1) “It’s been the coldest winter for so and so many years, where’s the global warming?” – Me: Global Warming refers to climate changes, not weather as such. Weather and climate are two different things; weather is short-term, climate is long-term.

2) “Weather forecasts can’t even be known a week in advance, why should I believe in climate models that claim to predict 100 years in advance?”. Me: This is related to #1, but with some additions. First, weather can be fairly accurately predicted in a timeframe of a few days, but over 5 days it becomes difficult to make accurate prognoses, and over 10 days, essentially impossible (though it is a question of the quality of your sensor data and how much computing power your are willing to expend to get your predictions). As for predicting the climate decades or even a century into the future, keep in mind that these ‘predictions’ aren’t really such – there are a great number of models based on various scenarios and assumptions for population, economic, climate mechanic etc. – for the exact reason that the climate scientists know they’re dealign with an extremely complex system with many “dials to adjust” so to speak. Climate science isn’t an entirely mature science yet, and while the field has in the past given sometimes erroneous or exaggered predictions, it is constantly changign and improving as observations are included into models and build on previous assumptions.

3) “Past predictions were wrong” or “it’s much colder these years than they predicted in the 1990′s”. Me: Several rebuttals to this kind of argument, which is also related to #2. a) Climate science isn’t exact, much as most science dealing in macro phenomena today isn’t. Most science operating on major, complex systems don’t make ‘predictions’ – they typically give a statistical chance of something happening, based on known initial conditions and the models these calculate from. b) You can’t dismiss the science because it can’t give you micrometer perfect data to compare up against. Skeptics should in this regard ask themselves how precise matches they want before they will accept the science/models as if not valid, then good enough to be trustworthy. Compare to my example: Would you also dismiss weather forecasting if it said that the temperatur tomorrow in your town was 12 Degrees C, and the thermometor outside your kitchen window showed 14 C? (or 13. or 12,5. or 12,1 – at which precision are you content?). Does climate science have to score a bullseye all the time for you to accept it? c) Also see next point.

4) “Warming stopped in 1997″. Me: This claim is based on data series using 1997 or 1998 as the basis year to compare against. Why is 1997 so significant? Because there is a massive ocean phenomenon called “El Niño” going on in the Pacific Ocean roughly every 7 years, which happened to coincide with that year. Not only that, it was a particularly strong example of the phenomenon. You then ask how some water current in a far away ocean should skew the temperatures so much? Keep in mind that The Pacific Ocean isn’t some village pond – it’s the planets greatest ocean, and the breadth of El Nino is from Australia to Equador – approximately 1/4 the circumference of the Earth. – Using 1997 as the base year for plotting the temperature developments globally would then make it seem like the global warming either slowed, stopped, or even reversed, depending on how agressively you cook the data. Fact of the matter is that, no, the warming has not stopped or reversed since 1997, however! it is true that it seemed to slow between 1997 and 2007, but true to the long-term trend, set new records again in 2009. Global warming has not stopped, and besides, no-one claims that it chugs along at a fixed, unchanging rate.

5) “Warming slowed the last couple of years, it must be showing that global warming is coming to an end”. Me: No. Short-term observations cannot reliably be used to make long-term prognoses. An everyday example I can offer is that because you had a fair bit of cash left over this month from after taxes, rent and food expenses are paid (as opposed to “normal” months where your personal finances ar ejust about break-even), doesn’t mean that you’re a millionaire a year from now.

6) “Surface temperature records are useless due to the Urban Heat Island effect, and thus cannot be used to show global warming”. Me: The UHI distortions are relatively minor, and second, despite the alleged major distortions of the UHI, the land station records show the essentially exact same global rise in temperatures as what is measured from satellite monitoring of the atmosphere.

7) “Artic Ice meltoff is negligible, as the 2007 drop is reversed, and the Ice coverage is back to normal”. Me: Yes, the *area* is not so far from the normal (recent recorded figures), but the *volume* isn’t. The speed of Ice meltoff depends on ice volume, not ice surface area. A solid block of 1 cubic metre of ice will of course take much longer to melt off than a slab of ice 1 square metre on the side, but otherwise 1 centimetre thick. (Try it yourself with varying sizes of ice cubes in your soft drink). Relevant to the point, the estimated volume of ice (multi-year ice) is at an all time low for the recording period.

