I don't think you're getting a license. I believe your university has a site license. You are getting the distribution disks only, and the license belongs to the university, so the situation isn't comparable.
Raymond is still immensely interesting. Just apply a judicious filter here and there.
"Gandhicon" may not be a word in common use, but it has a lot of nice features. Why should WSR not be able to use his position of influence on hacker vocabulary to expose neologisms he likes?
Take everything he says with a grain of salt. Hell, take everything anyone says with a grain of salt. (Except maybe Linus himself. All hail Linus.)
Raymond says a lot of silly things and a lot of interesting things. Do you think the right way to respond to this is to ask him to shut up? The cost of silly things is small compared to the benefit of interesting things. Raymond easily manages a high enough ratio that it's worth paying attention to him.
If you're ahead of your time, you get no services.
I got into electrical engineering at Northwestern's Tech Institute in the 1970s despite the fact that I came from a family with no practical skills and a snooty school with no shop program. I was explicitly looking for some remedial education. This was part of the appeal of engineering for me.
I was very strong mathematically and conceptually but didn't know how to pronounce "solder", had no idea why anyone would care about some marginal phenomena called "semiconductors" and thought a "transistor" was a type of radio. I left knowing better, but only slightly. Certainly no one at Northwestern bothered to teach me to drill or mount or solder things.
Ironically, while I wasn't remotely ready for an entry level tech job, I was well prepared for grad school. So I continued my education, and eventually met some patient people who showed me how to wire wrap and continuity test and such, but at the time I got my bachelor's degree I was furious. I had an engineering degree, but expected and deserved the derision of anyone who had ever built a machine that worked.
It was ASSUMED that an engineering student came from an engineering or at least a technical family or had a strong interest in such things in high school. I went through the entire program not knowing things that were presumed to be general knowledge in the student population, though they were in no way explicit prerequisites, and though no remediation was offerred.
From where I'm sitting, this brilliant MIT insight is thirty years too late.
If you are in a simulation, chances are good that the value of the simulation to the being doing the simulating declines abruptly once that being realizes that your behavior is being altered by your suspicion that you are in a simulation.
Therefore, by the logic of the advice paper, you should never publish such advice, as it would increase the likelihood of termination of the simulation.
This is all silly. It blithely assumes the strong AI premise as proven. But if the strong AI premise holds, there is no moral difference between a simulation and a reality, since both support consciousness.
Essentially, the article seems to be claiming that there is a God, to whom we should be grateful for not pulling the plug on our reality. Then it presumes that God is in it for entertainment and feels no moral obligation toward us. As religions go, this one seems particularly nasty and evil. I suspect that any being that can run a system as complex as this one will have moral obligations toward sentient entities which that creator has created.
I go along with those who think this review showed almost no insight or even attention and should not have passed muster for posting. I also think that discussing other members of this class of book without mentioning the hardly obscure OSX: The Missing Manual is practically negligent.
TMM plus OSX for Unix Geeks, both from O'Reilly, have served me well.
Agree - my mother-in-law hadn't Update-d ever, and has a dial-up. In addressing a sudden problem she had I agreed to only the relevant subset of recommended patches and broke her machine. I will never update her machine ever, nor will I run XP on any of mine. I use Appple update all the time, though.
I also agree that the proliferation of platforms hurts MS, but it hurts open source X86ware in the same way. Note that because Apple and Sun control the hardware, they and developers for their targets have many fewer such problems.
Yep, exactly. Economics assigns a value to a thing based on an exchange. The reason open source exists and the reason MS gets away with calling a nickel four hundred dollars are the same reason. When you give away software, you still own it. The core model of economics breaks down for pure information commodities, which is basically half of what we talk about around here.
In most cases the fix is really complicated but in this case it is easy. Microsoft should get a nickel in tax credits when they give away a CD, maybe a buck if they go so far as to include halfway useful documentation. Barring that Red Hat should do exactly as you suggest.
In case you're wondering why Sen. Starr sponsored this bill in the first place, it was requested by the MPAA lobbyist (who really is a nice guy) but Sen. Starr was told that it was a simple bill to update copyright law in relation to digital media. Yes, and a whole lot more!
