I would bet that you could trace the origins of software version numbers even through the 1960s, because they had two blocks of Apollo spacecraft, block 1 and block 2.
We're in tight economic times. Companies are not going to upgrade unless they have a real need for a new feature. I have several clients who are still running on Windows XP and have absolutely no need to change that. Same goes for Vista. If their current systems are running smoothly and meeting requirements, there is no reason to change things.
What this says is that Microsoft isn't doing a good job of marketing Windows 7.
In the long run, they'll switch. Until everything becomes a webapp, the ecosystem almost demands it. Here's hoping people realize webapps are where it's at, for most things.
It's interesting, in that, so many people of the current generation see webapps and centralized computing as the new best thing.
See, some of us old people got into the PC revolution when we were kids because we were rebelling against centralized computing. We hated the account quotas and slowness of shared system resources in college, the straightjackets around information, and we wanted to smash all of that. We saw that giving people power tools like spreadsheets and desktop databases empowered them over the static mainframe systems of old, that a computer was something that you owned, was, well, a personal thing.
Quite frankly, if it wasn't for ISPs being such a PITA about bandwidth for uploads and hosting, and if, honestly, there was more adoption of IPv6 so that everyone could have their own address, we would see a lot more desktop to the internet hosting. A quadcore PC could easily host a blog or a facebook account. Indeed, I would be the next killer application would be a desktop app that lets you do what facebook does, except that you own your data, and the core web service is really only a directory to enable peer to peer communications.
Where is the "Windows 7 Express Edition" to compete with ChromeOS
I don't think Microsoft would be allowed to give Windows away even if it wanted to. They get into trouble for giving away IE, and giving away Media Player. If they gave the whole operating system away, they would get sued like no tomorrow by various parties in the European Union. To a certain extent, governments looking to promote Linux would prefer Microsoft keep charging for Windows.
I think you mean "If it wasn't for Firefox, we would still be using IE6."
True. But, even in that case, we find that Google is the one shoveling money into Firefox. Once they get some penetration with Chrome, I would expect them to gradually withdraw support from Firefox and it will be IE vs Chrome.
People that would rather make a buck today than ten bucks next week.
Well, to be fair, the record company execs that bought airtime were arguably more greedy and more manipulative than the ones are today, and it was also easier with local radio. Back in the day, if you had a local radio station, to get airplay, an exec might go and just bribe the DJ at the station to put something on. In those days DJs had more creative control but that also made it easier for them to take bribes. As a result, the studio would pay to get music on the air by bribing the DJ.
Now...
The system is a less corrupt on that score, and the problem was "solved" by removing creative control from the DJ. They can't play new music unless corporate decides its selling, and it won't sell until somebody plays it. To some extent college radio worked to break new music but with iPOD college radio isn't the force it once was.
If everyone could hack into any person's brain and have sex with whoever they want, then what kind of society would that be like? On one hand, some super hot chicks are going to be pretty busy, but on the other hand, you would be reprogrammed periodically to think that bigfoot was hot.
If it wasn't for Google Chrome and Firefox, we would still be using IE6.
If it wasn't for Linux, there would probably not nearly the investment in Vista and Win7 that there has been.
And, I guarantee you, that if there were no Linux free IDEs, there would be no Visual Studio Express. I doubly guarantee you, that, if there was no gcc, there would be no standards compliant C++ in Visual Studio.
Google may not conquer the world with Chrome OS, and I think will ultimately lose to Microsoft, but, competition benefits everyone.
What will Google do to bolster search to respond to Bing? How will Adobe respond to Silverlight... you can laugh at Silverlight 1.0, dismiss 2.0, but MS has away of just chugging away like the borg when they want to attack a market.
It's all bound to keep people on their toes. What would be the alternative? A treaty between Google and Microsoft keeping each other in the browser and desktop, respectively? That would suck.
If you actually went through, every little single thing the file dialog in Windows 7 does, it might actually take 18 months to replicate all of that functionality, especially if it was in C.
