From what I can gather, the actual researchers suggesting a new Ice Age were not talking in fact about an imminent return of continent-spanning glaciers. That was hyperbole by science journalists of the time. This is why I find people who make claims of the state of any area of research based upon what some science reporter in a newspaper or magazine writes is a pretty dubious activity. Science journalists, to put it bluntly, spend their days sexing up often rather mundane or esoteric research into something that can produce "wow-pow!" headline, often betraying their own ignorance of the research in question.
And once again, what does the musings of a Law Professor in 1970 have to do with the state of the science in 1970? I don't give a flying f--- about 1970 climate zeitgeist. That's not the claim. The claim is clearly that climatologists in the 1970s believed the world was entering a new glacial period soon.
According to Skeptical Science, there were something like seven research papers in the period mentioning cooling, as opposed to over forty talking about temperature rises due to CO2. https://skepticalscience.com/i...
The Skeptical Science entry goes further to suggest that some of the reasons some researchers were positing cooling was due to SO2 releases at the time. One can debate whether those releases would have slowed temperature increases, but seeing as that SO2 limits were put in place, that's rather a moot point.
So what we have is a few alarmist articles of the period, little of their content apparently based on climatology research even at the time, and the usual anecdotal claims of "I remember my professor/teacher/some guy on TV saying the ice age was coming." In other words, no, few if any climatologists actual thought there was an ice age, and by that point, even 45-47 years ago, global warming due to human CO2 emissions was seen as a real phenomenon.
And I'll ask you, do you have any citations? Go on, surely since all your "science professors" were talking about it, it should be trivial to find some journal articles?
Do you have any citations in peer reviewed literature from the period? Do you think a Time Magazine article quoting a fucking law professor somehow constitutes an expansive statement on the view of climatologists in 1970?
JEsus Christ, the extent the deniers will go to is just fucking stunning. Since the heyday of the Creationists, it's hard to imagine a more motivated, and yet more fundamentally moronic group of people than the web forum climate skeptic.
Well, just wait for it to get worse. As the Republicans shambolically move towards repeal of Obamacare, it already looks like the replacement will likely be worse than what came before Obamacare. How a first world nation can have some of the worst health care outcomes in the industrialized world baffles me.
Having witnessed the creation of a centralized IT system close up, I have seen just how disastrous, and ultimately how expensive the results can be. I think the logic behind unifying infrastructure is seductive, but rarely does anyone honestly assess the massive costs, because if they did, no government would ever pay for it. So you put together an upgrade plan that has an absurdly low pricetag, knowing full well that by the time the job is actually done (if it is ever completed), the costs will be orders of a magnitude greater. The critical step to this "unlimited budget via the back door" is to bring the new system up, regardless of how far away from actual completion and stability it is, then immediately shut down the old systems, shred the hard drives and dispose of the hardware, so that no one can ever contemplate returning to the old system as a standby. This is critical. You have to make the cost of retreating back over the proverbial Rubicon so great that you end up being stuck with the new system, and thus with the costs of making it work.
To my mind, the more logical way to approach this is to create a centralized RDBMS, make sure that all the disparate systems at least can regularly vomit out a batch job in one common format, and dump it to the RDBMS. Over time you could conceivably use this new database as a the core of replacement systems, or not , as you choose. I've worked on this kind of system before, puking out batch exports from one system, throwing it into another database and then processing, reporting or whatever it is you want to do, and then pushing changes back up to the systems. It was all done with common shared import/export formats. Now admittedly this does mean having to write code for each system, but that is almost invariably a fraction of the workload of building an entire replacement system and then spending years of ever-inflating budgets, downtime, and in the case of a police force, possibly even risking lives.
But companies like Deloitte, IBM and HP have basically made selling "unified solutions" that inevitably turn into IT catastrophes a vast cash cow, and so long as they can con bureaucrats and politicians into buying into their bullshit, they'll keep making money hand over fist even as the products they roll out remain utter shit.
