Actually the fossil record suggests otherwise, if the amount of change is too abrupt. In that case most higher life forms go extinct because they are too dependent upon specific lower forms of life that often can not adapt. Most organisms have very specific environmental requirements. Go outside of those physiological limits and they die. Humans aren't much different in many respects. We do a lot of things, but seldom do we really get too far out of our physiological comfort zone. A world that in 80-100 years has temperatures of 130-140 degrees F in the shade for weeks on end will be a whole experience.
Keep in mind that this time its totally different, because of the rate at which CO2 is rising. Its going up more than 26 times faster than during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal maximum, which changed the forests of what is now northern Wyoming from redwoods to palm trees in a couple of thousand years. It will be hard to imagine many organisms surviving that kind of change over the course of a few hundred, much less most of their pollinators.
"Do you think Canadians and Russians live in fear of global warming?"
They should. The vast bulk of the warming that will be seen is occurring in the Arctic and generally speaking even Russians and Canadians need to eat. With food crops under threat, they may well find themselves stressed as well. Some 56,000 Russians died in the heat wave in 2010. Some 40,000-50,000 Europeans died from a similar heat wave in 2003. If the Lake El’gygytgyn results are a direct indication that the global climate sensitivity is 8 degrees Celsius which it appears to, rather than what people have been indirectly inferring and using in their climate models, then its pretty clear that we can expect many more to die as we now move into the Arctic amplification phase of global warming.
As for the high latitude North providing more arable land, don't count on it for several reasons. 1) Arctic soils are very poor, 2) few commercial plants can tolerate the long winters so most crops that require more than one year to produce, such as fruit trees won't be among them, 3) just because the Arctic is warming doesn't mean that it may not yet see many days with freezing temperatures, so most plants adapted to more southern latitudes simply won't be able to adapt to growing conditions which are interrupted by severe frost in an unpredictable way, 4) it may be almost impossible to take pollinators with them given the different wind and percipitation/abruptly changing temperature regimes. Keep in mind many plants used for human consumption, such as corn, rice, coffee are tropical or tropical highland species, 5) many others such as wheat are highly susceptible to rusts and fungi and will likely fare poorly as there is too much moisture in the atmosphere such as in early spring, and 6) simply because you have high latitude does not mean that abundant, year around sources of freshwater will be uniformly available throughout the entire landscape.
Nobody has those kinds of energy resources. Even in Dubai where they have an abundance of hydrocarbons, their islands don't amount to much more than a few meters of dredged sand in relatively restricted areas. Have you attempted to work out the energy requirements for moving such masses of sand and rock? Just think how expensive it would be just to get it from the sea to the mountains, much less on the barge in the first place? Do you have any idea how much CO2 you would generate in the process raising sea levels even further.
It seems your ideas are not very well thought out. You might have figured that out had to taken even a moment to reflect on your silly idea. Take a few more bong hits and get back to us.
Its pretty clear that when you look at periods in Earth history that had high CO2 and high temperatures, vast deserts were a very prominent feature of the landscape.
Perhaps it never occurred to you that waiting a few million years might prove impractical. Few people are that patient. I suspect you will simply give up before you wai it that long.
Of course that's a lot easier said than done. How do you propose to feed those who are presently just scrapping by on these marginal lands already? People here seem loathe to let in an immigrants, much less a few hundred million of them, many from the Middle East, South Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where desertification is expected to intensify.
I don't have a problem with DRM in HTML 5 Standards, as long as there is also a way to effectively and automatically set one's browser to ignore and not display any DRM content or mechanisms seeking payment for seeing that content. If people want to encrypt their data and not let me see it that's fine with me as long as they don't force me to spend any time what so ever otherwise using the remaining HTML 5 content or navigating around intrusive DRM content.
DRM content, out of sight, out of mind. Otherwise, I'm going to be force to watch and navigate around all sort of commercials and advertisements for stuff I have no interest in paying for.