But be that as it may, if Gnome decides to go and give me a bunch of b.s. about metaphorical problems and then ultimately clone the Windows 7 dialog but with some twist to make it somehow different, then, honestly, it would be an improvement over what they have now.
I prefer 'directory'. At least then it doesn't push a false analogy on an already confused mind
IS Directory really a good word though? A Directory could mean like a yellow pages, a dictionary, etc, its an entire system of managing things and the most appropriate use of the word directory really is -file system-, not an individual folder.
Who's bright idea was it to put the main launch facility in *Florida*.
I think the deal is that the closer to the equator you launch from, the cheaper it is. That's why the French launch Ariane from a complex in French Guyana.
Oh, so it's you against them and the only reason you care about is what will further your struggle. Well, when you get done tilting at windmills, start looking around.
This opinion of yours doesn't change the fact that I'm right.
Because you don't need a car to live where you do need food.
People need manufactured goods to live just as much as they need food. Do you know how to make steel, or even iron, to make a plow with? Or, how do you make so much as even a carved stick without tools.
And now your lumping tarriffs in with subsidies and the farm program. They aren't the same
They are entirely the same. The farm program is a subsidy. It's a trade restraining redistribution of wealth.
Wow, almost two centuries and you think it is wrong.
Well yes. Because, for most of that time, the North sought and got protectionism for manufactured goods, and turned the USA into a superpower. Just look at the difference between protectionist North in the civil war vs free trading South.
Yep.. But there should be very little free trade when dealing with food. There is no reason for demand to drive the price out of the reach of the poorer citizens. You may think otherwise but you are completely wrong.
Um, if there was free trade with food, it would be cheaper, just as free trade makes manufactured goods cheaper.
SO now it's the fat people. Ok, I'm starting to get some insight into how your mind works. I don't believe you are right but now I see
Uh, boy, that's a way to twist an example around. There are fat people because there are plenty of food to eat. My point is, if protectionism works so well with food, why not do it with manufactured goods?
Try KDE4's file dialogs with Nepomuk enabled sometime, and see how a file dialog should really be done...
See, I'm not a big fan of social ratings. Ratings can work for things that a lot of people are interested in, but, if you've got 1 reviewer giving you a star per year, that's hardly useful.
I just wish sometimes people who were religiously into Linux could admit that the operating system is something that is honestly more geared towards IT professionals only.
Like, I'm surprised no one looked at Win7 my comments about dialogs and provided what I thought was the nobrain Linux answer. You could get some of what I talk about with symbolic links. You can make a directory off of your home and then stuff it with symlinks. That would get about 80% of what Win7's dialogs do. But of course, that launches you back into shell land... and that's the thing about Linux.
What are you talking about, wrt W7 dialogs being so drastically superior to "Linux's file dialogs"?
1) Libraries. 2) Ability to do file management inside the file dialog. 3) Workmanship.
Is there something significant I'm missing here, or are you just blowing smoke? The file dialog in W7 is not only almost identical to what KDE has had since early 2002 (no, I'm not claiming they 'stole' anything), but it's also a dialog lacking the vast majority of the function that KDE has in its dialog.
No, you are missing something.
1) Libraries. 2) Ability to do file management inside the file dialog. 3) Workmanship.
How can you claim that libraries in Win7 are something that Linux has is beyond me. I have the latest Ubuntu, and win7, and my ubuntu is running KDE, and honestly, KDE's dialogs suck.
Seriously, look at the left of the dialog in Win7...
See that little thing that says "libraries" See the crumb thingy at the top And, if you actually used it, you might notice that if you hit the right mouse button, you get all the shell extensions.. and you can rename, copy, delete, etc... and even launch another app inside your file dialog...
I thought Open Source was about honest communications. And, instead, I get a sea of rationalization that Linux's AMC Pacer dialogs are even in the same ballpark as Win7's Caddy's. They just aren't.
Maybe if FOSS people got paid for their product, they won't have to make it into a religious crusade and could deal with it objectively.
You are essentially missing the forest for the trees.
I find those things to be more excuses and rationalizations than causes. The forest for the trees is that the red states have pushed for an economic system that benefits them at the expense of the rest of the country.
