Most of these people are not "climate scientists". Many are activists and science bureaucrats who haven't done any real science in decades. The best that can be said of them is that they are well-connected mathematicians, engineers and scientists with an opinion on Geoengineering. One of them is a lawyer.
For the rest, David Archer, Steven Sherwood, Frank Schwing and Andrew Gettleman are not too keen on the idea. Kevin Trenberth and LuAnne Thompson are dead-set against it.
Steven Ghan stands pretty much alone as a practicing geophysicist and climatologist in favour of geoengineering (as long as it is constrained to CO2 reduction).
Finally, it's notable that only half, 22 out of 44, of the respondents come out in favor of the idea.
Would it be out of the question to assess the needs of the troublesome 5% (and perhaps the other 10% that were shoehorned into Rails) and add a framework that's more in line with those needs?
Data exchange is sufficiently mature that interaction between applications in different environments is not an issue, so all you are left with is the added overhead of supporting two frameworks; not a bad thing if you consider the added flexibility of using the framework best suited to each application. Having options is usually a good thing.
Not only will they not be making adventurous switches to FOSS, they'll be milking their existing systems for as long as they can with a minimum of adds, moves or changes.
On the other hand, who are we to get in the way of a really good self-delusion? It's New Years--the time for resolutions we don't keep, and predictions that we hope no one will remember we made.
I've seen dramatic demonstrations of this over the years. One that stands out was a test of a Bryant drive sometime around 1970. In those days a 2 GB drive was at the edge of the envelope and Bryant was test-marketing just such a beast. It consisted of eight four-foot platters mounted four to a side on a shaft going through a monster of an electric motor. The heads were mounted on arms whose positioning was controlled by hydraulic cylinders big enough to be used as shocks on a pickup truck. The whole thing would not fit in the back of that pickup truck.
We were testing the thing with a program called the "Leese Bomb". Leese can identify himself or remain anonymous--I won't turn him in. The "Bomb" part was the nature of the test.
Basic tests in those days would involve writing a whole track and then reading it back and comparing what was read to what was written. You'd do this a number of times with different patterns to capture not only faults in the surface, but any sloppiness in the head control. The Leese bomb went one better.
It would write to the outside track, write to the inside track, read the outside track, read the inside track, and then compare. If the comparison failed it would repeat the test, and keep repeating untl it succeeded, counting the failures. If the test succeeded it would index the test both inward and outward so that the tracks tested would move toward the middle, cross, and continue. This test was superior in that it would capture dynamic flaws in the system as the distance the heads moved, and the time to move varied from max to zero.
In the case of the Bryant Drive (and, accidentally, an innocent Ramac drive at Caltech), the test found a resonant frequency. When the heads overshot their mark causing an error, the test stayed on the back and forth pattern, reinforcing the resonant motion with each cycle of the test. The drive started walking across the test floor in three-inch hops, but not for very long. In a few seconds, one of the shafts broke and one of the platters, a 500 pound disk rotating at 2400 rpm broke through the front of the unit and flew across the building until it was stopped, explosively, by one of the steel columns supporting the roof of the building. Miraculously, no one was hurt.
We gave up on Bryant for that application. Not long after that, CDC introduced its 200MB drives, and they passed the Leese Bomb with flying colours. Ten of them didn't take up any more room, or cost more, than the big Bryant, so our client was happy to go with that solution.
In any case the lesson is that, if it has moving parts, resonance is an issue.
Assuming you are old enough to have held a job, have you always worked for the same price, or have you "discriminated" by adjusting your income expectations to what the market would bear?
This sounds lovely on paper, but I don't think it's going to work out the way he thinks it will
So you are saying Obama is naive? From up here in Canada, it's not the impression we get. It looks like every move Obama makes is carefully orchestrated to produce exactly the result it gets. Reminds me, in much more than one way, of our own Pierre Trudeau.
I chose NT to point out that Windows has had serious IAC, permission management, for a long time, and the administrative tools to secure enterprise PC's haven't had anything to apologize about.
As to "home editions", Windows permission management has generally been more than adequate for the market Microsoft was serving. Multi-user PCs weren't an issue until parents started complaining about their kids hacking the family PC. I don't know how Microsoft tracks these things, but it would appear that XP was a response--not with new IAC features but with different default settings for features that had been there since NT.
As to MSDN--nice strawman. We weren't talking about administration. Google away; it works for me.
Users don't like change, but they can be convinced to embrace change if the payoff is there; witness the rapid switch from command line to GUI, from usenet to web. Both of those happened in a matter of months and now only techies use command lines and usenet (it's interesting that nothing ever goes away--we just keep adding new stuff--the delete key is dying).