“All the planets in the solar system are warming, so humans obviously can’t be causing Earthly warming”. Me: This claim is negated by that direct readings of the sun (solar output, insolation) shows little or no correlation with the warming observed both here on Earth, or on other planets (which by the way, have quite complex weather/climate systems of their own).

—

I’ll add and update points as I think of them and as time allows. Thanks for reading.

Oh, and for further reading, I highly recommend John Cook’s site Skeptical Science, no matter what your persuasion or extent of knowledge of the global warming phenomenon, especially as it treats these points and many others in a very thorough and accessible fashion.

My impressions in brief:

+ It was cheap (found it on sale)

+ It readily accepts any 3,5″ hard drive, which by the way are easily mounted in the slide-in brackets, which lock solidly in place. I’m running with two 1,5 TB Western Digital Green Power disks, but it should also work fine with 2 TB drives. Do however take note that NetGear has a “certified drive list” of hard drives that they’ve tested themselves with the unit, and they maintain that drives not on this list may not work well with the unit.

+ It’s Mac-friendly – it runs AFP as well as CIFS (aka SMB) and NFS.

+ Single-process file transfer performance is decent – read speeds up to 30 MB/s when reading large files. Write speeds are typically 10 MB/s, 15 MB/s on a good day.

+ It allow rsync’ed backups of your data on the unit to USB-attached external drives, for that extra helping of data protection.

- It’s performance is so-so if more than one task is running on it, ex. file transfer speed bottoms out if you’re counting up files in a  directory already present on the unit at the same time as you copy stuff to and from it.

- Its rsync server is a joke which won’t work with any specific triggers fx. from a Linux command line, essentially making it useless for any somewhat seasoned used needing to do more than a bare bones backup job.

- Rsync to an external drive is glacially slow and will give you lots of error messages if you are backing up more than trivial amounts of data, as the time it takes will likely make the backup jobs overlap.

- The Bittorrent client is useful, but only for files smaller than 2 Gigs in size – anything larger than that somehow bugs the embedded Bittorrent software, and the unit will attempt to download again after a reboot. If you’re thinking of downloading and serving stuff from private trackers larger than 2 Gigs in size, think again, doing it with this unit will spoil your seed ratio and possibly get you banned. It shouldn’t get you into trouble in downloading from public trackers, but it will eat away your bandwidth allowance with your ISP however. This error was known at least since July 2008 and hasn’t been fixed.

- Using the unit with AFP from a Snow Leopard Mac will display the metadata files (if any of your Mac files has metadata attached to it, it will have an invisible file in the same directory, with he same name, but with “._” prefix on its name. It shouldn’t be visible, but it is anyway. Uncertain if it’s a problem with Snow Leopard or the ReadyNAS, if it is the latter, then it hasn’t been fixed for over a year.

Summarized: It’s a cheap NAS solution that gets the basics done, but other than that it’s obvious from the functionality problems and lack of relevant updates that Netgear wants you to shell out for something higher up the product line if you want it to work without hassles.

Personal opinion: Mixed feelings about it. It’s great that I can sleep well at night knowing my data is safe from disk failures, but NetGear’s don’t care attitude towards known bugs is a turn-off that is a stark contrast to my very good experience in the past with their actual network products, and on this basis I’m hesitant to buy from them again.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/apple

Task – App on Mac or Windows – App on Linux

Communication

Web browsing – Safari, Internet Explorer – Firefox, Galeon, Konqueror

eMail - (Apple) Mail, Windows Mail – Thunderbird, Evolution

File Transfer via FTP – Transmit, Fetch – gFTP

Bittorrent File Transfers – Transmission, uTorrent -Transmission, Deluge

P2P downloading and sharing – Shareaza – aMule

IRC chat – Snak, mIRC – Xchat

Instant messenging (IM) – iChat, Adium - Pidgin, Empathy (or Skype, which is availabel for all)