I would think that deliberately misleading a legislator about the purpose of proposed legislation would disqualify a person from real niceness. Just my fringe opinion, I guess.
Yeh, I've managed a panic once on OSX and it was nasty. The "Aqua screen of death" was just a joke.
The "investment community" derails good things all the time, if the thing isn't good for the investor. There are other good things in the world, including but not limited to excellent products which come to fruition more slowly than the discount rate would allow. Closely held companies can take the financial hit because they have other interests, while publicly traded companies cannot.
More to the present point, the "investment community" is no longer plausibly viewed as an impartial balance of available information. Good things frequently get derailed through malice or incompetence. As the number of investors grows, it has an increasingly dominant herd mentality that can be either simply wrongheaded (AOL) or maliciously manipulated (Enron).
In this case, by encouraging the investors to think of Apple as owner of 3% of the desktop market rather than 100% of the quality desktop market, entities with an interest in the failure of Apple's initiatives can potentially create an irrational mindset in the "community". This would encourage investors to take a strong and stable company and divides it up into two worthless ones, in the mistaken or delibeartely misled impression that it would be doing the opposite.
In general, the decisions about which stocks succeed or fail are made by people with little specific expertise about anything at all, manipulated by people and institutions with narrow financial self-interest. The suggestion that the process is highly reliable has obviously been increasingly idiotic over the past few years. The fact that a significant investor group believes something offers just about zero credibility. It certainly doesn't constitute an argument in favor of their position, it simply invites me to get on an unexamined bandwagon. This is exactly how history's worst decisions have been made.
Wintel systems dominate the "market", to some extent, not despite the fact that they are dreadful but because of it. People feel compelled to upgrade in the forlorn hope that MS will get it right this time. That means more dollars spent on hardware to support the latest re-bloat of the OS.
I am convinced that Apple has much larger mindshare than its market share shows. Apple users LIKE to use their Apples, and use them a LOT for a LONG TIME. I would bet the usage per dollar expended on Apple machines is much more favorable than for Wintel boxes.
As a consumer or a developer of applications that depend on good UI design and solid infrastructure (as opposed to cutting-edge performance-critical applications), I am interested in finding systems that work for me for a long time, not in finding systems that compel constant infrastructure hassles, learning and retooling costs, and on-hold music from unhelpful help desks.
THe existing Apple strategy will gain total sales and market share but only slowly. (At some point, it may actually shrink the total market size, as it returns more value to the consumer.)
This may be small consolation for investors. The current strategy has a good chance of winning in the long run, but the turnaround will continue to be slow.
Splitting Apple won't help from the financial point of view.
Consider. Why does Apple suddenly have stunningly good software? There are three parts to the answer. 1) capitalizing on excellent pre-existing software (BSD and NextStep) 2) hard work by talented people and 3) a closed, finite set of hardware platforms.
Support random Wintel boxes and away goes your ease of development and low cost/high quality support.
If Apple splits in order to sell OSX to the WIntel platform, the hardware division suffers direct competition from Dell and the software division gets huge support nightmares in exchange for either a tiny market (post-OEM OS installs) or a market that MS has shown no inclination to share (commodity Wintel platform OEM installs).
There's no great market advantage to Aqua screens of death. Though I am sure they would be more attractive and polite, I don't think that's the best way to gain market share.
There are tremendous productivity and reliability advantages to an integrated hardware/software company for commodity machines, and Aplle stands alone in owning this space. Apple has it right and should stay the course.
If the investment community tries to derail this, Apple should indeed go to a privately held company, but held by people who appreciate the amazing work they have recently done and intend to hold to the plan to capture the eventual return. I wonder if ownership by a user consortium might actually work to protect the platform from this muddleheaded strategy.
Maybe this would be an appropriate opportunity to voice my Interland gripe. A couple of years ago I had a unix virtual server account with a company called Hostpro that merged somehow with Interland. Prior to the merger it was the best ISP experience I have had.
Immediately after the merger, my email became unreliable. I would get several bounce messages per week from an active majordomo list I was on. On more than one occasion, inbound email simply stopped altogether for over a day, sending (the same) bounce messages to correspondents to myself and my staff.