Note that both of those changes came from the fringes. Microsoft adopted them when it was clear there was a market. It's easy to tell who's leading the charge; it's the guy with the arrows in his chest. If the next revolution doesn't come from the linux community (and it may be too late), it will come from somewhere else on the fringes.
I find the absence of a Visio clone on linux puzzling.
FOSS software is mostly self-serving: for techies, by techies. Visio is quite likely the single most popular tool for presenting process and system architectures, use case models, domain object models, storyboards, etc. One would think that a powerful techie tool like this would be almost immediately built for planning and documenting linux developments. If I was a developing in a linux environment, I would quickly tire of switching to Windows every time I wanted to do something at a level of abstraction higher than code.
Is it only Windows developers that use things like UML models to think about what they are doing?
Spoken like someone who knows bupkiss about Windows. Linux is designed as a server OS. The desktop versions are just a pretty face on top of the same server OS. If you are going to compare with Windows you need to compare with Windows server configurations. For a desktop "conversion" one good choice is Windows NT. More than ten years ago Windows NT had sophisticated IAC. Not only that, it was able to draw much finer distinctions than "me, us, everybody else".
The linux advantage is low price (not zero; FOSS documentation is so appalling you have to buy books). I pop back and forth between Windows and Ubuntu, Microsoft Office and Open Office, mainly because I'm a consultant and I have to be ready for anything. But, given my druthers, there's no contest. Windows is a much more productive environment to work in. I find that even "born linux" tools like the Gimp work better in Windows. And vital "born Windows" tools like Visio have no equivalent on linux.
I have to agree with the suggestion that the linux community needs to do something revolutionary. Otherwise it's just another OS.
This is where the "open" part becomes a liability. The way to get a market leg up is to put an insane amount of effort into something totally surprising. When you introduce it you are so far ahead of the competition that they'll never catch up. It's also likely that you've made the cost of entry so high that it's more effective for them to buy or license your product. But with open source projects, there's no surprise. If it's a good idea, Microsoft and Apple will pick up on it, and probably have something to market sooner.
Sometimes you just can't win / I guess I'll go eat worms.
And I like my Logitech keyboard better than WordPerfect.
For what you pay for a Mac you can get PC hardware at a level of engineering excellence that Mac owners can only dream of...and it will run Windows. Is it only on Slashdot that people don't seem to know that Microsoft does not make computers?
On the other hand, there are lots of people who believe no one should be prevented from having a gun without well-documented cause. Among this group is this guy:
"Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest." -- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
If you are working on software that's of interest to developers, someone who can will almost certainly build a FOSS version of it rather than pay you. With a few very notable exceptions, FOSS development is essentially self-serving. On the other hand, if your product is aimed at a non-techie audience, it's unlikely to stimulate FOSS competition.
The Gimp is an excellent example. It tends to be compared to Photoshop, but the comparison is unfair. Photoshop is a heavily-funded complex product aimed at a community that uses computers as tools and has no interest in how those tools come into being; it has nothing to fear from FOSS. In terms of its capabilities, The Gimp has yet to reach the level of my five-year-old version of Jasc Paint Shop Pro, and its features curve is leveling off. It's fairly evident that The Gimp has reached a point where it's good enough for the developers and their friends. They may add a few features for the fun of meeting the challenge, but I don't see myself switching from Paint Shop to The Gimp any time soon, or ever.
There will always be a commercial software market, but not for development tools, operating systems, or technical utilities. The big players will continue to fund development of open software that will allow them to compete with Microsoft, and the occasional labor of love will crop up. For the rest, it's either pay for it, or no one will build it.
However, I still feel that in the case of drugs that cause negative behavior, it is reasonable for societal action to be taken
There's a strong statistical connection between being male and raised by a single mom and "negative behaviour". Is society (euphemism for "me and my kind") justified in forcing a change to such a family organization? What change would you propose?
Slashdot Mirror
Most of these people are not "climate scientists". Many are activists and science bureaucrats who haven't done any real science in decades. The best that can be said of them is that they are well-connected mathematicians, engineers and scientists with an opinion on Geoengineering. One of them is a lawyer.
For the rest, David Archer, Steven Sherwood, Frank Schwing and Andrew Gettleman are not too keen on the idea. Kevin Trenberth and LuAnne Thompson are dead-set against it.
Steven Ghan stands pretty much alone as a practicing geophysicist and climatologist in favour of geoengineering (as long as it is constrained to CO2 reduction).
Finally, it's notable that only half, 22 out of 44, of the respondents come out in favor of the idea.