Why should the failure of a farm be any more of an act of concern then the failure of a car company? Why should we have a national tariff to protect the production of sugar when we have no such protections against manufacturing of various goods? Isn't the ability to manufacture arguably more important than the ability to save joe farmer? Somewhere along the way, this country made the decision that the joes in the red states are entitled to federal subsidy and protectionism, but, the joe in the northern states are not.
Our current economic policy is about red states looking to sell food at the highest prices and buy the goods to make them with at the lowest. It's the same economic game that they have been playing for almost two centuries (those states that have been states that long, at least). Thus we have subsidies and protectionism for agriculture, and free trade on manufactured goods.
My argument would be that, if farm subsidies and import protectionism have actually been good for farming, and they have been, since so many of us are fat, then, why not have the same protectionism for manufacturing?
Free trade in the USA is a sham. I wrote a giant rant about this here:
Windows inertia keeping people from using a proper operating system.
Linux's file dialogs are too obsolete to call it a modern operating system. Once Windows 7 goes mainstream, people will be addicted to the libraries feature in the Windows 7 dialogs like they are crack. Then, not only will Linux have to come up with better file dialogs, which, they have a lot of work to do, they might also have to consider how they will migrate people's library settings from Windows to Linux.
Actually, farming subsidies are more or less a national security issue
Actually, no. Farming subsidies are something Democrats cooked up to keep their then solid south in their tow. It was pretty simple, Democrats in their 1910s-1950s era did the same things Republicans did in the 1960s and 1970s.... they threw a lot of money at the former confederate states in the form of agricultural subsidies and protectionism for agriculture, but free trade for manufactured goods, thereby screwing northern manufacturers. The weird part is that the Democrats and Republicans wound up flipping sides in the 1960s partially because of the fallout over the civil rights act...and the northern liberals in the Democratic Party essentially drove the south out.
There are many "truths" about the American experience that are just political spin and the truth is far more interesting and far more complicated. Many people can dismiss the American South, for sure, because of Jim Crow and their civil rights era stuff, but just as the South drove Republicans to invade Iraq and try and bring some Democracy, the American South was much more in favor of intervening in World War II and doing things like the Lend Lease Act.
Seriously, have a look at who drove the Naval Rearmament bills for the USA in the late 1930s and got Essex class aircraft carriers and Iowa class battleships into the design and procurement phase -before- World War II broke out. It was a staunch Democrat southerner, Carl Vinson, who helped Roosevelt out. Now Vinson has a carrier named after him, for it, but he was also arguably a racist. The thing is, if there was no Vinson, there was no 20 aircraft carriers under construction and the USA would be in rough shape during the war.
IF they all went back to the old ways, then expect a serious increase in food prices or a shortage of food.
WE could not feed ourselves with the old ways before. Malnutrition was common in western countries until the 1950s and to some extent to the 1960s. Have a look at World War II recruiting in the USA. You'll see towards the end of the war some of those people look positively starved.
European history, too, is filled with starvation. One of the great appeals of America to many people was the deer, the fish, the rabbits... and they weren't talking communing with nature. They were thinking -food-.
Due to the energy hungry nitrogen fixation process required to make the fertilizer so rich in energy...corn has been described as being "edible oil",
That's why we need to build more nukes! If anything, corn should be called "edible coal!"
But in all seriousness, that only serves to support my original post - that, as we tax energy to "save the planet", we're going to wind up making food a lot more expensive and therefor eating less.
Whine all you want about how New York having a cool day means the world isn't getting warmer; when the corn crops start dying from the longer (and hotter) growing season, you'll be more than "a bit thinner".
The problem is that global warming legislation will raise energy costs, alter land use, and, ultimately, in a few hundred years, shorten the growing season. So we're pretty much setting ourselves up to go through getting a bit thinner. Cutting down on our ability to save fat is almost like evolutionary suicide. 100 years from now, it will be like the old days, people that are fat will be rare and obesity will be a sign of power and wealth.