After establishing that they had no intention of diagnosing and fixing the problem, I moved my account to another provider and duly informed Interland. I did not demand a refund for the two months of inadequate service.
They kept charging me $95 per month (yeah, too much, another reason to switch), so I emailed and called, getting assurances that the problem was resolved and my money would be refunded. This occurred on three occasions (amounting to four cancellations, and three promises of a refund). The details of the incompetence and confusion of the cutomer service in this incident are largely lost in the mists of time, but I recall it was generally a big waste of time.
Eventually they stopped billing my credit card, but the refund never arrived. I am of the opinion that Interland stole $570 cash from me, as well as several hours of my time, not to mention a competent hosting service.
They sent me an exit interview email when they finally closed the account. I told the story in great detail, but never got any further response.
If this is how they intend to get small businesses online let me just say that I have my doubts about how well it will go.
Linux MUST be preinstalled on computers to be a sustainable business. The Microsoft stranglehold on OEMs must be cracked to change the dynamics of the PC business. Until this happens, no desktop Linux company should be considered a viable longterm company.
Yup. Every time I've said this exact thing on/. I get modded down, oddly enough.
The paranoid in me says that M$ is saving up mod points to squelch things they need unsaid, and this is one of them. Actually, I don't believe my paranoid side. I think it's just tiresome hacker elitists, who think anyone who doesn't share their obsessions must be incompetent. Of course, they are wrong, and in this case they are self-defeatingly wrong, because their elitism is damaging the market success of truly open computing.
The only plausible way to detoxify computing in our lifetimes is to get viable competition for Microsoft on the desktop, and the only way that will happen is if the first-time boot into Linux is not a high-skilled operation, and the only way that is going to happen is if the OEM does the install. As long as MS has every mass market OEM (including/excluding Apple as you prefer) in its pocket, nothing will change.
I wonder that IBM doesn't see this, but meanwhile viva Lindows!
The small town of Reedsburg WI of all places (similar population, but no major university) has essentially the same idea.
According to an op-ed piece in a recent edition of the Wisconsin State Journal by the mayor of that town, the cable TV companies are lobbying to pass a statewide resolution making such a thing illegal. The mayor, who didn't seem much of radical lefty, thought this was a bit over the top.
I have very little additional information. There's nothing online as far as I can tell about this controversy, which is why I didn't submit it as a Slashdot story.
Apparently, competition from the public sector is going to be illegal though. I wonder how come we still have a postal service. Anyway, your town needs to watch out for being blindsided by this.
This is a "family support" nightmare that relates to Windows Update. My mother-in-law got upgraded to XP by my helpful out-of-town sister-in-law, who leaves me holding the bag as "computer expert", even though I've sworn never to touch XP. She has all this cheesy legacy hardware (that sister-in-law also thoughtfully provided) that I have to migrate, like a $99 scanner from when $99 scanners were young. Anyway, after working tolerably for a couple of months, for no apparent reason this system starts spewing cryptic error messages, and "learn more" or some such advises me to go do Windows Update.
Of course, not Mama nor sister-in-law nor I have ever done Windows Update, and so I find myself invited by my helpful friends in Redmond to download 66 meg of updates over her dial-up connection, and this before dinner. Well, I think, at least it gave me some checkboxes as to which updates to pick, so I pick what looks like the relevant ones, reducing the upload to a merely inconvenient 2 meg. Silly me.
There must be some dependencies among these patches, right? Under the pressure and sheer unpleasantness of the situation, I just idiotically thought, encouraged by the friendly checkboxes, that I could pick and choose. Bad idea.
Right. Windows XP no longer boots past "safe mode". Busted machine. No glory. No dinner. Back up data. Reinstall everything.
Machines being released these days are essentially useless without broadband, I suppose. "XP Home Edition" indeed.
More to the point, what were they thinking when they gave me those checkboxes? Either update altogether or don't. Anyway, my resolve never to touch XP is reinforced by these experiences. At least the mysterious error message has gone away for the time being.
Actually, a "sun getting brighter" article and a "global temperature time series" article from the same source does damage credibility quite a bit. Astrophysics and paleoclimatology are not closely related disciplines.