Remote Desktop (VNC) – Apple Remote Desktop – vino, vinagre

Office and Productivity

Calendaring – iCal – Evolution, Sunbird, Orage

Office Apps – Pages, Numbers, Microsoft Office - OpenOffice

Anti-Virus (if needed) – too many to mention - Xclam

Other productivity apps

Graphics Editing – Photoshop (professional) – Gimp

Vector Graphics – Illustrator (professional), Corel draw - Inkscape

3D rendering – AutoDesk 3DS Max, Lightwave – Blender

Music composing – Garageband – Rosegarden

Advanced Text Editing & Programming - TextMate, UltraEdit - Geany, XeMacs, Vim (and really, really many others)

IDE / Programming Environment – erm, various – Eclipse, NetBeans

Utility functions and Media

Editing Text files – Textedit, Notepad, WordPad – gedit

Graphics viewer – Preview – GnomeViewer

Video editing – iMovie, Windows Movie Maker - Cinelerra

Video playback – Quicktime Player, Windows Media Player – VLC, Totem

Photo Cataloguing  – iPhoto – F-spot

Music Cataloguing and playback – iTunes – Rhytmbox (and yes, it does work with your iPod)

Other

Virtual Environments for software – Parallels, VMWare - Virtualbox OSE

.NET programmign environment - Mono

For running largely *any* Windows app, you have Wine, The Windows Environment.

For any kind of web (apache), data (ftpd) or database hosting (mysql), Linux or other UNIX derivatives like it are basically the best solution for getting the job done; Unix machiens have been the backbone of the internet since its childhood. If stuff like this is what you need to do, you should look to a Server edition (fx. Ubuntu Server) of whatever Linux flavor you’re reading up on.

This is a cursory list of the things people do with their PC’s today. Obviously I can’t cover all tasks and jobs you need for your computer for, and if it’s not on this list, it does not mean that Linux can’t do what you’re looking for, merely that I’ve either not thought about that particular app, or that I’m too lazy to type it in. After two years with Linux as my OS of choice, I’ll say as much that I’m of the opinion that if there somethign you can’t do on Linux, it’s probably not worth bothering with. (Games? Get a console, PC’s are for serious business. Yes.)

First, some sadness from United Kingdom, which seems to be in a race (pun not originally intended) with the United States to get the spot as the world’s first totalitarian democracy in the modern age.

BRITAIN appears to be evolving into the first modern soft totalitarian state. As a sometime teacher of political science and international law, I do not use the term totalitarian loosely. There are no concentration camps or gulags but there are thought police with unprecedented powers to dictate ways of thinking and sniff out heresy, and there can be harsh punishments for dissent.

…

The Government is pushing ahead with legislation that will criminalise politically incorrect jokes, with a maximum punishment of up to seven years’ prison. The House of Lords tried to insert a free-speech amendment, but Justice Secretary Jack Straw knocked it out. It was Straw who previously called for a redefinition of Englishness and suggested the “global baggage of empire” was linked to soccer violence by “racist and xenophobic white males”. He claimed the English “propensity for violence” was used to subjugate Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and that the English as a race were “potentially very aggressive”. (As long as you are politically mainstream and politically correct, it seems speaking racially denigrating is OK. – p)

…

A 10-year-old child was arrested and brought before a judge, for having allegedly called an 11-year-old boya “Paki” and “bin Laden” during a playground argument at a primary school (the other boy had called him a skunk and a Teletubby). When it reached the court the case had cost taxpayers pound stg. 25,000. The accused was so distressed that he had stopped attending school. The judge, Jonathan Finestein, said: “Have we really got to the stage where we are prosecuting 10-year-old boys because of political correctness? There are major crimes out there and the police don’t bother to prosecute. This is nonsense.”

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – the first sacrifice upon the altar of political correctness is humor.

Read the full text for more such lunacy. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/thought-police-muscle-up-in-britain/story-e6frg6zo-1225700363959

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ctrl + alt + F1 : Switches you to a fullscreen TTY (text terminal – shorthand for the command line interface. Useful if your display manager freezes up or oterwise misbehaves).

ctrl + alt + F7 : Switches you from a TTY back to a graphical environment such as Xorg (if you have one such running; sometimes you have to press F9 instead though).

ctrl + F2 : When using a graphical environment, this calls up a launcher where you can instantly execute a command line app (fx. to kill off rampant processes (ex. “sudo killall Xorg”) without opening the process list)

ctrl + alt + del : Probably what you remember most fondly from Windows, this particular three finger salute doesnt do quote the same in Linux; when booted into Ubuntu’s graphical environment, it calls up the reboot/shutdown menu where you can choose to restart, hibernate or switch off your computer. If you are in a terminal environment, it reboots your computer (if you want to shutdown instead, you’ll want the command “sudo halt”).