Would it be out of the question to assess the needs of the troublesome 5% (and perhaps the other 10% that were shoehorned into Rails) and add a framework that's more in line with those needs?
Data exchange is sufficiently mature that interaction between applications in different environments is not an issue, so all you are left with is the added overhead of supporting two frameworks; not a bad thing if you consider the added flexibility of using the framework best suited to each application. Having options is usually a good thing.
Bang on!
Not only will they not be making adventurous switches to FOSS, they'll be milking their existing systems for as long as they can with a minimum of adds, moves or changes.
On the other hand, who are we to get in the way of a really good self-delusion? It's New Years--the time for resolutions we don't keep, and predictions that we hope no one will remember we made.
What part of "bet the farm" did you not understand?
Disk drives have a resonant frequency
I've seen dramatic demonstrations of this over the years. One that stands out was a test of a Bryant drive sometime around 1970. In those days a 2 GB drive was at the edge of the envelope and Bryant was test-marketing just such a beast. It consisted of eight four-foot platters mounted four to a side on a shaft going through a monster of an electric motor. The heads were mounted on arms whose positioning was controlled by hydraulic cylinders big enough to be used as shocks on a pickup truck. The whole thing would not fit in the back of that pickup truck.
We were testing the thing with a program called the "Leese Bomb". Leese can identify himself or remain anonymous--I won't turn him in. The "Bomb" part was the nature of the test.
Basic tests in those days would involve writing a whole track and then reading it back and comparing what was read to what was written. You'd do this a number of times with different patterns to capture not only faults in the surface, but any sloppiness in the head control. The Leese bomb went one better.
It would write to the outside track, write to the inside track, read the outside track, read the inside track, and then compare. If the comparison failed it would repeat the test, and keep repeating untl it succeeded, counting the failures. If the test succeeded it would index the test both inward and outward so that the tracks tested would move toward the middle, cross, and continue. This test was superior in that it would capture dynamic flaws in the system as the distance the heads moved, and the time to move varied from max to zero.
In the case of the Bryant Drive (and, accidentally, an innocent Ramac drive at Caltech), the test found a resonant frequency. When the heads overshot their mark causing an error, the test stayed on the back and forth pattern, reinforcing the resonant motion with each cycle of the test. The drive started walking across the test floor in three-inch hops, but not for very long. In a few seconds, one of the shafts broke and one of the platters, a 500 pound disk rotating at 2400 rpm broke through the front of the unit and flew across the building until it was stopped, explosively, by one of the steel columns supporting the roof of the building. Miraculously, no one was hurt.
We gave up on Bryant for that application. Not long after that, CDC introduced its 200MB drives, and they passed the Leese Bomb with flying colours. Ten of them didn't take up any more room, or cost more, than the big Bryant, so our client was happy to go with that solution.
In any case the lesson is that, if it has moving parts, resonance is an issue.
They missed "intertubes" and "looser" used as a noun (as in "your a looser").
So let me understand this: The wave of the future is that we'll be talking to our computers and typing on our phones? "Oh brave new world..."
Assuming you are old enough to have held a job, have you always worked for the same price, or have you "discriminated" by adjusting your income expectations to what the market would bear?
the manufacturer must sell them at the same pricing and quantities they sell to cable companies
You don't really get this "free market" idea at all, do you?
This sounds lovely on paper, but I don't think it's going to work out the way he thinks it will
So you are saying Obama is naive? From up here in Canada, it's not the impression we get. It looks like every move Obama makes is carefully orchestrated to produce exactly the result it gets. Reminds me, in much more than one way, of our own Pierre Trudeau.
Welcome to the rabbit hole.
I chose NT to point out that Windows has had serious IAC, permission management, for a long time, and the administrative tools to secure enterprise PC's haven't had anything to apologize about.
As to "home editions", Windows permission management has generally been more than adequate for the market Microsoft was serving. Multi-user PCs weren't an issue until parents started complaining about their kids hacking the family PC. I don't know how Microsoft tracks these things, but it would appear that XP was a response--not with new IAC features but with different default settings for features that had been there since NT.
As to MSDN--nice strawman. We weren't talking about administration. Google away; it works for me.
Users don't like change, but they can be convinced to embrace change if the payoff is there; witness the rapid switch from command line to GUI, from usenet to web. Both of those happened in a matter of months and now only techies use command lines and usenet (it's interesting that nothing ever goes away--we just keep adding new stuff--the delete key is dying).
Note that both of those changes came from the fringes. Microsoft adopted them when it was clear there was a market. It's easy to tell who's leading the charge; it's the guy with the arrows in his chest. If the next revolution doesn't come from the linux community (and it may be too late), it will come from somewhere else on the fringes.