These conclusions, if sound, would ordinarily be reached by dramatically different scientific methods, and therefore by members of different communities. I am therefore inclined to conclude that 1) the authors are not serious participants in the relevant field in at least one of the papers and 2) the authors' work is politically rather than scientifically motivated, since the only common thread is to cast doubt on the consensus opinion about climate change.
-People are trying to model the effects of greenhouse gasses and then extrapolate the results of the models to regions where there is no data.
Extrapolation is notoriously difficult.
The principles used in climate modeling are physical, not statistical. There is no extrapolation involved. Thyere are other problems which I won't go into right now, but it isn't about extrapolation or curve-fitting. It's about radiative physics and fluid dynamics.
Actually, your statement is too strong. Historical and prehistorical climate trends are the only data against which we can refine our understanding.
The gross understanding, though, can be tested against other planets. That question is whether we can get a good estimate of the surface temperature of a planet knowing its orbital parameters, it surface composition and its atmospheric composition. Indeed we can, and that level of knowledge is sufficient to let us know there is a problem.
However, the earth being a very mutable place, and there are complex feedbacks in place. It would be good to understand them, so the past is a very important input to the analysis.
Because the first order policy response is so expensive, the more we can know about climate the better, except to the extent that this uncertainty is used as an excuse to avoid order zero response.
In other words, we already know that contemporary emissions are dangerously high, and policy should be aimed at least at slowing the rate of increase of the rate of increase. Eventually, ecomonomic tradeoffs will be important, and the more we know about the system, the better.
Further study of the past is irrelevant to immediate policy considerations, unless the current scientific understanding turns out to be totally misguided. It is the contention of the quoted article that this is indeed the case, though.
The Telegraph merely alludes to evidence without even so much as identifying the investigator. However, in the unlikely event that such evidence should exist, it indeed would be necessary to reconsider what ought to be done.
100% of the carbon in the biosphere is of volcanic origin, as is 100% of the carbon in the fossil fuel supply. That's hardly relevant to contemporary CO2 increases, which are about the conversion of fossilized carbon to atmospheric and biosphere reservoirs.
My reference is Biogeopchemistry W.H.Schlesinger, Academic Press, 1991. Figure 11.1 shows contemporary natural fluxes near equilibrium, plus an annual artificial input 5 x 10^15 tons of carbon. Weathering and limestone deposition fluxes are about two orders of magnitude smaller.
It was the standard textbook on the subject a few years back, but it may be a bit out of date. What are you using?
I see, you believe that no one associated with climate science knows how to take a derivative. Please feel free to do so and enlighten them.
The problem, of course, is that thermometers weren't even invented for most of the time period of interest, and that nobody set out to take a systematic measurement of the entire surface of the planet until very recently.
It's generally believed that the data looks something like this. The data series can be found here, in case you want to exercise your finite difference script on it.
Apparently this consensus is being called into question. It's the validity of the data, not the competence of the community to analyze it, that is apparently in question here. We are a long way from a serious challenge to the consensus opinion, though. First we need to know whether the journalist mangled the story, and if not, who were the unnamed scientists involved, what evidence they have come up with, and whether their ideas have been peer reviewed by other paleoclimatologists.
It's important for the interested lay reader to understand that the public debate is being colored by advocacy posing as science, often funded by fossil fuel interests. One study doesn't reverse the consensus, no matter how a breathless reporter phrases it. It's worth noting that the unnamed "scientists" are supposed to be associated with the
UK Climate Impacts Programme, whose site prominently states, as of today:
The average global temperature is warmer than any other century in the last 1,000 years. About 0.6C of warming has occurred over the last century, with land warming more than the oceans. The 1990s were the warmest decade in the last 100 years.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think you're getting a license. I believe your university has a site license. You are getting the distribution disks only, and the license belongs to the university, so the situation isn't comparable.
Well, at least we know that you aren't astroturfing. What a great link! Thanks for the href!
"Gandhicon" may not be a word in common use, but it has a lot of nice features. Why should WSR not be able to use his position of influence on hacker vocabulary to expose neologisms he likes?
Take everything he says with a grain of salt. Hell, take everything anyone says with a grain of salt. (Except maybe Linus himself. All hail Linus.)