For a lot of different and usually very handly “linux cheat sheets” for terminal hints and help, have a look here: http://www.scottklarr.com/topic/115/linux-unix-cheat-sheets—the-ultimate-collection/

The most widely used partition table scheme for over more then two decades or has been the ‘Master Boot Record’ (MBR), which has served the PC community well, but is showing its age in part in that it does not support disk drives larger than 2 TiB (2^40 bytes). (note: Apple Macintosh computers have used Apple Partition Map for their storage systems). As 2009 saw storage units of this capacity appear on the market, the need for a replacement is obvious; it’s been here for some years and it’s called the GUID Partition Table (GPT). Allowing for larger drives and partitions: Drives can be up to 2^64 sectors in size; a drive sector has typically been 512 bytes in size (thus allowing for hypothetical drives up to 8796 billion (10e9) GibiBytes), but this year drives with 4 KiB sectors have entered the market (allowing for hypothetical drives 8 times the aforementioned number; 70 quadrillion (10e12) GibiBytes) – in any case, allowing for drives of such astronomical capacities that it will require several future revolutions in storage technology before the partition scheme is made obsolete and in need of replacement by such developments.

The GPT is more up-to-date in regards to computing demands and practicalities, more versatile and flexible as to partition changes when necessary, offering duplication and integrity checking of partition table data to allow for storage degradation without data loss. However, it does not confer any performance benefits on the storage unit which is formatted with this partitioning scheme. Also note that maximum file size and other such particulars are not determined by the partition table, but by the file systems inside individual drive partitions (such as FAT32, ext3, HFS+ and so on).

On a closing note, it is no surprise that the best operating system support for the GPT is found on free software systems such as FreeBSD and Linux.

Sources and further reading:

A summary by Roderick W. SMith of IBM DeveloperWorks

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_Boot_Record

Side note: The US anti-spam law, the CAN-SPAM act, was enacted in 2003 (after years of agonized waiting in the Internet community as the spam problem was growing ever worse), and has been ineffectual, of no surprise to anarchists. Top 1 spamming nation is still the USA.

NYTimes is becoming a pay site, as regular newspaper sales are declining (not just NYT, though, it’s general), and revenue from ads on online news don’t make up for it, (especially since ‘the crisis’ started two years ago, with a major drop in advertiser willingness to shell out for ads, to the tune of a halving of ad revenue).

My opinions on this tendency:

a) Big Business (in this case, Big Media) and their traditional way of running things is scarcely compatible with a  network-centric, de-centralized 21st Century style of living.

b) more importantly, the quality of commercial written material, newspapers as well as magazines, have declined severely over the past 15 years, and I have limited interest in daily papers for the same reason that I don’t buy printed magazines anymore: I find their content predictable, superficial and saturated with advertisements and product placement to the point where it is an insulting affair to read their tripe.

Facebook doesn’t want you to leave – it seems the AOL of the 2000′s, where leaving the ‘social network’-cum-data-mining-operation is made as difficult as possible. Various people have made FB apps and web pages that help you commit “facebook suicide” (wiping your account), but FB has been quick to purge itself of any mention of these.

Answers.com says FB has 321M members. With that many on board, the priorities tend to shift from getting more, to keeping who you have.

Stuff on the web today is easy to sign up for (to satisfy short attention spans), but difficult to get out of again (either in a clean way or with less effort than threatening legal action). Since employers and ‘authorities’ increasingly use web searches and data from social sites to dig up dirt on you, combined with that stuff you put on the web these days just doesn’t go away (google.com knows everything and archive.org remembers everything), it goes without saying that you should think before speaking on controversial matters in public in your own name, or and thinking at least twice before signing up for ‘social’ foolishness. A good way of gauging a social site or service is doing your homework on whether they give you an easy option of leaving and having your contributions deleted if you decide to. If they don’t, it’s clear that they do not intend you to leave if and when you wish.

In 2009, Intel introed their sucessor to the Core2 line of CPUs, the Core i<something> series, the big news being that the memory controller is contained in the same package as the CPU itself, resulting is a major boost in system memory bandwidth. AMD did this in 2003 in the same swing as unveiling their 64-bit processors (which, to digress, opened the door to 64-bit computing at consumer prices, ultimately derailing Intel’s Itanium train); at the CES in the first week of January this year, AMD once again distance themselves technologically from Intel, by presenting their plans: Merging the GPU (graphics chip) onto the CPU die, the first practical results of which we will probably see in 2011.

2010 will for Intel be the year where new Core iX (‘X’ denoting 3, 5 or 7) products are launched, marking the departure of old socket775 processor series like the Core2Duo and Core2Quad. I’m sure the motherboard manufacturers will be happy at the refreshed opportunities for making high-margin products. Intel promises introduce a 6-core Core_i7@3,33 GHz, taking the effective processing capability for their flagship product to almost twice what it was early 2009. Moore’s Law is alive and well, and in more than one interpretation.

USB 3.0 has seen the light of day; the first motherboard from Asus with USB 3.0 connectors was unveiled November 2009; the first brand-name PC containing the tech is a Hewlett-Packard (specifically their ‘Envy’ series of pricey laptops), also unveiled at the CES this month. USB 3.0 is the youngest member of the Universal Serial Bus family; providing a theoretical 5 Gbps bandwidth on 9-pin cable, it is quite a step up from it’s predecessor, USB 2.0 which has had a theoretical max. of 480 Mbps since its inception in early 2000. Usb 3.0 has been in the pipeline since late 2007, thus a good two years underway. In practical terms, it is ten times faster than 2.0, and for mass storage, it means that in single- and dual-drive external RAID enclosures , the drive speed will be limited not by the cable,but by the drive mechanisms. From where I’m sitting, USB 3.0 is heartily welcomed!

(FireWire seems to be hiding away in its niche; it held great promise 10 years ago, but the FireWire 800 sucessor to FireWire 400 never caught on too well, as USB 2.0 had made its appearance by then, and besides it was not much of an improvement over what it replaced. The “good enough” mentality had a major part in this, I suspect, and in this case with good reason. There has been talk about FireWire 1600 and FireWire 3200 for the last two years, but now that USB 3.0 has made its entry, the niche for FireWire is shrinking. Those professional who aren’t satisfied with USB 3.0, will go with Fibre Channel.)

The first USB 3.0 expansion cards for PCIe are commecially available for 60$ and up. Western Digital has likewise introduced a USB 3.0 version of its 1 TB external MyBook hard drive, with a 2 TB version coming soon.

SATA (Serial ATA) 3.0 has likewise said hello in 2009, but is still far from the mainstream; also dubbed SATA 6G, it now allows 6 Gigabits of data to be piped through per second; for professionals, it is not as much the increased tempo that matters (though SSD storage can now saturate a SATA 2.0 bus!), but the addition of NCQ (Native Command Queuing), enabling Isochronous transfers that allow reliable throughput for audiovisual applications.

Speaking of storage and memory, I believe that 2010 will be the year where SSD enters the mainstream to replace them ol’ spinnign disks, and 16 GB RAM will become the new standard of installed memory in personal computers (as 4 GB was in most PC’s you could buy in 2009). We shall see, I’m not giving any of you beer if I turn out to be wrong.

1. 123456
2. 12345
3. 123456789
4. Password
5. iloveyou
6. princess
7. rockyou
8. 1234567
9. 12345678
10. abc123

In regards to password length, 49,4% of the passwords were less than 8 characters long. 18,51% was 10 chars long or more (iow, of decent strength).

A similar finding was published last summer for Hotmail passwords. Even then, it’s nothing new; lax attention to password strength has been common for at least since the wider popularization of the web, and this central to the security nightmare that being hooked up to the net can be if you’re a provider of some sort.

I’m not opposed to service providers of whatever sort demanding recovery fees for folks who compromise their accounts using idiotically weak passwords, the same way I’m not opposed to insurers denying to compensate houseowners who consider a bar on the door as having secured their home sufficiently when they leave and later come home to find it burgled.