That is true enough. And even though OpenOffice and LibreOffice are more than capable of doing almost all the tasks one can ask from an office suite, there are enough differences between that and MS Office that one can get tricked up. But the reality here is that whenever you bring in new software, you have to put resources into training. With MS-Office being near-ubiquitous, organizations and firms tend to have the expectation that existing staff and new hires are just going to know at least the basics, and with MS having done what I think anybody can see as an excellent job with low-cost editions for students and the like, MS-Office is a software ecosystem with a high degree of penetration. Frankly, in my company, I haven't seen a CV cross my desk in years that didn't cite experience with Word and Excel, which means that even if I wanted to save money on licensing, and go with LibreOffice or OpenOffice, I'd end up having to do a lot of training and support, and while I suspect the cost of retraining existing staff would be lower, it would also mean having to train every new employee, so in a way, you have a recurring cost that may end up not being that much different than MS licensing.
The problem is that it is a shitty manager who insults any subordinate. If you have a problem with a member of your team, you take them aside and try to deal with it. If it rates disciplinary action, then so be it, but that can still be done respectfully. Either we are adults who can behave with some decorum, or we are unruly children. I won't have unruly children as managers, period. Behave appropriately or you will be demoted. Calling anyone a "fag", get into shouting matches with them, and I will be making you apologize to the persons involved and to anyone who overheard them, and do it repeatedly, and you'll be shown the door. A work place should not be a place where people with power feel some right to behave badly to other people.
My experience from my coursework was that the cited studies seemed to me to be pretty rigorous. There was an entire section dedicated to what might have been titled "junk science", though as I recall the authors of the textbook used a somewhat more diplomatic term. In there were all kinds of commonly-held disorders like pre-menstrual syndrome, seasonal affective disorder in the like where research suggests that while the disorders may be real, they in fact effect a far smaller group of people than earlier studies had claimed. In other words, even in psychology it sure looks to me like there is at least some psychologists who follow valid methodological principles.
The other thing to remember is that "psychology" is a pretty damned broad term, and that in a lot of cases other professions like psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, counselors and the like often get lumped in, and in some cases these other groups publish in journals of varying degrees of quality. That's not to say that some of these people don't adhere to pretty strong methodologies, but it does tend to be a bit of a wild west in some cases. But when you're talking about cognitive psychology and other similar branches, there's a lot of overlap there that pulls in neurological experts, behavioral experts and the like who sit within the harder edges of the psychology field. It most certainly isn't all just kooky neo-Freudians.
Having taken a college-level psychology course (which of course makes me an expert in the field!) I can tell you that psychology isn't necessarily as soft as you think, and while there are certainly holdover schools of psychology that are based on partial or total rubbish, when you start talking about cognitive psychology and behaviorism, these are just as hard a science as physics or geology, to the point that I got the strong impression that my instructor viewed many of the other schools pretty dimly as being as much wishy-washy metaphysics as anything else. Psychology is an awfully big field, so claiming most of it is rubbish is deeply unfair.
The problem being is that the effects of CO2 aren't that hard to pin down. The skepticism is basically fake, fueled by some of the wealthiest companies and individuals on the planet, even as they themselves prepare for the low-carbon future.
Of course there has been in a lot of research on management styles, some of it predating WWII which suggested that bullying management style may bring about short-term gains, but usually at the cost of a paranoid and low-morale organization which can negatively effect long term performance.
I've only been yelled at once in my working life, and while it scared the shit out of me to be sure, the only take-away I had was that my boss was a fucking asshole. I could only work as fast as I was going, and because he was a cheap asshole, he wouldn't hire someone else to take over some of my sysadmin role so I could more coding.
I see little evidence that science is regaining ground. There has been far too concerted an effort in the last ten to fifteen years to demonize scientists, to make them out to be profiteering frauds. In the end reality will very much bring back the pro-science movement, but for now, even on Slashdot, the attitude on everything from climate change to basic research is incredibly negative.