I find the absence of a Visio clone on linux puzzling.
FOSS software is mostly self-serving: for techies, by techies. Visio is quite likely the single most popular tool for presenting process and system architectures, use case models, domain object models, storyboards, etc. One would think that a powerful techie tool like this would be almost immediately built for planning and documenting linux developments. If I was a developing in a linux environment, I would quickly tire of switching to Windows every time I wanted to do something at a level of abstraction higher than code.
Is it only Windows developers that use things like UML models to think about what they are doing?
Sure they have. It's called the command line. And coincidentally, this is where Linux absolutely outshines Windows.
Really? How is bash on linux better than bash on Windows?
Windows ignored user permissions until XP
Spoken like someone who knows bupkiss about Windows. Linux is designed as a server OS. The desktop versions are just a pretty face on top of the same server OS. If you are going to compare with Windows you need to compare with Windows server configurations. For a desktop "conversion" one good choice is Windows NT. More than ten years ago Windows NT had sophisticated IAC. Not only that, it was able to draw much finer distinctions than "me, us, everybody else".
The linux advantage is low price (not zero; FOSS documentation is so appalling you have to buy books). I pop back and forth between Windows and Ubuntu, Microsoft Office and Open Office, mainly because I'm a consultant and I have to be ready for anything. But, given my druthers, there's no contest. Windows is a much more productive environment to work in. I find that even "born linux" tools like the Gimp work better in Windows. And vital "born Windows" tools like Visio have no equivalent on linux.
I have to agree with the suggestion that the linux community needs to do something revolutionary. Otherwise it's just another OS.
This is where the "open" part becomes a liability. The way to get a market leg up is to put an insane amount of effort into something totally surprising. When you introduce it you are so far ahead of the competition that they'll never catch up. It's also likely that you've made the cost of entry so high that it's more effective for them to buy or license your product. But with open source projects, there's no surprise. If it's a good idea, Microsoft and Apple will pick up on it, and probably have something to market sooner.
Sometimes you just can't win / I guess I'll go eat worms.
I prefer all my Mac hardware to Windows . Huh?!
And I like my Logitech keyboard better than WordPerfect.
For what you pay for a Mac you can get PC hardware at a level of engineering excellence that Mac owners can only dream of...and it will run Windows. Is it only on Slashdot that people don't seem to know that Microsoft does not make computers?
some people think everybody should have a gun
Really? Name one.
On the other hand, there are lots of people who believe no one should be prevented from having a gun without well-documented cause. Among this group is this guy:
"Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest." -- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
The "tool" is a plate.
I suspect that this case will reach a turn when someone points out that
To my mind, Microsoft has the deep pockets and they are an easy target, but the wrong people are being sued.
As is often the case...it depends.
If you are working on software that's of interest to developers, someone who can will almost certainly build a FOSS version of it rather than pay you. With a few very notable exceptions, FOSS development is essentially self-serving. On the other hand, if your product is aimed at a non-techie audience, it's unlikely to stimulate FOSS competition.
The Gimp is an excellent example. It tends to be compared to Photoshop, but the comparison is unfair. Photoshop is a heavily-funded complex product aimed at a community that uses computers as tools and has no interest in how those tools come into being; it has nothing to fear from FOSS. In terms of its capabilities, The Gimp has yet to reach the level of my five-year-old version of Jasc Paint Shop Pro, and its features curve is leveling off. It's fairly evident that The Gimp has reached a point where it's good enough for the developers and their friends. They may add a few features for the fun of meeting the challenge, but I don't see myself switching from Paint Shop to The Gimp any time soon, or ever.
There will always be a commercial software market, but not for development tools, operating systems, or technical utilities. The big players will continue to fund development of open software that will allow them to compete with Microsoft, and the occasional labor of love will crop up. For the rest, it's either pay for it, or no one will build it.
"Microsoft has destroyed it's [sic] credibility." Recursive [sic]ing. Happy?
Not recursive at all, given that the [sic] clearly refers to the erroneous "it's".
You definitely don't want a loose tail rotor. Some loose tail, on the other hand...
DARPA's mission is to prevent technological surprise for the United States and to create technological surprise for its adversaries.
Short, simple, unambiguous. If there were awards for objective statements, this would get one. Would that all my projects were so well defined!
However, I still feel that in the case of drugs that cause negative behavior, it is reasonable for societal action to be taken
There's a strong statistical connection between being male and raised by a single mom and "negative behaviour". Is society (euphemism for "me and my kind") justified in forcing a change to such a family organization? What change would you propose?
Given that there is not a single example of such a drug, your argument is specious.
You confuse autonomous with automatic.