No, I'm just looking at it from an instruction set point of view. In 16 bit world, ES,DS and the other segment registers were just annoyances that you had to deal with in order to get at data over 64k in length. In C you could choose a couple of ways to handle this - there was the small and tiny memory models which locked down the segments to be the start of the program and data, the medium and large, which lets you change the segments occasionally, and then the huge, which gave you an illusion of a giant address space but at a steep performance cost because it did the segment : offset conversion to an effective address at I think about every pointer dereference.
In those days, we looked at the need to even think about segment registers as pure, useless evil, and they were...
But, in 80368 mode, the segment register took on a whole new life and a whole new meaning. Specifically, a segment because the unit of security for protected memory. IT's there that we as an industry blew it. What we have now is that the segments are doled out to each application by the operating system but there's basically a single giant segment for code and data and that's the flat memory model. It's really, conceptually, the small memory model as it was in 16 bit land, but now the count registers can be 32 bits and so we never really think about segment registers at all, at the application level.
What could have happened was that programs could have been the medium modem or large model-esque, which would have allowed them to have multiple segments. Segments in 386 world have their own page tables and permissions and what not, and so offer potentially to the application a way of getting a finer grained memory protection that you speak of. Thus they could guard against overwrites - the cause of -many- security problems and native code bug, via the CPU. Instead, we have a single address space with a fixed set of segments flat model and so everything within a process's space can walk all over each other within the process. Segments were a tool in 386 mode that could have been used to reduce this, but just weren't. And now, in x64, segments are essentially useless appendages, and there's no real going back.
Slashdot Mirror
I would bet that you could trace the origins of software version numbers even through the 1960s, because they had two blocks of Apollo spacecraft, block 1 and block 2.
We're in tight economic times. Companies are not going to upgrade unless they have a real need for a new feature. I have several clients who are still running on Windows XP and have absolutely no need to change that. Same goes for Vista. If their current systems are running smoothly and meeting requirements, there is no reason to change things.
What this says is that Microsoft isn't doing a good job of marketing Windows 7.
In the long run, they'll switch. Until everything becomes a webapp, the ecosystem almost demands it. Here's hoping people realize webapps are where it's at, for most things.
It's interesting, in that, so many people of the current generation see webapps and centralized computing as the new best thing.
See, some of us old people got into the PC revolution when we were kids because we were rebelling against centralized computing. We hated the account quotas and slowness of shared system resources in college, the straightjackets around information, and we wanted to smash all of that. We saw that giving people power tools like spreadsheets and desktop databases empowered them over the static mainframe systems of old, that a computer was something that you owned, was, well, a personal thing.
Quite frankly, if it wasn't for ISPs being such a PITA about bandwidth for uploads and hosting, and if, honestly, there was more adoption of IPv6 so that everyone could have their own address, we would see a lot more desktop to the internet hosting. A quadcore PC could easily host a blog or a facebook account. Indeed, I would be the next killer application would be a desktop app that lets you do what facebook does, except that you own your data, and the core web service is really only a directory to enable peer to peer communications.
Where is the "Windows 7 Express Edition" to compete with ChromeOS
I don't think Microsoft would be allowed to give Windows away even if it wanted to. They get into trouble for giving away IE, and giving away Media Player. If they gave the whole operating system away, they would get sued like no tomorrow by various parties in the European Union. To a certain extent, governments looking to promote Linux would prefer Microsoft keep charging for Windows.
I think you mean "If it wasn't for Firefox, we would still be using IE6."
True. But, even in that case, we find that Google is the one shoveling money into Firefox. Once they get some penetration with Chrome, I would expect them to gradually withdraw support from Firefox and it will be IE vs Chrome.
People that would rather make a buck today than ten bucks next week.
Well, to be fair, the record company execs that bought airtime were arguably more greedy and more manipulative than the ones are today, and it was also easier with local radio. Back in the day, if you had a local radio station, to get airplay, an exec might go and just bribe the DJ at the station to put something on. In those days DJs had more creative control but that also made it easier for them to take bribes. As a result, the studio would pay to get music on the air by bribing the DJ.
Now...