Computing is pretty much ubiquitous nowadays. When I first got into computing back in grade school around 1981-82, computers were just this incredibly awesome thing. There was a pioneering spirit to the home computing world. I remember taking my crappy little Radio Shack computer to local meetups, and you'd have everyone from ten year olds like myself to grizzled old guys (who could actually afford cool peripherals like disk drives and the like). That persisted to some extent until the early 1990s, with the earliest versions of Linux like the original Slackware release being the swan song of an age of computing that had persisted since the mid-70s. Once the Internet really overtook the old BBS culture, that was the final nail. I blame it all on AOL!
I can remember pouring through Byte magazine back in the mid-80s and just salivating over the idea of having a modem or a double-sided floppy drive. It was just a very optimistic age. I found an old box of computer magazines from the era, and still smiled at the three page BASIC program listing for some sort of text adventure game, remembering how I built my first one based on a how-to book I'd ordered from an advertisement in the back. Good times.
This is why I wish Slashdot would get rid of ACs. I have no idea who I'm debating. Are they responding to what I wrote? Are they the parent?
AT any rate, lots of people of every stripe care about money. Whoever you are, the AC I was responding to heavily suggested that Milo is vindicated because he makes lots of money. How that squares with your post is beyond me.
In general I would frown on any employees, but in particular a manager, getting into a shouting match, homophobic slur or otherwise. In a manager I would find this particularly disturbing, because you should really be promoting managers based on leadership qualities, and shouting at your subordinates doesn't display leadership, it displays bullying. As to a specifically homophobic slur, like it or not, we live in a litigatory age, and, as you point out, if the staff member being yelled at were gay, then your manager has crossed a realm into pain. As others have pointed out, this kind of culture comes down from the top. Good sound senior management would not allow the workplace to behave this way.
The fact is that in any workplace, but particularly a large one, you're going to have conflicts, and on occasion they may get out of hand. I agree that the homophobic slur is the least serious of them, but it still isn't something that should be tolerated. An off the record warning would be exactly how I'd deal with that as well, but if the employee persisted in that sort of conduct, then it would have to move on to a more formal disciplinary process.
Oh, and to all those brave alt-right haters, want to end up in court, go tell a subordinate who complains they were threatened or abused to suck it up.
It's what happens when you let sociopaths into senior management. The advice I received many years ago about "toxic employees" is that while companies should throw them out as soon as possible, quite often, because they have some sort of narcissistic personality, they ingratiate themselves with their bosses, move up the corporate ladder, where they become nightmares to everyone else and create an incredibly toxic environment. And they can significantly harm a company in the process, driving out talent along the way. I cannot imagine why any company would tolerate this kind of behavior, or would allow such a workplace environment to persist. Apart from the risks of expensive lawsuits, such a workplace will have low morale, wallow in inefficiency, and ultimately gain a reputation as a shit place to work.
Wow, so you think any kind of expectation of good behavior is fascism? I suspect in real life you don't behave that way, but the Internet and anonymity affords you the freedom to make believe that you're some sort of Milo-like entity. And look where his big mouth got him.
If I was a Nazi, you AC troll, I'd be demanding the government moderate forums. As it is, if I own a forum, it's mine, and if I don't want Nazis on it, that's my business.
I was posting on moderated Usenet forums in the early 90s, and trolls who got too abusive (and it wasn't just about content, but also about the number of posts) would get booted. This happened in particular in specialist forums like the sci. hierarchy, In fact, the talk. hierarchy was initially created to try to siphon off the kooks.
In general, anyone whose posts frequently amount to intimidation and threats, and who posts large volumes of them, is the kind of person who is often given the boot in many forums.
