes the problem worse.
By your line of arguing, the Super Bowl should be broadcast by every network and without commercial interruption.
Maybe it should be, maybe it shouldn't. I think that's something one can think about on a case-by-case basis. Just because this is a continuum of choices doesn't mean we must set the limit at one extreme or another, which is what you seem to be arguing.
Forbidding people to simulate the NFL in games goes too far for my taste.
I think rotations in depth, which is what you get with a fully 3D UI, are a gimmick in user interfaces.
However, stacking, blurring, shadowing, zooming, and translucency add useful visual cues that actually make user interfaces more usable. You might call those "2.5D desktops" (actually, animation also adds a time dimension on top of that).
Although that's been understood for many years, machines weren't fast enough to implement them, but that's changing and all major desktops are now in the process of adding those features (with the usual hype and claims of "innovation" all around).
I don't think people are really much bothered by the uncanny-ness of 3D UIs, they are bothered by the fact that they don't do anything yet that 2D interfaces don't do at least as well.
This seems wrong to me. Do we really want a world in which every aspect of human activity is licensed or paid for? Sports is culture and community; we shouldn't commercialize that space.
I mean, what's left to commercialize after this? Is the next frontier to commercialize transactions within families? Honey, a roll in the hay will be $500, and do take note of the Coca Cola logo (a licensing exclusive) on the bra before your remove it. If you want a hug from your kids, that will be $5 a hug. (Well, sadly, we may be pretty far along down that road already.)
Accpacc, Great Plains, and Peachtree are accounting packages; I don't see how they compare to SAP or Peoplesoft. In fact, many organizations probably need the non-accounting functionality of SAP or Peoplesoft more urgently than the accounting stuff, since they probably already have accounting solutions in place that they trust.
when it comes to ERP and other financial packages is the shitload of regulatory requirements
Accounting is only a small part of the software SAP sells.
Also IMO you either have to be an accountant or at least have to have a good understanding of accounting or you just will not get it right.
Sure. But this kind of knowledge is no more obscure than C semantics. There are experts inside every business that know this stuff inside-and-out, and they would be involved if a company decides to participate in building an OSS project. OSS projects, like other projects, do gather requirements and talk to users.
This will extend Moore's law a little (actually, not even that; it will extend speed improvements), but it won't "perpetuate" it. Perpetuate = make perpetual; this is a one-time deal.
Oh, I forgot, I'm supposed to write it myself. My stupid.
First of all, SAP is mostly a marketing construct. If you look at their higher education product, for example, three out of the five modules already have open source implementations.
Second, SAP has a bunch of big problems: they are stuck with cumbersome technology for various reasons and their customers have big scalability demands. A low-end FOSS implementation can be kept much simpler and be based on platforms that make implementations much easier.
Give it a little more time and SAP and PeopleSoft will be replaceable by open source components for most customers.
i cannot imagine anyone doing enterprise apps for any reason other than profit
Neither can I. But companies like Oracle or PeopleSoft are eating into the profits of small companies that can barely afford them and that don't need something as big anyway.
So, small companies sooner or later will ask their own, paid employees to develop bits and pieces of such software. It won't be very scalable or featureful, but it will be good enough for many companies with simple needs. Then, they'll recognize that it will improve more if they release it OSS, and other people will start contributing. After a little while, you have a fairly featureful FOSS application.
That's how open source usuall starts.
How many programmers out there will say "Huh, I don't like this PeopleSpft stuff, I will write my own ERP software!"?
That's not how OSS works.
How it works is that some small-to-medium company says "we only need a simple ERP system and we are tired of paying big bucks or getting jerked around by our vendor, we can so something simple ourselves". Then, that company discovers that maintenance gets cheaper when they release it open source. Then, other companies start adding features.
Programmers do the work for the same reason they always have: they get paid for it.
After you have gone through a few of those, you'll come to realize the value of open source. People didn't use to think this was possible for OS'es or GUIs, but it turned out it was. They said open source wasn't reliable enough or secure enough or whatever, but they were wrong. And, yes, it is possible for the kinds of products PeopleSoft used to make as well.
Maybe your company and a bunch of other companies should get together and start working on an open source version of PeopleSoft's software. The good thing is that you don't have any legacy headaches and that you have great tools to work with.