If DRM content is to be managed within HTML there needs to be seemless standards that make it entire invisible to people who don't want to be bothered by it, when viewing other non-DRM content. Otherwise, this stuff will rapidly make the rest of the web useless as you waste time just trying to figure out how to avoid it.
" just a subscription service that makes the software usable."
Exactly. You don't pay, you get no useable software, even if you are somewhere where you can't access the internet.
As a more or less casual user of Adobe CS5, there just simply nothing in it that is worth $50/month. I've had it for 3 years now and I still don't see why I need to pay Adobe $50 / month for software I fire up maybe 2 or 3 times per week. Yes, its nice, but hardly essential. I suspect there are many users like me.
Actually, from a business perspective businesses that run GIMP might not have the latest and greatest but then they won't have to pass on the costs of upgrades to their consumers making them increasingly more competitive in the long run.
Which begs the question is it really worth it to me to get f___ked?
Seems like a real incentive here to just hold on and wait until either 1) other more competitive products come a long that do most of what I need, 2) GIMP and open software get better, friendlier or 3) wait for Adobe's pricing model to bomb and get a better price as they realize they are losing customers.
Its not exactly like I have to use Adobe products.
You would probably have to be using photoshop 8 hours per day to save that 5 minutes. I really doubt anyone in any design studio is that diligent.
For me as a casual user, its hard to justify even upgrading, much less paying $50/month for a piece of software I may use 1-2 hours per month at most. I suspect there are a great many users like me, so there is a very big market for the taking for anyone who wants to design a good Photoshop/Illustrator/PDF alternative. A $350-500 competitor product with a $100/yr upgrade cost that does about 80-85% of what CS6 does and Adobe will be out of business in a few years.
I'm more than willing to hold on to my CS5 version until it breaks and see what there is out there later. Just not enough value in the upgrades to make them worth it anymore.
Exactly. The cloud aspect is to provide more control for Adobe via more lock in. Lock in ultimately means less choice for users and more predatory pricing and even less incentive for Adobe to develop more cost effective software.
Even for small businesses, write-off's don't come without a cost. What you get now and what you might hope you get at a reasonable price in the future are two very different things. One rarely sees software reduce unnecessary features so as to become more inexpensive. The trend is more expensive, and usually for features that the vast majority of users won't ever or will only rarely use.
You hope that they won't be deleted but there's really no guarantee. I've been a CS user for some time now, but feel the product has become too expensive for the value I get out of it, so I'll just stick with an older version and be done with it.
The bigger problem with the cloud approach is that down the line, what's to say you won't have to watch commercials or be locked into an every increasing subscription price down the road while you use their product? At least with CD your investment is already paid for you don't loose what you already have. That's not necessarily true for the software subscription/cloud based product. You are at their mercy.
Exactly. Now they can just attach a brick to the can and it will go right through the roof into your living room. With precise enough GPS, there will be no need to even get up out of the sofa.
As a one time user of Adobe products this is a big issue for me. I have to maintain my projects over the long term. If the Adobe user base craters and Adobe takes a hike I don't want to loose access to my work. At least with an old purchased version it still works. With the new cloud implementation, this is anything but certain, especially as they become even more incentivized to make changes to fundamental file structures that constantly force to you migrate to the ever more expensive alternative.
"As to jobs... again, if a workplace needs CS, they'll pay the monthly license (per-seat, probably) as part of their operating cost"
This is the expectation, but in this environment its getting a lot harder to pass off one's costs to customers even if much can be written off the top as a business expense. This model, which will be $600 this year will probably be $1000 in a few more and a lot of companies will start seeking alternatives to keep themselves competitive relative to those that have to pay Adobe for exorbitantly priced software.
For now I'll just keep using my old Adobe products until something better comes a long an replaces it. I'm not buying into the software for rent model. Just way to many hidden and unexpected costs, with very limited control over one's computing environment for users.
There is also no guarantee that they won't change the various file formats going forward, so the opportunities for lock in become tremendous as the project goes fully toward the cloud/rental model.