Slashdot Mirror
From what I can gather, the actual researchers suggesting a new Ice Age were not talking in fact about an imminent return of continent-spanning glaciers. That was hyperbole by science journalists of the time. This is why I find people who make claims of the state of any area of research based upon what some science reporter in a newspaper or magazine writes is a pretty dubious activity. Science journalists, to put it bluntly, spend their days sexing up often rather mundane or esoteric research into something that can produce "wow-pow!" headline, often betraying their own ignorance of the research in question.
And once again, what does the musings of a Law Professor in 1970 have to do with the state of the science in 1970? I don't give a flying f--- about 1970 climate zeitgeist. That's not the claim. The claim is clearly that climatologists in the 1970s believed the world was entering a new glacial period soon.
According to Skeptical Science, there were something like seven research papers in the period mentioning cooling, as opposed to over forty talking about temperature rises due to CO2. https://skepticalscience.com/i...
The Skeptical Science entry goes further to suggest that some of the reasons some researchers were positing cooling was due to SO2 releases at the time. One can debate whether those releases would have slowed temperature increases, but seeing as that SO2 limits were put in place, that's rather a moot point.
So what we have is a few alarmist articles of the period, little of their content apparently based on climatology research even at the time, and the usual anecdotal claims of "I remember my professor/teacher/some guy on TV saying the ice age was coming." In other words, no, few if any climatologists actual thought there was an ice age, and by that point, even 45-47 years ago, global warming due to human CO2 emissions was seen as a real phenomenon.
And I'll ask you, do you have any citations? Go on, surely since all your "science professors" were talking about it, it should be trivial to find some journal articles?
Do you have any citations in peer reviewed literature from the period? Do you think a Time Magazine article quoting a fucking law professor somehow constitutes an expansive statement on the view of climatologists in 1970?
JEsus Christ, the extent the deniers will go to is just fucking stunning. Since the heyday of the Creationists, it's hard to imagine a more motivated, and yet more fundamentally moronic group of people than the web forum climate skeptic.
Well, just wait for it to get worse. As the Republicans shambolically move towards repeal of Obamacare, it already looks like the replacement will likely be worse than what came before Obamacare. How a first world nation can have some of the worst health care outcomes in the industrialized world baffles me.
Having witnessed the creation of a centralized IT system close up, I have seen just how disastrous, and ultimately how expensive the results can be. I think the logic behind unifying infrastructure is seductive, but rarely does anyone honestly assess the massive costs, because if they did, no government would ever pay for it. So you put together an upgrade plan that has an absurdly low pricetag, knowing full well that by the time the job is actually done (if it is ever completed), the costs will be orders of a magnitude greater. The critical step to this "unlimited budget via the back door" is to bring the new system up, regardless of how far away from actual completion and stability it is, then immediately shut down the old systems, shred the hard drives and dispose of the hardware, so that no one can ever contemplate returning to the old system as a standby. This is critical. You have to make the cost of retreating back over the proverbial Rubicon so great that you end up being stuck with the new system, and thus with the costs of making it work.
To my mind, the more logical way to approach this is to create a centralized RDBMS, make sure that all the disparate systems at least can regularly vomit out a batch job in one common format, and dump it to the RDBMS. Over time you could conceivably use this new database as a the core of replacement systems, or not , as you choose. I've worked on this kind of system before, puking out batch exports from one system, throwing it into another database and then processing, reporting or whatever it is you want to do, and then pushing changes back up to the systems. It was all done with common shared import/export formats. Now admittedly this does mean having to write code for each system, but that is almost invariably a fraction of the workload of building an entire replacement system and then spending years of ever-inflating budgets, downtime, and in the case of a police force, possibly even risking lives.
But companies like Deloitte, IBM and HP have basically made selling "unified solutions" that inevitably turn into IT catastrophes a vast cash cow, and so long as they can con bureaucrats and politicians into buying into their bullshit, they'll keep making money hand over fist even as the products they roll out remain utter shit.
