Some have said that the X11 version is "ugly", but the Open Office developers have only themselves to blame for that, there are numerous beautiful graphics toolkits avialable on X11 which wonderful and georgeous user interfaces can be created with. Its not like X11 actually restricts user interface design, in fact, X11 provides a stable, time tested and refined platform which doesnt limit the beautiful user interfaces that you can implement on top of it.
You're missing the point (yes, there is one).
Graphical user interfaces work and leverage user experience by being consistent. Inconsistent user interfaces are a bad thing. Conequently, taking an application with one style of user interaction and dropping it onto a screen where every other application has a different style of user interaction is going to make things more difficult for users.
This has nothing to do with whether or not you use X11 as your basic underlying windowing layer. As you say, there are lots of nice GUI toolkits for X. But it has a lot to do with how you abstract your user interface controls. Sun has a lot of experience of doing this, and, frankly, a lot of experience of getting it wrong.
Look at Java. Originally it came with the Abstract Window Toolkit, which was the right idea if not brilliantly executed. Whatever platform you used, an AWT application had menus which looked like and worked like the menus of the platform - because they _were_ the menus of the platform, mapping Java methods onto the windowing API of the platform; and similarly for all other UI widgets. It was lightweight, looked consistent and, to a considerable extent, worked consistently. But because Sun wanted AWT apps to work exactly alike on all platforms, AWT had to be the lowest common denominator of the GUI features of those platforms: if you had two, or three, or more buttons on your mouse you could still only use one. There's no mechanism in AWT to allow you to specify how to react to a second mouse button, or a scroll-wheel, if it happens to be present... but it would have been so easy to do.
So next Sun brough out Swing, which is a mighty piece of bloat and a heroic processor hog, which ignores all the high level GUI API of the host operating system and instead provides its own GUI components, guaranteed to be inconsistent with the user interaction style of every platform. Cle-ver.
If Open Office had adopted an AWT-like approach to interacting with the GUI components of the host platform (but extended to make use of extra features when present), the problem of supporting Aqua would cease to be a problem.
It's not about the filename extension (if any), silly. It's about the
data. Valid RDF data may be stored in files with a wire range of
extensions, or even (how radical is this?) generated on the fly.
What matters is first the mime type (which is most likely
application/xml or preferably text/xml), and
the data in it.
And BTW for the clueless, you do imagine that someone actually measured this pot right? And recorded what he measured - it's not prophecy after all. The reason these measurements are recorded is that the pot was very think. One measurement was an inner measurement, and the other was an outer measurement.
Do the math, go look up how much a hand breadth is, and figure the inner diameter was 10 cubits minus a hand breadth. Then see how 30 cubits compares with what you calculate for the inner circumference - you'll find it's quite accurate.
Ye Gods!
The scary thing is I don't think that's meant to be a joke, do you?
Let's get this straight. What we're dealing with here may be a 'puff' piece - a bit of political spin - telling people how rich and powerful Solomon was. If so, it may have been written down at the time - but it is written by someone trying to impress. It probably isn't written by the architect; it was probably written by Solomon's equivalent of a PR department, and you don't expect precise technical accuracy from a PR department. If it was written down at the time, it's probably just not very precise.
But the second thing is, Solomon was the Israeli's Golden Age. He was the most powerful king they ever had. This passage may have been written down two or three generations later, when Solomon's palace was ruined or redeveloped. It could be old mens' memories of what their grandfather's said. It may be highly exaggerated.
And let's face it, Solomon was rich and powerful, but the amount of energy to maintain 32 cubic metres of some unspecified (but by implication not normally molten) substance in a molten state would be very high. Yes, ancient kings did indulge in huge spectaular showpieces, but nevertheless I think it's more likely that this detail is either a huge exaggeration or just untrue.
Either way it can't be taken as 'proving' that either the contemporary Jews or their God thought that the diameter of a circle of exactly thirty cubits perimeter was exactly ten cubits. After all, to the degree of accuracy needed by either a PR piece or an old man's story telling, the diameter of a roughly thirty cubit circle is roughly ten cubits: you're investing these statements with a degree of accuracy that the author never intended.
Actually you are wrong, AGAIN. There are geothermal resource available all over the planet, there are places all around the Pacific Rim's ring of fire that have them. Yellowstone is rich in it. Pretty much anyplace where there is an active or even dorman volcano is sure to have it. If you drill deep enough you can find them anywhere, our planet has a molten core in case you didn't know.
No.
Yes, there is geothermal energy everywhere on the planet. Yes, we could tap it. But that's just falling back into the trap the last few generations have got us into, of living way beyond our energy means, and it is just storing up more trouble for future generations.
The planet receives locally 'new' energy only from the sun. Solar energy, which we can trap either directly with photovoltaic arrays and photosynthesis or indirectly with wind-turbines. That's our income. And actually, provided we use it efficiently, it's plenty.
But geothermal energy, like fossil fuel, is capital. Spending it has consequences. The consequence of spending geothermal energy is that we cool the planet's core. Frankly, I don't know what effects that will have, and on the precautionary principal I think that's a very good reason for not doing it. Isn't it time we learned the lessons of quick technical fixes?
I've been to Iceland. I like it there. The stuff those folk have done with geothermal energy is really impressive. But in Iceland sunny days are so rare that they get an automatic school holiday! I don't think it's a solution that scales for the rest of us.
If you looked at it from the perspective of lives lost, it will have little effect on the industrialized world, and maybe farmland in non-industrialized countries will slowly disappear.
...from which the 'industrialised world' is already a net importer of food...
Then again, frozen areas in the north may become more cultivable. I'm always amused when people worry that frozen waste land is being changed from global warming, as if that's such a bad thing that the land is now more useful for our own use.
This is based on a bit of profound misunderstanding about the shape of the planet.
Sunlight falling in the tropics meets the surface of the planet at near enough 90 degrees (indeed, the definition of the tropics is that at some point in the year sunlight falls there at exactly 90 degrees). So one square metre of sunlight is available for photosynthesis to the plants on one square metre of surface.
At 60 degrees north (or south) latitude the amount of sunlight (average throught the year) available to plants on one square metre of surface is cosine( 60), or one half, as much. So the maximum total productiveness per unit area is half as much.
Now, assume for a moment there are no oceans, and the planet is a smooth round billiard ball of potentially usable agricultural land. What happens when you increase the temperature of the atmosphere and thus shift the arable zone away from the equator? The total area of the arable zone gets smaller, is what. Because the planet isn't a cylinder, as the mercator projection maps we all look at suggests. The diameter of the earth at 60 north is half what it is at the equator, so there's half as much land at 60 north as at the equator.
And finally, the distribution of land masses on the planet isn't even. Between 40 degrees and 60 degrees south there's virtually no land at all. So if you shift the arable band away from the equator, you decrease the proportion of the arable band which is land as opposed to ocean. Which means you have even less food production.
And that's before you notice the fact (which should be obvious) that the effects of global warming aren't distributed evenly. If, as is suggested, the warm water circulation of the North Atlantic is changing, then the eastern seaboard of the United States and the whole of Western Europe - historically important agricultural and industrial areas - are going to get a lot less productive. If, as is suggested, the Mid West of the United States becomes desert, an enormous proportion of the food producing capacity of the temperate world is going to be lost.
So you need to get away from this idea that 'global warming isn't going to hurt us here'.
Do you honestly believe that "a fat American in a Humvee" is going to destroy the environment and kill millions people?
One fat American in one Humvee, no. But one fat American in one Humvee is burning far more fossil fuel than the same fat American would burn if he rode a bicycle (he'd also be less fat, which wouldn't benefit the planet but it might benefit him). And one fat American in a Humvee driving to work fifty miles from his home is burning far more fossil fuel than the same fat American sitting at his desk in his home telecommuting (although he'd still be just as fat).
The problem is that there isn't just one fat American in a Humvee. There are 293 million Americans, most of whom are fat, in 24 million SUVs. And the difference in energy usage between 24 million SUVs and 24 million bicycles is enough - more than enough - to make a difference.
From a geological standpoint, everything I have read about says that our planet should be about 10 degrees warmer than what it is today. We're coming out of 'abnormal' climtes, and apparently inching back toward 'normal'. A google on "cenozoic ice age" will be instructive, as is this page: http://www.museum.state.il.us/exhibits/ice_ages/ "During most of the last 1 billion years the globe had no permanent ice."
