<quote>"Over and over, we read of hidden, manipulated, and cherry-picked data, refusals to abide with having outsiders vet their work, and allowing naked advocacy into the IPCC reports on climate change as if they were peer-reviewed science. "

No, we don't; you just made those things up.</quote>

He did not make them up. They are all well documented. Various inquiries have found that Mann and Jones and his colleagues at the CRU did cherry pick data, they did manipulate figures to hide declines in temperature. The inquiries, including by the NSF, then concluded that this was normal scientific practice so there was no problem. The IPCC bigwigs did appointed lots of mates to write sections of its reports, including things like the classic section on India where the information was cut and paste from WCF propaganda on ice melting that was discredited.

Of course the fact that a few scientists stupidly exaggerated stuff and fudged a few graphs doesn't change the fact that the planet is warming. What this and the lame attempts to cover-up this up and deny it did was simply to cause serious damage to the climate change activists' agenda. Which is what the article is about. They are trying to blame their failure to win the political argument on a lack of scientific knowledge. They want to make up a scientific argument so they can ride roughshod all over the messy business of democracy and people's rights.

The majority of the population has never understood science and never will. It doesn't matter. In the past that lead to blind acceptance of science as progress but it leads now to cynicism about science. And given the actions of pharmaceutical companies that is fairly easy to understand and sensible. It isn't science that is going to win elections but politics. They have to stop bothering about trying to silence their critics and just debate them and campaign for support.

Significance testing is poor and confusing way of doing statistics that is used mostly in the humanities. The standard method of estimation is much better at conveying the magnitude of the difference and accuracy and likely repeatability of the experiment. Most academic who use significance testing never understood first year statistics anyway. There is a good argument on this issue here:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor/stories/2011/3333636.htm

I suspect that one of the reasons that Quorum did better in the experiment what that it uses white space rather than semi-colons and brackets. Misplaced semi-colons and brackets are common trivial errors that experienced programmers make. For novices writing in an editor (without any syntax highlighting or compiler errors to pick them up) under exam conditions that would be a major issue. It will be interesting to see their suggested further research with larger sample and languages like Python and C included.

On Perl. Perl was not a carefully designed language. It was intended for for text processing and just grew with the functionality of a shell, sed, awk, REs, bits of OO and whatever else you can think of thrown in. It is large, irregular and requires of lot of learning by rote and practice to master. It is very powerful and efficient at doing what it does but I don't think anyone is going to claim that it is a good language for quickly teaching the concepts of programming to beginners or the disabled. Which is what the authors of the paper are interested in and are comparing.

And if Perl is so wonderful and easy to use then why have they spent over a decade trying to clean up the syntax, reduce the number of ways of doing the same thing and improve the implementation with Perl 6? A neater language with Perl's functionality may have been a good idea but it has taken so long that other languages have been developed to fulfill roles (PHP, Java, Javascript, C#, Python, Ruby, Haskell etc) along with languages designed for modern issues like concurrency and cloud based applications e.g. Go, Opa and Dart.

Perl's main advantage are that there are lot of people who can do stuff quickly in Perl 5 and there is a lot of code available on the net. Perl 6 will now have little to offer because you would have to rewrite everything. It will be easier to back port new functionality where useful into Perl 5 (as is happening e.g with say (which is another illogical bit to have to learn by rote)) than to do that.

Centrelink already runs such a system for welfare recipients and it sucks.

Instead of just opening a letter you get an email or SMS to tell you that you have an electronic letter. Then you have to log into their website past a password and security question and download a PDF of the letter.

The website is offline most Sundays and nights for routine maintenance. At other times it is overloaded and so slow that it hard to use. For a while some of the PDFs were corrupted and unreadable by either Foxit or Adobe. And if you missed the email or SMS you missed the letter which could be important and leave you open to having your welfare suspended.

The Government has never implemented a single IT project properly and always wastes billions. I went back to getting letters and intend to continue doing so.

50 pixels -- that's an extra limb you can see while watching porn on your netbook!

You should say "See you later I am going somewhere else with reasonable conditions".
However, if you can't say that you should say "Excellent idea sir".

Linux has never ever been on its way to desktop success. It has never had more than 1% of the desktop market and is not growing. That is the entire point of the PC World article. That is not the result of a conspiracy, and referring to PC World article is not trolling.

Most people don't want to have to bother with updating an OS, let alone partitioning and installing one and hunting around to find drivers that work. Then hunting down and installing the applications they want to run. Homes and businesses want to buy a computer, push a button and use it. That is why the major desktop OS is still Windows XP, and it will become Windows 7 as people buy new computers because that is what will be installed on the computer they buy.

Linux computers cost more because they sell in smaller numbers and Linux is more costly to install, support and train users in. With Linux and X Windows, Gnome, KDE and host of libraries needed to run applications a full version of Linux runs slower than XP on a netbook. That is why Dell and Asus are ditching it, it is simply dollars because the cost of an OS is irrelevant compared to the testing and support to get and keep it working.

As to all this that my uncle's cousin runs it as a desktop so it must be growing and will soon take over the market that is all nonsense. Yes many people use Linux, but the fact is only 1% of the desktop market. Linux is modular and flexible and free but it is not homogenous, simple or easy and was never intended to be a mass market commercial OS.

And there is the claim here that universities use Linux so that is future. Not as desktops in Australia they don't. I have worked for two major universities one uses all Mac desktops and laptops the other used a mix of Macs and PCs but is now switching to centralised PCs and laptops with Microsoft Outlook, Exchange, Internet Explorer and MS Office all supplied and supported on a tender from one major computer supplier, because that is the cheapest to install and support.

Tasmania is a trial programme. The ISP are being charged a heavily subsided connection fee of $300 per customer.

There has been no cost benefit analysis down on the scheme, there have been wholesale prices set and we have no idea what it will cost in the end.

The Government's figures are for an average cost of $6000 per household, or $2000 per person. Regional centres will cost $8000 and rural properties up to $22,000 all subsidised by metropolitan users. The remotest 7% will be served by wireless and satellite.

To make that possible they are requiring 70-90% uptake. Which will be generated by ripping out copper phone lines and ADSL and restricting spectrum for wireless to make a corporatised monopoly operating on a set 6-7% profit margin to pay back the Government, and whom ever they eventually sell it of too.

No other country has tried fibre to the door of such a large low density population. No other fibre programme has gotten greater than 30% market penetration or made a profit, or generated any economic benefit. It is far from certain that retail ISP will even want to be involved in much of it, including low profitable rural areas where household incomes are on average 25% less than in metropolitan areas which would forcing the government to run its own subsidised ISP for them.

Assuming all this works the whole charges are expected to be about $33/month plus usage.

Currently the ACCC sets ADSL pricing at $16/month plus usage. At that level 40% of low income households in cities can't afford broadband. The bottom 10% of households can't afford the internet at all.

The NBN is a massive uncosted risk.

Bollocks.

Howard gave tax cuts to all sections of society. He also delivered family benefits and child care subsidies through a tightly means tested welfare system. This meant that the benefits of the boom were shared and low income families got their share. Australia has had no increase in inequality over period of Howard's government (as measured by the ABS Gini co-efficient).

Of course this was achieved by taking the benefits of the boom caused by selling resources to China and handing all of it out. Which leaves nothing in reserve, may over heat the economy and cause serious problems if the boom runs out.

Our education industry is not that large.

What Howard deregulating foreign students did was in 5 years create a $16b industry involved in selling residency permits. That scam is being shut down and we will then have to start funding our educution instead of ripping off foreign students to pay for it.

The mining industry has not agreed to the mining tax. The 3 biggest mining companies have agreed to a settlement to be negotiated by a committee chaired by Don Argus, ex-CEO of BHP. The small mining companies disagree with this. The legislation has not even been drafted. The independents and Swan are arguing over whether or not the Government's new Tax Committee will reexamine the whole issue of the mining tax (along with the GST and Henry's other recommendations).

 

The reason I didn't use Google Wave was simply because few of my friends did, and they didn't because was is the same for them. Whatever the technical, invitation and marketing problems were they were irrelevant. To be useful all your friends had to have a pressing need for the Wave and to bother to install and learn it. Otherwise email, facebook and twitter were good enough, and all your networks functioning on them.

The Wave was just not a successful disruptive technology. Email was and succeeded because it was universal and the alternatives were telegrams, faxes and letters.

And it's not like the lawyers didn't know it is stupid.

This was probably the most fun they had all year.