Raymond says a lot of silly things and a lot of interesting things. Do you think the right way to respond to this is to ask him to shut up? The cost of silly things is small compared to the benefit of interesting things. Raymond easily manages a high enough ratio that it's worth paying attention to him.
aargh. Now why didn't I think of that?
(see functional fixity )
If you're ahead of your time, you get no services.
I got into electrical engineering at Northwestern's Tech Institute in the 1970s despite the fact that I came from a family with no practical skills and a snooty school with no shop program. I was explicitly looking for some remedial education. This was part of the appeal of engineering for me.
I was very strong mathematically and conceptually but didn't know how to pronounce "solder", had no idea why anyone would care about some marginal phenomena called "semiconductors" and thought a "transistor" was a type of radio. I left knowing better, but only slightly. Certainly no one at Northwestern bothered to teach me to drill or mount or solder things.
Ironically, while I wasn't remotely ready for an entry level tech job, I was well prepared for grad school. So I continued my education, and eventually met some patient people who showed me how to wire wrap and continuity test and such, but at the time I got my bachelor's degree I was furious. I had an engineering degree, but expected and deserved the derision of anyone who had ever built a machine that worked.
It was ASSUMED that an engineering student came from an engineering or at least a technical family or had a strong interest in such things in high school. I went through the entire program not knowing things that were presumed to be general knowledge in the student population, though they were in no way explicit prerequisites, and though no remediation was offerred.
From where I'm sitting, this brilliant MIT insight is thirty years too late.
I always thought mini-mallism was about low-slung commercial structures with multiple small shops and ample parking, though.
Therefore, by the logic of the advice paper, you should never publish such advice, as it would increase the likelihood of termination of the simulation.
This is all silly. It blithely assumes the strong AI premise as proven. But if the strong AI premise holds, there is no moral difference between a simulation and a reality, since both support consciousness.
Essentially, the article seems to be claiming that there is a God, to whom we should be grateful for not pulling the plug on our reality. Then it presumes that God is in it for entertainment and feels no moral obligation toward us. As religions go, this one seems particularly nasty and evil. I suspect that any being that can run a system as complex as this one will have moral obligations toward sentient entities which that creator has created.
TMM plus OSX for Unix Geeks, both from O'Reilly, have served me well.
I also agree that the proliferation of platforms hurts MS, but it hurts open source X86ware in the same way. Note that because Apple and Sun control the hardware, they and developers for their targets have many fewer such problems.
In most cases the fix is really complicated but in this case it is easy. Microsoft should get a nickel in tax credits when they give away a CD, maybe a buck if they go so far as to include halfway useful documentation. Barring that Red Hat should do exactly as you suggest.
I would think that deliberately misleading a legislator about the purpose of proposed legislation would disqualify a person from real niceness. Just my fringe opinion, I guess.
No more Tang, right?
The "investment community" derails good things all the time, if the thing isn't good for the investor. There are other good things in the world, including but not limited to excellent products which come to fruition more slowly than the discount rate would allow. Closely held companies can take the financial hit because they have other interests, while publicly traded companies cannot.
More to the present point, the "investment community" is no longer plausibly viewed as an impartial balance of available information. Good things frequently get derailed through malice or incompetence. As the number of investors grows, it has an increasingly dominant herd mentality that can be either simply wrongheaded (AOL) or maliciously manipulated (Enron).
In this case, by encouraging the investors to think of Apple as owner of 3% of the desktop market rather than 100% of the quality desktop market, entities with an interest in the failure of Apple's initiatives can potentially create an irrational mindset in the "community". This would encourage investors to take a strong and stable company and divides it up into two worthless ones, in the mistaken or delibeartely misled impression that it would be doing the opposite.
In general, the decisions about which stocks succeed or fail are made by people with little specific expertise about anything at all, manipulated by people and institutions with narrow financial self-interest. The suggestion that the process is highly reliable has obviously been increasingly idiotic over the past few years. The fact that a significant investor group believes something offers just about zero credibility. It certainly doesn't constitute an argument in favor of their position, it simply invites me to get on an unexamined bandwagon. This is exactly how history's worst decisions have been made.
I am convinced that Apple has much larger mindshare than its market share shows. Apple users LIKE to use their Apples, and use them a LOT for a LONG TIME. I would bet the usage per dollar expended on Apple machines is much more favorable than for Wintel boxes.