I do worry about corporations such as Adobe, since it would only take a Google to decide to compete with them in the cloud and users could soon find themselves out high and dry in terms of basic file structures and archival issues.
You make some good points. There is a lot of things that some software does that others won't that make it worth the money to have.
However, everyone isn't in the same boat. I just can't see getting $600/year use out of the CS suite. I have an older version and for me this is just fine.
Once Adobe stand alone versions become obsolete and hard to find, you can bet that you will be held hostage to pay whatever they ask in perpetuity. Until there is competition there is no reason to suspect that it won't happen.
I was a buying Adobe Creative suite and updating for a while, but their business model is now simply too predatory for my tastes. I'll wait for others now with an incentive to build similar, but much cheaper software. I and I suspect most users don't use more than 20-30% of the functionality in the suite as it is. Why pay to rent something you are not going to use?
The real problem with renting software is essentially that you are locked in. Once you stop paying, your software "goes away". They have zero incentive to let you stay using older versions, so expect once they lock in the market, the window to upgrade before you are shut out will grow shorter, while the price to rent grows larger. You can see this already in their price increases over the past few years. This year it will be $600/yr, the next $700 and so on. Count on it.
Looks as if Adobe is giving other software vendors a real incentive to displace them in all but the high end niche of the market.
As anyone who is familiar with interpolation knows, extrapolation is a very risky business that provides little statistical confidence and error bounds in the prediction.
Of course, that doesn't prevents some from trying to use it to win the lottery anyway. Sure you get a prediction, but there is virtually no way to assign useful error bounds to the prediction.
Slashdot Mirror
"Life adapts. That's what it does."
Actually the fossil record suggests otherwise, if the amount of change is too abrupt. In that case most higher life forms go extinct because they are too dependent upon specific lower forms of life that often can not adapt. Most organisms have very specific environmental requirements. Go outside of those physiological limits and they die. Humans aren't much different in many respects. We do a lot of things, but seldom do we really get too far out of our physiological comfort zone. A world that in 80-100 years has temperatures of 130-140 degrees F in the shade for weeks on end will be a whole experience.
Keep in mind that this time its totally different, because of the rate at which CO2 is rising. Its going up more than 26 times faster than during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal maximum, which changed the forests of what is now northern Wyoming from redwoods to palm trees in a couple of thousand years. It will be hard to imagine many organisms surviving that kind of change over the course of a few hundred, much less most of their pollinators.
"Do you think Canadians and Russians live in fear of global warming?"
They should. The vast bulk of the warming that will be seen is occurring in the Arctic and generally speaking even Russians and Canadians need to eat. With food crops under threat, they may well find themselves stressed as well. Some 56,000 Russians died in the heat wave in 2010. Some 40,000-50,000 Europeans died from a similar heat wave in 2003. If the Lake El’gygytgyn results are a direct indication that the global climate sensitivity is 8 degrees Celsius which it appears to, rather than what people have been indirectly inferring and using in their climate models, then its pretty clear that we can expect many more to die as we now move into the Arctic amplification phase of global warming.
As for the high latitude North providing more arable land, don't count on it for several reasons. 1) Arctic soils are very poor, 2) few commercial plants can tolerate the long winters so most crops that require more than one year to produce, such as fruit trees won't be among them, 3) just because the Arctic is warming doesn't mean that it may not yet see many days with freezing temperatures, so most plants adapted to more southern latitudes simply won't be able to adapt to growing conditions which are interrupted by severe frost in an unpredictable way, 4) it may be almost impossible to take pollinators with them given the different wind and percipitation/abruptly changing temperature regimes. Keep in mind many plants used for human consumption, such as corn, rice, coffee are tropical or tropical highland species, 5) many others such as wheat are highly susceptible to rusts and fungi and will likely fare poorly as there is too much moisture in the atmosphere such as in early spring, and 6) simply because you have high latitude does not mean that abundant, year around sources of freshwater will be uniformly available throughout the entire landscape.