That is true enough. And even though OpenOffice and LibreOffice are more than capable of doing almost all the tasks one can ask from an office suite, there are enough differences between that and MS Office that one can get tricked up. But the reality here is that whenever you bring in new software, you have to put resources into training. With MS-Office being near-ubiquitous, organizations and firms tend to have the expectation that existing staff and new hires are just going to know at least the basics, and with MS having done what I think anybody can see as an excellent job with low-cost editions for students and the like, MS-Office is a software ecosystem with a high degree of penetration. Frankly, in my company, I haven't seen a CV cross my desk in years that didn't cite experience with Word and Excel, which means that even if I wanted to save money on licensing, and go with LibreOffice or OpenOffice, I'd end up having to do a lot of training and support, and while I suspect the cost of retraining existing staff would be lower, it would also mean having to train every new employee, so in a way, you have a recurring cost that may end up not being that much different than MS licensing.
What the fuck are you talking about? Nothing in Chrome requires a root user.
I have no idea what you're point is
You mean someone else builds the indexes? Wow? Really?
The problem is that it is a shitty manager who insults any subordinate. If you have a problem with a member of your team, you take them aside and try to deal with it. If it rates disciplinary action, then so be it, but that can still be done respectfully. Either we are adults who can behave with some decorum, or we are unruly children. I won't have unruly children as managers, period. Behave appropriately or you will be demoted. Calling anyone a "fag", get into shouting matches with them, and I will be making you apologize to the persons involved and to anyone who overheard them, and do it repeatedly, and you'll be shown the door. A work place should not be a place where people with power feel some right to behave badly to other people.
My experience from my coursework was that the cited studies seemed to me to be pretty rigorous. There was an entire section dedicated to what might have been titled "junk science", though as I recall the authors of the textbook used a somewhat more diplomatic term. In there were all kinds of commonly-held disorders like pre-menstrual syndrome, seasonal affective disorder in the like where research suggests that while the disorders may be real, they in fact effect a far smaller group of people than earlier studies had claimed. In other words, even in psychology it sure looks to me like there is at least some psychologists who follow valid methodological principles.
The other thing to remember is that "psychology" is a pretty damned broad term, and that in a lot of cases other professions like psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, counselors and the like often get lumped in, and in some cases these other groups publish in journals of varying degrees of quality. That's not to say that some of these people don't adhere to pretty strong methodologies, but it does tend to be a bit of a wild west in some cases. But when you're talking about cognitive psychology and other similar branches, there's a lot of overlap there that pulls in neurological experts, behavioral experts and the like who sit within the harder edges of the psychology field. It most certainly isn't all just kooky neo-Freudians.
Having taken a college-level psychology course (which of course makes me an expert in the field!) I can tell you that psychology isn't necessarily as soft as you think, and while there are certainly holdover schools of psychology that are based on partial or total rubbish, when you start talking about cognitive psychology and behaviorism, these are just as hard a science as physics or geology, to the point that I got the strong impression that my instructor viewed many of the other schools pretty dimly as being as much wishy-washy metaphysics as anything else. Psychology is an awfully big field, so claiming most of it is rubbish is deeply unfair.
The problem being is that the effects of CO2 aren't that hard to pin down. The skepticism is basically fake, fueled by some of the wealthiest companies and individuals on the planet, even as they themselves prepare for the low-carbon future.
Of course there has been in a lot of research on management styles, some of it predating WWII which suggested that bullying management style may bring about short-term gains, but usually at the cost of a paranoid and low-morale organization which can negatively effect long term performance.
I've only been yelled at once in my working life, and while it scared the shit out of me to be sure, the only take-away I had was that my boss was a fucking asshole. I could only work as fast as I was going, and because he was a cheap asshole, he wouldn't hire someone else to take over some of my sysadmin role so I could more coding.
I see little evidence that science is regaining ground. There has been far too concerted an effort in the last ten to fifteen years to demonize scientists, to make them out to be profiteering frauds. In the end reality will very much bring back the pro-science movement, but for now, even on Slashdot, the attitude on everything from climate change to basic research is incredibly negative.