The system is a less corrupt on that score, and the problem was "solved" by removing creative control from the DJ. They can't play new music unless corporate decides its selling, and it won't sell until somebody plays it. To some extent college radio worked to break new music but with iPOD college radio isn't the force it once was.
It is that ... by silently critiquing religion, you've fallen into your own self defined trap of "US or them"..
And, we might also note, that "threats against the afterlife" is essentially interchangable with "saving the planet"
If everyone could hack into any person's brain and have sex with whoever they want, then what kind of society would that be like? On one hand, some super hot chicks are going to be pretty busy, but on the other hand, you would be reprogrammed periodically to think that bigfoot was hot.
Goddamned, the unintended consequence of techonological evolution is that it makes every conspiracy theory ultimately more likely to do in the future.
If it wasn't for Google Chrome and Firefox, we would still be using IE6.
If it wasn't for Linux, there would probably not nearly the investment in Vista and Win7 that there has been.
And, I guarantee you, that if there were no Linux free IDEs, there would be no Visual Studio Express. I doubly guarantee you, that, if there was no gcc, there would be no standards compliant C++ in Visual Studio.
Google may not conquer the world with Chrome OS, and I think will ultimately lose to Microsoft, but, competition benefits everyone.
What will Google do to bolster search to respond to Bing? How will Adobe respond to Silverlight... you can laugh at Silverlight 1.0, dismiss 2.0, but MS has away of just chugging away like the borg when they want to attack a market.
It's all bound to keep people on their toes. What would be the alternative? A treaty between Google and Microsoft keeping each other in the browser and desktop, respectively? That would suck.
makes a good point in noting that the developers hold the most sway in terms of release management.
Obviously you've never written financial software.... deadline... uh, ship it!!! I saw one guy release something that he never even ran...
If you actually went through, every little single thing the file dialog in Windows 7 does, it might actually take 18 months to replicate all of that functionality, especially if it was in C.
But be that as it may, if Gnome decides to go and give me a bunch of b.s. about metaphorical problems and then ultimately clone the Windows 7 dialog but with some twist to make it somehow different, then, honestly, it would be an improvement over what they have now.
I prefer 'directory'. At least then it doesn't push a false analogy on an already confused mind
IS Directory really a good word though? A Directory could mean like a yellow pages, a dictionary, etc, its an entire system of managing things and the most appropriate use of the word directory really is -file system-, not an individual folder.
Who's bright idea was it to put the main launch facility in *Florida*.
I think the deal is that the closer to the equator you launch from, the cheaper it is. That's why the French launch Ariane from a complex in French Guyana.
Oh, so it's you against them and the only reason you care about is what will further your struggle. Well, when you get done tilting at windmills, start looking around.
This opinion of yours doesn't change the fact that I'm right.
Because you don't need a car to live where you do need food.
People need manufactured goods to live just as much as they need food. Do you know how to make steel, or even iron, to make a plow with? Or, how do you make so much as even a carved stick without tools.
And now your lumping tarriffs in with subsidies and the farm program. They aren't the same
They are entirely the same. The farm program is a subsidy. It's a trade restraining redistribution of wealth.
Wow, almost two centuries and you think it is wrong.
Well yes. Because, for most of that time, the North sought and got protectionism for manufactured goods, and turned the USA into a superpower. Just look at the difference between protectionist North in the civil war vs free trading South.
http://www.treatyist.com/issue1/protectionismcivilwar.aspx
PS. The South lost.
Yep.. But there should be very little free trade when dealing with food. There is no reason for demand to drive the price out of the reach of the poorer citizens. You may think otherwise but you are completely wrong.
Um, if there was free trade with food, it would be cheaper, just as free trade makes manufactured goods cheaper.
SO now it's the fat people. Ok, I'm starting to get some insight into how your mind works. I don't believe you are right but now I see
Uh, boy, that's a way to twist an example around. There are fat people because there are plenty of food to eat. My point is, if protectionism works so well with food, why not do it with manufactured goods?
Try KDE4's file dialogs with Nepomuk enabled sometime, and see how a file dialog should really be done...
See, I'm not a big fan of social ratings. Ratings can work for things that a lot of people are interested in, but, if you've got 1 reviewer giving you a star per year, that's hardly useful.
I just wish sometimes people who were religiously into Linux could admit that the operating system is something that is honestly more geared towards IT professionals only.
Like, I'm surprised no one looked at Win7 my comments about dialogs and provided what I thought was the nobrain Linux answer. You could get some of what I talk about with symbolic links. You can make a directory off of your home and then stuff it with symlinks. That would get about 80% of what Win7's dialogs do. But of course, that launches you back into shell land... and that's the thing about Linux.
What are you talking about, wrt W7 dialogs being so drastically superior to "Linux's file dialogs"?
1) Libraries.
2) Ability to do file management inside the file dialog.
3) Workmanship.
Is there something significant I'm missing here, or are you just blowing smoke? The file dialog in W7 is not only almost identical to what KDE has had since early 2002 (no, I'm not claiming they 'stole' anything), but it's also a dialog lacking the vast majority of the function that KDE has in its dialog.
No, you are missing something.
1) Libraries.
2) Ability to do file management inside the file dialog.
3) Workmanship.
How can you claim that libraries in Win7 are something that Linux has is beyond me. I have the latest Ubuntu, and win7, and my ubuntu is running KDE, and honestly, KDE's dialogs suck.
Seriously, look at the left of the dialog in Win7...
http://www.treatyist.com/gallery.aspx?gallery=windows7vslinux&image=8
See that little thing that says "libraries"
See the crumb thingy at the top
And, if you actually used it, you might notice that if you hit the right mouse button, you get all the shell extensions.. and you can rename, copy, delete, etc... and even launch another app inside your file dialog...
And you tell me THIS is better?
http://www.treatyist.com/gallery.aspx?gallery=windows7vslinux&image=15
or THIS is better?
http://www.treatyist.com/gallery.aspx?gallery=windows7vslinux&image=16
than this?
http://www.treatyist.com/gallery.aspx?gallery=windows7vslinux&image=17
I thought Open Source was about honest communications. And, instead, I get a sea of rationalization that Linux's AMC Pacer dialogs are even in the same ballpark as Win7's Caddy's. They just aren't.
Maybe if FOSS people got paid for their product, they won't have to make it into a religious crusade and could deal with it objectively.
You are essentially missing the forest for the trees.
I find those things to be more excuses and rationalizations than causes. The forest for the trees is that the red states have pushed for an economic system that benefits them at the expense of the rest of the country.
Why should the failure of a farm be any more of an act of concern then the failure of a car company? Why should we have a national tariff to protect the production of sugar when we have no such protections against manufacturing of various goods? Isn't the ability to manufacture arguably more important than the ability to save joe farmer? Somewhere along the way, this country made the decision that the joes in the red states are entitled to federal subsidy and protectionism, but, the joe in the northern states are not.
Our current economic policy is about red states looking to sell food at the highest prices and buy the goods to make them with at the lowest. It's the same economic game that they have been playing for almost two centuries (those states that have been states that long, at least). Thus we have subsidies and protectionism for agriculture, and free trade on manufactured goods.
My argument would be that, if farm subsidies and import protectionism have actually been good for farming, and they have been, since so many of us are fat, then, why not have the same protectionism for manufacturing?
Free trade in the USA is a sham. I wrote a giant rant about this here:
http://www.treatyist.com/issue1/alabamasnewflag.aspx
Windows inertia keeping people from using a proper operating system.
Linux's file dialogs are too obsolete to call it a modern operating system. Once Windows 7 goes mainstream, people will be addicted to the libraries feature in the Windows 7 dialogs like they are crack. Then, not only will Linux have to come up with better file dialogs, which, they have a lot of work to do, they might also have to consider how they will migrate people's library settings from Windows to Linux.
Actually, farming subsidies are more or less a national security issue
Actually, no. Farming subsidies are something Democrats cooked up to keep their then solid south in their tow. It was pretty simple, Democrats in their 1910s-1950s era did the same things Republicans did in the 1960s and 1970s.... they threw a lot of money at the former confederate states in the form of agricultural subsidies and protectionism for agriculture, but free trade for manufactured goods, thereby screwing northern manufacturers. The weird part is that the Democrats and Republicans wound up flipping sides in the 1960s partially because of the fallout over the civil rights act...and the northern liberals in the Democratic Party essentially drove the south out.