As a consumer or a developer of applications that depend on good UI design and solid infrastructure (as opposed to cutting-edge performance-critical applications), I am interested in finding systems that work for me for a long time, not in finding systems that compel constant infrastructure hassles, learning and retooling costs, and on-hold music from unhelpful help desks.
THe existing Apple strategy will gain total sales and market share but only slowly. (At some point, it may actually shrink the total market size, as it returns more value to the consumer.) This may be small consolation for investors. The current strategy has a good chance of winning in the long run, but the turnaround will continue to be slow.
Splitting Apple won't help from the financial point of view.
Consider. Why does Apple suddenly have stunningly good software? There are three parts to the answer. 1) capitalizing on excellent pre-existing software (BSD and NextStep) 2) hard work by talented people and 3) a closed, finite set of hardware platforms.
Support random Wintel boxes and away goes your ease of development and low cost/high quality support.
If Apple splits in order to sell OSX to the WIntel platform, the hardware division suffers direct competition from Dell and the software division gets huge support nightmares in exchange for either a tiny market (post-OEM OS installs) or a market that MS has shown no inclination to share (commodity Wintel platform OEM installs).
There's no great market advantage to Aqua screens of death. Though I am sure they would be more attractive and polite, I don't think that's the best way to gain market share.
There are tremendous productivity and reliability advantages to an integrated hardware/software company for commodity machines, and Aplle stands alone in owning this space. Apple has it right and should stay the course.
If the investment community tries to derail this, Apple should indeed go to a privately held company, but held by people who appreciate the amazing work they have recently done and intend to hold to the plan to capture the eventual return. I wonder if ownership by a user consortium might actually work to protect the platform from this muddleheaded strategy.
Immediately after the merger, my email became unreliable. I would get several bounce messages per week from an active majordomo list I was on. On more than one occasion, inbound email simply stopped altogether for over a day, sending (the same) bounce messages to correspondents to myself and my staff.
After establishing that they had no intention of diagnosing and fixing the problem, I moved my account to another provider and duly informed Interland. I did not demand a refund for the two months of inadequate service.
They kept charging me $95 per month (yeah, too much, another reason to switch), so I emailed and called, getting assurances that the problem was resolved and my money would be refunded. This occurred on three occasions (amounting to four cancellations, and three promises of a refund). The details of the incompetence and confusion of the cutomer service in this incident are largely lost in the mists of time, but I recall it was generally a big waste of time.
Eventually they stopped billing my credit card, but the refund never arrived. I am of the opinion that Interland stole $570 cash from me, as well as several hours of my time, not to mention a competent hosting service.
They sent me an exit interview email when they finally closed the account. I told the story in great detail, but never got any further response.
If this is how they intend to get small businesses online let me just say that I have my doubts about how well it will go.
Yup. Every time I've said this exact thing on /. I get modded down, oddly enough.
The paranoid in me says that M$ is saving up mod points to squelch things they need unsaid, and this is one of them. Actually, I don't believe my paranoid side. I think it's just tiresome hacker elitists, who think anyone who doesn't share their obsessions must be incompetent. Of course, they are wrong, and in this case they are self-defeatingly wrong, because their elitism is damaging the market success of truly open computing.
The only plausible way to detoxify computing in our lifetimes is to get viable competition for Microsoft on the desktop, and the only way that will happen is if the first-time boot into Linux is not a high-skilled operation, and the only way that is going to happen is if the OEM does the install. As long as MS has every mass market OEM (including/excluding Apple as you prefer) in its pocket, nothing will change.
I wonder that IBM doesn't see this, but meanwhile viva Lindows!
According to an op-ed piece in a recent edition of the Wisconsin State Journal by the mayor of that town, the cable TV companies are lobbying to pass a statewide resolution making such a thing illegal. The mayor, who didn't seem much of radical lefty, thought this was a bit over the top.
I have very little additional information. There's nothing online as far as I can tell about this controversy, which is why I didn't submit it as a Slashdot story.
Apparently, competition from the public sector is going to be illegal though. I wonder how come we still have a postal service. Anyway, your town needs to watch out for being blindsided by this.