Computing is pretty much ubiquitous nowadays. When I first got into computing back in grade school around 1981-82, computers were just this incredibly awesome thing. There was a pioneering spirit to the home computing world. I remember taking my crappy little Radio Shack computer to local meetups, and you'd have everyone from ten year olds like myself to grizzled old guys (who could actually afford cool peripherals like disk drives and the like). That persisted to some extent until the early 1990s, with the earliest versions of Linux like the original Slackware release being the swan song of an age of computing that had persisted since the mid-70s. Once the Internet really overtook the old BBS culture, that was the final nail. I blame it all on AOL!
I can remember pouring through Byte magazine back in the mid-80s and just salivating over the idea of having a modem or a double-sided floppy drive. It was just a very optimistic age. I found an old box of computer magazines from the era, and still smiled at the three page BASIC program listing for some sort of text adventure game, remembering how I built my first one based on a how-to book I'd ordered from an advertisement in the back. Good times.
This is why I wish Slashdot would get rid of ACs. I have no idea who I'm debating. Are they responding to what I wrote? Are they the parent?
AT any rate, lots of people of every stripe care about money. Whoever you are, the AC I was responding to heavily suggested that Milo is vindicated because he makes lots of money. How that squares with your post is beyond me.
In general I would frown on any employees, but in particular a manager, getting into a shouting match, homophobic slur or otherwise. In a manager I would find this particularly disturbing, because you should really be promoting managers based on leadership qualities, and shouting at your subordinates doesn't display leadership, it displays bullying. As to a specifically homophobic slur, like it or not, we live in a litigatory age, and, as you point out, if the staff member being yelled at were gay, then your manager has crossed a realm into pain. As others have pointed out, this kind of culture comes down from the top. Good sound senior management would not allow the workplace to behave this way.
The fact is that in any workplace, but particularly a large one, you're going to have conflicts, and on occasion they may get out of hand. I agree that the homophobic slur is the least serious of them, but it still isn't something that should be tolerated. An off the record warning would be exactly how I'd deal with that as well, but if the employee persisted in that sort of conduct, then it would have to move on to a more formal disciplinary process.
Oh, and to all those brave alt-right haters, want to end up in court, go tell a subordinate who complains they were threatened or abused to suck it up.
Because that's the only standard of behavior that matters. "Does it make money?"
You do realize the Alt-right are the conservative's new useful idiots, and as Milo's exile shows, once the idiots cease to be useful...
It's one thing to go to the corner pub, or to go to lunch once in a while. I honestly would never hang out with a manager at their house.
It's what happens when you let sociopaths into senior management. The advice I received many years ago about "toxic employees" is that while companies should throw them out as soon as possible, quite often, because they have some sort of narcissistic personality, they ingratiate themselves with their bosses, move up the corporate ladder, where they become nightmares to everyone else and create an incredibly toxic environment. And they can significantly harm a company in the process, driving out talent along the way. I cannot imagine why any company would tolerate this kind of behavior, or would allow such a workplace environment to persist. Apart from the risks of expensive lawsuits, such a workplace will have low morale, wallow in inefficiency, and ultimately gain a reputation as a shit place to work.
Wow, so you think any kind of expectation of good behavior is fascism? I suspect in real life you don't behave that way, but the Internet and anonymity affords you the freedom to make believe that you're some sort of Milo-like entity. And look where his big mouth got him.
If I was a Nazi, you AC troll, I'd be demanding the government moderate forums. As it is, if I own a forum, it's mine, and if I don't want Nazis on it, that's my business.
I was posting on moderated Usenet forums in the early 90s, and trolls who got too abusive (and it wasn't just about content, but also about the number of posts) would get booted. This happened in particular in specialist forums like the sci. hierarchy, In fact, the talk. hierarchy was initially created to try to siphon off the kooks.
In general, anyone whose posts frequently amount to intimidation and threats, and who posts large volumes of them, is the kind of person who is often given the boot in many forums.