Did people actually read the article? It is about what to do with legacy OS/2 systems.

There are lots of legacy system still used by large companies and you have the choice of continuing to maintain them or developing a new system which isn't cheap. One large finance company I used to work for has just spent $100m replacing their workflow system and got one that does half of what the old system, after 20 years of modifications and tweaking, did for the money.

So reportantly IBM has considered buying modern hardware, runing Linux on it and then writing a version of OS/2 on top of that runs the old applications.
They may or may not do it.
It may or may not work.
If it does work it will replace some legacy systems sitting in basements and you will probably never hear about it unless you work supporting old OS/2 and AS/400 systems, like a friend of mine does.

Teach For America have collected statistics on all their teachers and have tried and tested theories about what makes a good teacher. They have found only two variables that matter, and matter a great deal, and by focusing on these two features have improved the performance of their scheme.

Their best teachers:
1. Are enthusiastic and engage the class room
2. They ask the students questions to check they have learnt something and then adapt their approach till until the kids gets it.

Experience, background, race, education, master's degrees and class size etc. are all totally irrelevant.

The main reason Google is developing Chrome OS is so that there will be a simple platform for running web apps for their staff, and as a bonus any corporate clients using their apps. Google are spending a lot of money on developing their own version of Ubuntu to provide a desktop for their staff, and simpler more secure platform has advantage for them.

Google's business is advertising and tax avoidance by billing all their business to Ireland, not operating systems. They developed Chrome for similar reasons. Chrome has 3.6% of the browser market as of November, down from 3.8%, and it's not like it matters to them.

Chrome OS, like most OSes, isn't going to change the world. It will have its uses though.

<quote>This is a Linux distro that can't run any non-google-SDK software. No X server wipes out being able to run most of the GUI software in the ecosystem. You locked to google. Why would I want this? ...
The best google could have done is done yet another standard Linux distro, with X in some form, so they can tap into the existing software ecosystem. </quote>

The reason you want this is because you sitting a coffee shop and want to something quickly without booting Windows7. Google have a vision of the thin client, and it is an old vision, but these days there is fast wireless and the software available to do it and the sales of netbooks indicate there is a lot of demand for the idea.

Google can't use Linux/GNU/X11/KDE/Gnome because it has already failed in the Netbook environment. It is too bloated and overly complex for doing simple stuff and no one but a Linux geek can get it to work. While X11 isn't that bad it is based on an out-dated local server/client model, the sever runs as root and it is not easy to develop for. If want to add to X you end up with complexity and diversity of a multitude of libraries and the whole KDE/Gnome thing. This makes Linux a difficult environment to develop for (as Google complained about with Chrome), unless you have lots of keen volunteers doing all the work. Very few commercial businesses have seen any profit from in getting into the Linux desktop.

Vista was a debarcle and has also failed in netbooks since it is way too bloated. Apple haven't bothered with the net book market at all relying on the iPhone. I would have thought Google would go with Android, but they have obviously realised that while it works for PDAs and phones it won't scale up.

The Netbook winner so far has thus been Window XP, with ASUS doing very minor business with Xandros!
Thus Google is dependent mostly on XP to run the platform they want -- that is hardly nice or secure. Microsoft's plan is for a plethora of versions of Windows 7 offering one platform from PDAs and Netbooks up to servers. If Google doesn't want to be dependent on Microsoft they have a problem.

So first Google designed a browser to be fast and secure and that runs applications twice as fast on XP as Firefox. Sure it it is a memory hog but how much does 1GB of RAM cost these days? . Second Google have announced a replacement for Windows XP on netbooks just before Microsoft replace it with Windows 7 and everyone starts talking about how complete Microsoft's domination of the market will be. A bit of old fashion FUD to make up for the fact that Google are 12 months too late with delivering something to compete with Windows 7.

The idea that Chrome OS will be some replacement for or compete with the Linux development environment is just wrong. Google have simply seen a gap in the market and want something fast and secure that manufacturers will install on netbooks for surfing and web applications and that will stop Microsoft gaining complete dominance. So they are cobbling together something from what they have as quickly as possible.

Personally a cheap Netbook that I can use to surf, email, watch the Tour de France on and use to play online bridge with, all of which all only requires Chrome with Flash 10, without Windows 7 sounds good to me.