Of course, not Mama nor sister-in-law nor I have ever done Windows Update, and so I find myself invited by my helpful friends in Redmond to download 66 meg of updates over her dial-up connection, and this before dinner. Well, I think, at least it gave me some checkboxes as to which updates to pick, so I pick what looks like the relevant ones, reducing the upload to a merely inconvenient 2 meg. Silly me.
There must be some dependencies among these patches, right? Under the pressure and sheer unpleasantness of the situation, I just idiotically thought, encouraged by the friendly checkboxes, that I could pick and choose. Bad idea.
Right. Windows XP no longer boots past "safe mode". Busted machine. No glory. No dinner. Back up data. Reinstall everything.
Machines being released these days are essentially useless without broadband, I suppose. "XP Home Edition" indeed.
More to the point, what were they thinking when they gave me those checkboxes? Either update altogether or don't. Anyway, my resolve never to touch XP is reinforced by these experiences. At least the mysterious error message has gone away for the time being.
Your turn.
These conclusions, if sound, would ordinarily be reached by dramatically different scientific methods, and therefore by members of different communities. I am therefore inclined to conclude that 1) the authors are not serious participants in the relevant field in at least one of the papers and 2) the authors' work is politically rather than scientifically motivated, since the only common thread is to cast doubt on the consensus opinion about climate change.
The principles used in climate modeling are physical, not statistical. There is no extrapolation involved. Thyere are other problems which I won't go into right now, but it isn't about extrapolation or curve-fitting. It's about radiative physics and fluid dynamics.
The gross understanding, though, can be tested against other planets. That question is whether we can get a good estimate of the surface temperature of a planet knowing its orbital parameters, it surface composition and its atmospheric composition. Indeed we can, and that level of knowledge is sufficient to let us know there is a problem.
However, the earth being a very mutable place, and there are complex feedbacks in place. It would be good to understand them, so the past is a very important input to the analysis.
Because the first order policy response is so expensive, the more we can know about climate the better, except to the extent that this uncertainty is used as an excuse to avoid order zero response.
In other words, we already know that contemporary emissions are dangerously high, and policy should be aimed at least at slowing the rate of increase of the rate of increase. Eventually, ecomonomic tradeoffs will be important, and the more we know about the system, the better.
Further study of the past is irrelevant to immediate policy considerations, unless the current scientific understanding turns out to be totally misguided. It is the contention of the quoted article that this is indeed the case, though.
The Telegraph merely alludes to evidence without even so much as identifying the investigator. However, in the unlikely event that such evidence should exist, it indeed would be necessary to reconsider what ought to be done.
100% of the carbon in the biosphere is of volcanic origin, as is 100% of the carbon in the fossil fuel supply. That's hardly relevant to contemporary CO2 increases, which are about the conversion of fossilized carbon to atmospheric and biosphere reservoirs.
My reference is Biogeopchemistry W.H.Schlesinger, Academic Press, 1991. Figure 11.1 shows contemporary natural fluxes near equilibrium, plus an annual artificial input 5 x 10^15 tons of carbon. Weathering and limestone deposition fluxes are about two orders of magnitude smaller.
It was the standard textbook on the subject a few years back, but it may be a bit out of date. What are you using?
The greenhouse effect has been established physics for 150 years.
The problem, of course, is that thermometers weren't even invented for most of the time period of interest, and that nobody set out to take a systematic measurement of the entire surface of the planet until very recently.
It's generally believed that the data looks something like this. The data series can be found here, in case you want to exercise your finite difference script on it.
Apparently this consensus is being called into question. It's the validity of the data, not the competence of the community to analyze it, that is apparently in question here. We are a long way from a serious challenge to the consensus opinion, though. First we need to know whether the journalist mangled the story, and if not, who were the unnamed scientists involved, what evidence they have come up with, and whether their ideas have been peer reviewed by other paleoclimatologists.
It's important for the interested lay reader to understand that the public debate is being colored by advocacy posing as science, often funded by fossil fuel interests. One study doesn't reverse the consensus, no matter how a breathless reporter phrases it. It's worth noting that the unnamed "scientists" are supposed to be associated with the UK Climate Impacts Programme, whose site prominently states, as of today: