tygorius

But really, in the realm of scripting languages 14 years is a huge amount of time. Why would anyone judge Perl, Python, or Lua, say, by the state of those languages in 1997. The mind boggles.

Throughout this discussion you've made vague assertions about how scientists disagree with Taubes, but never cited specific points where got he facts wrong, only that some scientists don't like his using their data and words to support a conclusion they don't share. You made the bizarre claim that Americans have been eating more fat and that the Atkins diet is a disaster, both without any supporting evidence. I find this unpersuasive.

If the Atkins diet is such a disaster, for example, why is that when some of your "real scientists" conducted the relatively famous ATOZ diet study[1], it showed that the Atkins diet provided roughly twice the weight loss of the Zone, LEARN, and Ornish diets while providing as good or better secondary benefits (e.g. heart disease indicators). I mean, does that sound like "a disaster" to you?

Taubes is hardly alone in crying "foul" over the low-fat, high-carb diet fiasco. Watch Robert Lustig's UCSF talk entitled "Sugar: The Bitter Truth"[2] He'll go into plenty of detail on the biochemistry involved. He starts out, however, by saying his goal is to debunk the last 30 years of nutrition information in America, and I think he makes a damn good case.

The money slide for our discussion appears at 0:09:40 in the talk. It shows, as I alluded to earlier, that the percentage of calories from fat in US adult diets has been steadily declining since the mid-1960s. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, the percentage of prevalence of obesity is pretty stable, maybe ticking up a percent or so. But in 1982 the AHA, AMA, and USDA tell us we should cut our fat intake. Faced with low-fat processed foods that taste like cardboard, the manufacturers try to improve the taste with things like high-fructose corn syrup and guess what happens? In the mid-1980s the incidence of obesity shows a sudden, dramatic increase, doubling from 15% to 30% over the next two decades. Yes, there was a disaster all right, but it had nothing to do with increased fat intake or the Atkins diet.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17341711

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

You want to upgrade users to grub 2.0? OK, not a pressing need for me, but fine, whatever. But at least when you make that change include system support so I don't have to manually repair the grub menu's default selection every freaking time you update the kernel. </rant mode>

And now we're getting the Unity interface before it's really finished. I really think the new interface is something that works on netbooks but is a step backward if you're using a widescreen monitor or regular laptop.

But I'm just a knuckle-dragging throwback who likes minimalism, xmonad, and Vim, who doesn't stream audio over the network and thinks ALSA was perfectly adequate, etc., so what do I know? If I'm the sort who's happier with Arch, then I'm clearly not their target user anyway. YMMV.

I don't know that the union argument really works in the Linux distribution realm. After peeing in the community pool Mr. WhinyUser went off to a fork of Arch that supports signatures (for their additions only, which doesn't appear to address his original concerns about Arch repositories, but apparently for some the appearance of "security" is enough). But even if he didn't have that fork to go to, there was nothing stopping him from adopting one of the many Debian offshoots, or Redhat, or ... The Arch maintainer union -- really an odd term for a handful of unpaid volunteers -- have no control over his actions or desires, but there are plenty of Linux distribution alternatives out there.

Sad to see LWN publish an attack without making an effort to get the other side of the story first. If the complainer had made the patch submissions he claimed and that the Arch maintainers deny ever seeing, well it should be pretty easy to sort out before publishing the article -- if you're really interested in journalism, that is.

I do know that he is distinctly at odds with the majority of scientists who work in the dietary field.

Oh dear. Even if you had data to back that up, are you really going to embrace science as a popularity contest?

I'm talking about real scientists, with real science degrees. Doing real controlled scientific studies. Most of them consider Atkins a disaster for public health.

I'm not as interested in scientists' opinions as I am in the underlying science. I'm unaware of any studies that show the Atkins diet is really a disaster, but feel free to cite away. But to repeat myself, don't conflate warnings on the dangers of carb consumption with being a proponent of the Atkins diet.

Taubes' focus for most of his career is about how good science is perverted for not-so-good human motives. So for example when some of your "real scientists" offer a "real controlled scientific study"[1] showing that people lost weight on both low-fat and low-carb diets, Taubes asks[2] the rather logical question, how is that a weight-loss study would restrict total calorie intake on only one (low-fat) of the two diets. I mean, if you're studying weight loss, shouldn't you be controlling total calorie intake for all groups?

the scientists he quoted have said repeatedly that the disaster is that we eat 20% more calories per day, in general, than we did before WW2, and that increased fat consumption also occurred during that time

Well if those scientists really said that, which I doubt, I'm pretty sure they're wrong on the facts. I haven't digested the whole NHANES data set from the CDC, but a quick Google check found this nutritionist's summary[3]:

"In 1964 Americans ate 39 percent of their calories from fat and only 13 percent were obese. Now, while most Americans get only about 33 percent of their calories from fat, two-thirds, more than 190 million Americans are overweight or obese."

In short: Fat is not your enemy, but keep your eyes on both calories and carbs.

Edit: added following links...

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20679559

[2] http://www.garytaubes.com/2010/12/calories-fat-or-carbohydra...

[3] http://www.redcedarwellness.com/2010/07/the-truth-about-fats...

Most of Taubes' critics mistake his case for restricting carb intake as being synonymous with the Atkins diet, which isn't really the case. (Taubes' wife mocks Atkins as "meat boy".) The logic seems to be: Atkins is icky, Taubes promotes restricting carbs like Atkins, he must be icky too, the science be damned.

For those who don't read all the way to the end of the sixth page at _Reason_, Taubes has a response[1] to his critic, Fumento.

Contrary to your assertion about Taubes "first making a name for himself" back in 2003, he's been a science writer for something like 30 years. He won an MIT journalism fellowship back in 1996 and he's won three awards from the National Association of Science Writers.[2]

I also don't know about the "religious fervor" of Taubes' anti-carbohydrate stance. He's made it clear, for example, that not all carbohydrates are the same, just as not all fats are bad for you. I think his main point is that the post WW2 infatuation with low-fat diets has been a disaster.

Both Taubes and Fumento are bright fellows who write about controversial areas of science, so it's not a big surprise that they might disagree on a topic. But it's pretty easy to tell the difference between them: Taubes is the one with masters degrees in engineering and journalism and writes articles for _Science_, while Fumento is the one whose degree is in law and writes articles for _Reason_.

[1] http://reason.com/archives/2003/03/01/an-exercise-in-vitriol...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Taubes

Let me put it to you this way: would the meeting scene you witnessed have been any better if they'd had iPads instead of MacBook Air laptops?

It's probable the doctors involved had desks and PCs, but as a patient/client I didn't see their office. I saw them in examining rooms and operating rooms -- places where an iPad simply makes no sense.

We could argue hypotheticals all day and it wouldn't change anything. I'll believe your examples when I see them in the real world.

Well, his research and work have been in the area of risk management -- so I find it quite plausible he has access to detailed assessments of nuclear power plant liabilities.

I occasionally watch a CNBC trading show ("Fast Money"). The four traders at the desk used to have live market feeds delivered to laptops that sat on the desk, and those were replaced with iPads on stands last year. Now some of those traders have their laptops back in addition to the iPads, presumably because when you're looking at charts and numbers, bigger is better.

Some of your examples seem contrived, like the office meeting where someone is dragging their power brick -- as if the iPad was the only device with a battery that lasts all day (and that the office worker didn't just unplug their laptop at their desk, where it had been freshly charged).

Police in their cars don't need a smaller display, and when they're out of the car they don't need yet another thing dangling from their belts. Delivery drivers already have solutions that are designed for their specific application and I suspect playing movies as well isn't a high priority at FedEx HQ's IT planning meetings. Etc, etc.

As someone who recently abandoned methylphenidate for my new BFF bupropion, I understand the sensitivity to common claims that ADD/ADHD is primarily a lack of will power or a lack of parental/teacher discipline. But I still believe in science. Part of my early treatment involved vitamin supplements for serum deficiencies in iron, B12, and D. Bringing those levels up did not alleviate the symptoms for me, but I'm open to scientific investigation of reports that such supplements were a crucial difference for other people.

As I see it, the fundamental flaw in socialism always boils down the facts that a) a great many people like power and won't willingly give it up, b) these are the people who historically wind up in control of political structures (including unions), and c) as Dame Thatcher observed, sooner or later you run out of other people's money.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8257176 [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17048717

There's a lot more to the server market than power savings. The Register article also notes: "It is a pity that ARM is not moving the quad-core, 40-bit Cortex-A15 to market faster and talking about either 64-bit kickers or how it will manage virtualized 32-bit applications on multi-core ARM servers such that no one cares that they are 32-bit applications."

As to Microsoft, I can remember Windows NT shipping for DEC Alpha, MIPS, and Power PC. Just because Windows 8 will work on ARM-based netbooks doesn't justify extrapolation to the PC and server markets. And even if Microsoft did (theoretically) support ARM in those markets, well, they actually shipped NT for Alpha, MIPS, and Power PC, and where are those architectures now?

My read of history is that if ARM ever became a real threat to Intel in PCs and servers, the company would simply lower profit margins in those markets to starve the competition. But hey, maybe this time things really will be different.

I will echo another comment, however. Three "Follow me on Twitter" links in a single article came across as desperate begging rather than offering extra value to the reader.

Where ARM has succeeded is in new markets (phones and tablets) that both rely on low-power operation and are relatively immune to legacy code or chip architecture issues. As far as I'm aware, Intel's never been successful in those spaces and even took the strategic step of dumping its ARM (Xscale) operation.

My point being, if Intel's secure in established markets and uncompetitive in newer markets, that's not a technological disruption in the classic Christenson sense. It's merely the consequence of earlier strategic decisions to not go after newer low-power application markets. Where would Intel be, for example, if in the early days they had dumped the microprocessor business to focus on their core business of memory chips?

edit: typo

edit: typo