Obviously, a lot depends on how fast the change.
Nobody has those kinds of energy resources. Even in Dubai where they have an abundance of hydrocarbons, their islands don't amount to much more than a few meters of dredged sand in relatively restricted areas. Have you attempted to work out the energy requirements for moving such masses of sand and rock? Just think how expensive it would be just to get it from the sea to the mountains, much less on the barge in the first place? Do you have any idea how much CO2 you would generate in the process raising sea levels even further.
It seems your ideas are not very well thought out. You might have figured that out had to taken even a moment to reflect on your silly idea. Take a few more bong hits and get back to us.
Its pretty clear that when you look at periods in Earth history that had high CO2 and high temperatures, vast deserts were a very prominent feature of the landscape.
Perhaps it never occurred to you that waiting a few million years might prove impractical. Few people are that patient. I suspect you will simply give up before you wai it that long.
Of course that's a lot easier said than done. How do you propose to feed those who are presently just scrapping by on these marginal lands already? People here seem loathe to let in an immigrants, much less a few hundred million of them, many from the Middle East, South Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where desertification is expected to intensify.
What makes you think algae won't be affected? They have always been affected in the past when there are major temperature changes.
I don't have a problem with DRM in HTML 5 Standards, as long as there is also a way to effectively and automatically set one's browser to ignore and not display any DRM content or mechanisms seeking payment for seeing that content. If people want to encrypt their data and not let me see it that's fine with me as long as they don't force me to spend any time what so ever otherwise using the remaining HTML 5 content or navigating around intrusive DRM content.
DRM content, out of sight, out of mind. Otherwise, I'm going to be force to watch and navigate around all sort of commercials and advertisements for stuff I have no interest in paying for.
If DRM content is to be managed within HTML there needs to be seemless standards that make it entire invisible to people who don't want to be bothered by it, when viewing other non-DRM content. Otherwise, this stuff will rapidly make the rest of the web useless as you waste time just trying to figure out how to avoid it.
" just a subscription service that makes the software usable."
Exactly. You don't pay, you get no useable software, even if you are somewhere where you can't access the internet.
As a more or less casual user of Adobe CS5, there just simply nothing in it that is worth $50/month. I've had it for 3 years now and I still don't see why I need to pay Adobe $50 / month for software I fire up maybe 2 or 3 times per week. Yes, its nice, but hardly essential. I suspect there are many users like me.
Actually, from a business perspective businesses that run GIMP might not have the latest and greatest but then they won't have to pass on the costs of upgrades to their consumers making them increasingly more competitive in the long run.
Isn't GIMP open source that can be forked if the project managers are doing a poor job?
"For the user, not so much..."
Which begs the question is it really worth it to me to get f___ked?
Seems like a real incentive here to just hold on and wait until either 1) other more competitive products come a long that do most of what I need, 2) GIMP and open software get better, friendlier or 3) wait for Adobe's pricing model to bomb and get a better price as they realize they are losing customers.
Its not exactly like I have to use Adobe products.
You would probably have to be using photoshop 8 hours per day to save that 5 minutes. I really doubt anyone in any design studio is that diligent.
For me as a casual user, its hard to justify even upgrading, much less paying $50/month for a piece of software I may use 1-2 hours per month at most. I suspect there are a great many users like me, so there is a very big market for the taking for anyone who wants to design a good Photoshop/Illustrator/PDF alternative. A $350-500 competitor product with a $100/yr upgrade cost that does about 80-85% of what CS6 does and Adobe will be out of business in a few years.
I'm more than willing to hold on to my CS5 version until it breaks and see what there is out there later. Just not enough value in the upgrades to make them worth it anymore.
Exactly. The cloud aspect is to provide more control for Adobe via more lock in. Lock in ultimately means less choice for users and more predatory pricing and even less incentive for Adobe to develop more cost effective software.
