Posts by Ryan Nix

OpenStack has a promising future

While we haven't run anything in production on OpenStack, we are actively exploring OpenStack as an option to replace our extremely expensive VMWare environment. We have an OpenStack pilot running on an Intel NUC and the performance is quite good. It was dead simple to setup using the instructions found here: https://www.rdoproject.org/Quickstart

I'm very optimistic on OpenStack's roadmap. Redhat says Liberty will be the first release to get longer term support, which makes us more comfortable when or if it comes time to place the bet. Quite frankly, I desperately want to see OpenStack as a viable IaaS. I think just about everything else (sans our Windows print server) in our environment can be docker'ized to run in OpenShfit version v3, which of course would run on top of OpenStack. Scalable micro services, run through an automated infrastructure tool PaaS like OpenShift seems to be the future.

Orwell was right

Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Net income of $200 million?! Wow! They're rich!!!

So a company with a net income of $200 million is supposedly worth $50 billion? What year is this, 1999?!

Google has a Net that's about 30x greater than Facebook's. Yet, Google is only valued at about 4x more than Facebook. Absolute insanity.

Bad science shouldn't be used to make good policy

I'm glad to see the Register's stance on this. We should all try really hard to be as dispassionate about these matters as possible, in order to make as good a decision as possible on these studies. This shouldn't be a religious type matter where people are firmly entrenched in their beliefs. Although I believe this is an honest mistake in reading the data, it should never be permissible to fudge the facts in an ends-justify-the-means type way. I'm referring to stopping the use of fossil fuels of course.

A prediction is never a fact....

Why do so few seem to understand that?

"For example: 1998 was a record breakingly hot year. But it was also an El Nino year, and the effect of that current shifting should be accounted for."

And over at Slashdot, a major correction came out:

"According to an article at DailyTech, a blogger has discovered a Y2K bug in a NASA climate study by the same writer who accused the Bush administration of trying to censor him on the issue of global warming. The authors have acknowledged the problem and released corrected data. Now the study shows the warmest year on record for the contiguous 48 states as being 1934, not 1998 as previously reported in the media. In fact, the corrected study shows that half of the 10 warmest years on record occurred before World War II."

http://www.dailytech.com/Blogger+finds+Y2K+bug+in+NASA+Climate+Data/article8383.htm

Anyone want to bet $20 what the temperature will be in 1 week from tomorrow?

Of course not. So why would someone bet on the weather prediction 50-100 years from now?

A "prediction" is never a "fact"

Responding to all of the responses to my posting, I'd like to clear up a few things:

I believe that decarbonization is a good thing, for many reasons. We're making it naturally. Recyled paper, glass, hybrid cars, etc have become common place in our everyday lives in the past 10-15 years. Yes, CO2 levels are up 30% in the past 100 years, and things like cars, factories, even farm cows, are a major contributor for this. Lastly, I'd like to say that I recyle my trash, I don't own a car and use public transportation to get to work everyday.

I just don't believe global warming is a catastrophie. From 1940-1970 the earth showed cooling, and celebrity scientists like Paul Ehrlich predicted half of all species being extinct, and a new ice age. It didn't happen. Who honestly believes that the atmosphere is a simple linear system, and by reducing one or two components, maninly Co2, will change or "stabilize" our environment, when it's never, ever had a history of being stable? My problem with this whole debate, is that it's becoming so emotionally involed and people really aren't looking at the data. It's more about how people "feel" when they see a tree being cut down, or see black smoke coming out of a tail pipe.

Jasmine, Richard and Tim's posting are not only wrong in fact's, but wrong in speculating. NONE OF US KNOW THE FUTURE. Consenus is the business of politics, not science. Lastly, a crash program to try and reverse global warming is unwise, and unwarranted. Also, I never said that CO2 was increasing malaria out break, but banning DDT did.