There are many "truths" about the American experience that are just political spin and the truth is far more interesting and far more complicated. Many people can dismiss the American South, for sure, because of Jim Crow and their civil rights era stuff, but just as the South drove Republicans to invade Iraq and try and bring some Democracy, the American South was much more in favor of intervening in World War II and doing things like the Lend Lease Act.
Seriously, have a look at who drove the Naval Rearmament bills for the USA in the late 1930s and got Essex class aircraft carriers and Iowa class battleships into the design and procurement phase -before- World War II broke out. It was a staunch Democrat southerner, Carl Vinson, who helped Roosevelt out. Now Vinson has a carrier named after him, for it, but he was also arguably a racist. The thing is, if there was no Vinson, there was no 20 aircraft carriers under construction and the USA would be in rough shape during the war.
IF they all went back to the old ways, then expect a serious increase in food prices or a shortage of food.
WE could not feed ourselves with the old ways before. Malnutrition was common in western countries until the 1950s and to some extent to the 1960s. Have a look at World War II recruiting in the USA. You'll see towards the end of the war some of those people look positively starved.
European history, too, is filled with starvation. One of the great appeals of America to many people was the deer, the fish, the rabbits... and they weren't talking communing with nature. They were thinking -food-.
Due to the energy hungry nitrogen fixation process required to make the fertilizer so rich in energy...corn has been described as being "edible oil",
That's why we need to build more nukes! If anything, corn should be called "edible coal!"
But in all seriousness, that only serves to support my original post - that, as we tax energy to "save the planet", we're going to wind up making food a lot more expensive and therefor eating less.
Some people are going to starve to death.
Whine all you want about how New York having a cool day means the world isn't getting warmer; when the corn crops start dying from the longer (and hotter) growing season, you'll be more than "a bit thinner".
Markets don't lie.
Food prices falling across the board
Says to me that there's not a corn shortage.
The problem is that global warming legislation will raise energy costs, alter land use, and, ultimately, in a few hundred years, shorten the growing season. So we're pretty much setting ourselves up to go through getting a bit thinner. Cutting down on our ability to save fat is almost like evolutionary suicide. 100 years from now, it will be like the old days, people that are fat will be rare and obesity will be a sign of power and wealth.
confusing concepts..
No, I'm just looking at it from an instruction set point of view. In 16 bit world, ES,DS and the other segment registers were just annoyances that you had to deal with in order to get at data over 64k in length. In C you could choose a couple of ways to handle this - there was the small and tiny memory models which locked down the segments to be the start of the program and data, the medium and large, which lets you change the segments occasionally, and then the huge, which gave you an illusion of a giant address space but at a steep performance cost because it did the segment : offset conversion to an effective address at I think about every pointer dereference.
In those days, we looked at the need to even think about segment registers as pure, useless evil, and they were...
But, in 80368 mode, the segment register took on a whole new life and a whole new meaning. Specifically, a segment because the unit of security for protected memory. IT's there that we as an industry blew it. What we have now is that the segments are doled out to each application by the operating system but there's basically a single giant segment for code and data and that's the flat memory model. It's really, conceptually, the small memory model as it was in 16 bit land, but now the count registers can be 32 bits and so we never really think about segment registers at all, at the application level.
What could have happened was that programs could have been the medium modem or large model-esque, which would have allowed them to have multiple segments. Segments in 386 world have their own page tables and permissions and what not, and so offer potentially to the application a way of getting a finer grained memory protection that you speak of. Thus they could guard against overwrites - the cause of -many- security problems and native code bug, via the CPU. Instead, we have a single address space with a fixed set of segments flat model and so everything within a process's space can walk all over each other within the process. Segments were a tool in 386 mode that could have been used to reduce this, but just weren't. And now, in x64, segments are essentially useless appendages, and there's no real going back.