Even for small businesses, write-off's don't come without a cost. What you get now and what you might hope you get at a reasonable price in the future are two very different things. One rarely sees software reduce unnecessary features so as to become more inexpensive. The trend is more expensive, and usually for features that the vast majority of users won't ever or will only rarely use.
You hope that they won't be deleted but there's really no guarantee. I've been a CS user for some time now, but feel the product has become too expensive for the value I get out of it, so I'll just stick with an older version and be done with it.
The bigger problem with the cloud approach is that down the line, what's to say you won't have to watch commercials or be locked into an every increasing subscription price down the road while you use their product? At least with CD your investment is already paid for you don't loose what you already have. That's not necessarily true for the software subscription/cloud based product. You are at their mercy.
Exactly. Now they can just attach a brick to the can and it will go right through the roof into your living room. With precise enough GPS, there will be no need to even get up out of the sofa.
The adults are taller so they should be able to reach the beer first.
Great idea, but its likely to only stimulate the development of interceptor drones out to get one keg up on the other drones.
As a one time user of Adobe products this is a big issue for me. I have to maintain my projects over the long term. If the Adobe user base craters and Adobe takes a hike I don't want to loose access to my work. At least with an old purchased version it still works. With the new cloud implementation, this is anything but certain, especially as they become even more incentivized to make changes to fundamental file structures that constantly force to you migrate to the ever more expensive alternative.
"As to jobs... again, if a workplace needs CS, they'll pay the monthly license (per-seat, probably) as part of their operating cost"
This is the expectation, but in this environment its getting a lot harder to pass off one's costs to customers even if much can be written off the top as a business expense. This model, which will be $600 this year will probably be $1000 in a few more and a lot of companies will start seeking alternatives to keep themselves competitive relative to those that have to pay Adobe for exorbitantly priced software.
For now I'll just keep using my old Adobe products until something better comes a long an replaces it. I'm not buying into the software for rent model. Just way to many hidden and unexpected costs, with very limited control over one's computing environment for users.
There is also no guarantee that they won't change the various file formats going forward, so the opportunities for lock in become tremendous as the project goes fully toward the cloud/rental model.
I do worry about corporations such as Adobe, since it would only take a Google to decide to compete with them in the cloud and users could soon find themselves out high and dry in terms of basic file structures and archival issues.
Fact is that if they had to spend their time learning how to write software, they probably wouldn't have time to be artists.
How much money does the average coder make for their artwork anyway?
You make some good points. There is a lot of things that some software does that others won't that make it worth the money to have.
However, everyone isn't in the same boat. I just can't see getting $600/year use out of the CS suite. I have an older version and for me this is just fine.
Once Adobe stand alone versions become obsolete and hard to find, you can bet that you will be held hostage to pay whatever they ask in perpetuity. Until there is competition there is no reason to suspect that it won't happen.
I was a buying Adobe Creative suite and updating for a while, but their business model is now simply too predatory for my tastes. I'll wait for others now with an incentive to build similar, but much cheaper software. I and I suspect most users don't use more than 20-30% of the functionality in the suite as it is. Why pay to rent something you are not going to use?
The real problem with renting software is essentially that you are locked in. Once you stop paying, your software "goes away". They have zero incentive to let you stay using older versions, so expect once they lock in the market, the window to upgrade before you are shut out will grow shorter, while the price to rent grows larger. You can see this already in their price increases over the past few years. This year it will be $600/yr, the next $700 and so on. Count on it.
Looks as if Adobe is giving other software vendors a real incentive to displace them in all but the high end niche of the market.
Nice recommendation
The industry that has formed around highly speculative science and mysteriology is alive, well, and thriving.
As anyone who is familiar with interpolation knows, extrapolation is a very risky business that provides little statistical confidence and error bounds in the prediction.
Of course, that doesn't prevents some from trying to use it to win the lottery anyway. Sure you get a prediction, but there is virtually no way to assign useful error bounds to the prediction.