The history of 20th century Europe, with two major wars, does not give European diplomacy much credibility.
The US fought pretty much all the local conflicts it was geographically capable of fighting and then went on occupying one island nation after another. The only reason it stopped because it ran out of enemies. That's in addition to a bloody civil war and a genocide perpetrated against native Americans. Since WWII, the US has been involved in one military conflict after another, often several simultaneously.
US diplomacy has always consisted of the US government getting its will, by any means possible. The only difference between US diplomacy and, say, France is that the US happens to have been successful with that approach in recent history.
Unless the Europeans learn how to develop multicultural societies, the social tensions built up by immigration and declining native population will tear them apart.
I don't think Europe has to fear any comparison in that regard with the US. While there is a lot of hand-wringing over racism in Europe, when you look at the economic and social facts on the ground, Europe is in a far better position than the US.
The fact that Indians are paid poorly compared to US corporate graphic designers doesn't make them "fake artists".
India is actually full of artists, craftsmen, and designers that will create whatever you like (physical or virtual) at a fraction of the cost that the US corporate designer gets paid.
Geez, the solution is right in the posting you responded to: use "xargs". Read the man page; it's one of the most useful commands of the UNIX command line.
Palm just announced that the next generation Palm environment is going to run on top of a Linux kernel with a standard (though, presumably, trimmed-down) Linux user space. They have also fixed severe problems with their database format and other parts of their system.
If they don't go bankrupt before shipping the Palm/Linux environment, that should turn out to be a good handheld.
Sorry, but it doesn't work that way. No matter whether the US was right or wrong in specific instances (and we won't ever know whether that was the best course of action anyway), the US still acted unilaterally. Cooperation sometimes means following a course of action that you may not think is right but that others do.
So, your examples are just further examples of US unilateralism. The fact that the US may have been right in hindsight on some of these doesn't change that. The US has, after all, also been wrong on many other of its unilateral actions.
Did you know the USA gives more in the way of (government & non-government) aid to other countries than ALL other countries combined?
Your numbers are wrong. Even in terms of absolute dollars, the US had moved to first place in recent years because of a strong dollar, but even then it has given less than Japan and France together. With the weak dollar, it will probably lose that position altogether.
But absolute dollars don't matter, what matters is amount of money given relative to population size or GNP, and on both measures, the US is stingy. Furthermore, much of the US "aid" is actually political pay-offs or military aid, tied to US purchases, and is really just a subsidy in disguise.
is the number of people who believe the world is a totally safe place, and if it isn't so, then America must have made it that way.
Quite to the contrary: Europeans know first hand that the world is a dangerous place. The US population only seems to have woken up to this uncomfortable fact on 9/11 and still seems to have trouble dealing with it. If every nation started wars when there was a terrorist attack on its soil, civilization would have ended long ago.
The problem is that the US thinks it can make the world safe for its citizens, and that the US government doesn't give a damn what it is doing to other nations in the process.
Metadata will be integrated into the file system, and authors will be able to describe their own metadata to the OS.
File types that benefit from metadata already have space for it (Word, OOo, PDF, MP3, TIFF, JPEG, etc.). But most people just don't bother putting anything there.
Adding metadata to the file system just causes gratuitous incompatibilities; there is no real benefit. Be tried it, Microsoft tried it, and Apple is trying it as well. In fact, this idea goes way, way back. In part, UNIX was intended to clean up this kind of mess.
find / |grep' doesn't do any of that.... even "find / -exec grep foo {} \;" is much slower then an indexed database engine
... | xargs grep ..." or "find ... | xargs grep ..." is quite fast. Not as fast as something that's indexed, but it's fast enough and always up-to-date.
Forget about the "-exec" flag; it is almost always the wrong thing to use, and it's dreadfully slow.
"locate
That's probably the main reason people on UNIX just haven't bothered. But there are text indexing systems that you can use as well if you like.
Actually, there are already several open source text indexing engines. Lucene is pretty popular. Putting a user interface and a plug-in architecture around it is not so difficult. The main problem with it is that it's written in Java, but it can be compiled with gcj and the UI could be written in SWT.