That may be true, but what is significant is that human beings did not evolve during that period. We're evolved to cope with a world which does have permanent ice and is on the whole temperate. While we're individually very adaptable and I have no doubt that some human population could survive in a world ten degrees warmer, considered as a total population we need a huge amount of food which in turn means a huge amount of arable land.
As the planet warms, so the climate belts not affected by drought get shifted up the latitudes where, because of the curvature of the earth, the amount of solar radiation per unit area is less, and consequently the available energy for photosynthesis is less, and consequently plants are less productive. So as you shift agriculture progressively away from the equator you get progressively less food per unit area.
So the bottom line is a warmer planet means a lot fewer people. It doesn't mean we all die off like dinosaurs, but it does mean most of us die off.
Personally, I feel that the planet is pretty grossly overcrowded anyway and a lot fewer people would be a very good thing, but try telling that to the people who are going to have to get off.
There are two ways that droughts are produced. 1. less precipitation 2. precipitation drops in the wrong places.
Global warming produces increased precipitation.
So what's changing the wind patterns?
Global warming, of course.
Not that, as others have pointed out, that changes in wind patterns are the only things causing increased drought; but the atmsophere is a heat engine, and wind is (by and large) air moved by heat differential - in other words, convection. The hotter the atmosphere, the more powerful the wind movements (have you noticed we've been having a lot of hurricanes lately?).
Of course there is a bit of coriolis effect in the overall wind movement, leading to the great westerly wind belts of the forties and fifties of latitude, but that doesn't change the fact that wind is largely heat driven, and global warming directly changes wind patterns.
My wish is that Mozilla properly render Slashdot. What an embarassment! Someone even went so far as to make a Mozilla plugin that fixed the Slashdot rendering bug! I mean, c'mon people, you'd think that Mozilla would properly render Mozilla's biggest supporter.
Fix the problem.
The problem isn't with Mozilla; Mozilla renders valid HTML very well indeed. The problem is that Slashcode doesn't emit valid HTML. And frankly, for something that claims to be a geek site, that's shameful.
Is there anything that could possibly have less consequence?
Not much, if you live in Montana.
But if you live in Texas, or Louisiana, or Florida, it's got quite a lot of consequence. Ice melts on its exposed edges. So break it up into smaller pieces and it melts faster, decreasing the salinity of the ocean, and thus affecting circulation, which leads to changes in storm patterns. Had any hurricanes lately?
Melting of floating ice, of course, doesn't change the sea level. But the floating glacier provides back-pressure which holds back the much larger glacier on shore. If you break off the floating part of the glacier and release the back-pressure, more of the non-floating part slides down into the sea and starts to float, and that does change the sea level. How high do you want your tide today?
Just as a point of information, people are writing as if there is one unified 'UK' legal system. There isn't. Scots law (in Scotland) is completely different from English law (England and Wales) - not even the same basic legal principles apply.
I think Northern Ireland is different again but I'm not certain of that. The Isle of Man certainly has a separate legal system, as do the Channel Islands and other bits and bats that people think of as part of the United Kingdom but which technically are not. Even within Scotland, Orkney and Shetland use old Norse ('Udal') law for some civil matters which is different from Scots law.
SCO are almost certainly talking about bringing action in the English courts against Linux users in England. But, as we've seen before many times, SCO talks a lot about bringing these actions. They don't actually do it. And given their 4th Quarter license revenues have dropped $10M to $120K over the past year, even the threats aren't working any more.
Why should that piss you off? As a citizen of the US, I absolutely DO NOT want a third party to be able to accurately aim a missile at the White House, the Capitol, or a nuclear power plant.
You grow up. Anybody with the technology to build a missile with enough range, payload and accuracy to hit those targets effectively has the ability to make a nuclear weapon - which makes the issue of accurate targetting moot.
Anyone with the competence to build a nuclear or biological weapon isn't going to bother with a missile. They're going to enter the country - probably perfectly legally, with valid, genuine documents, rent a house, build the weapon, and deliver it to the target in a pickup. Terrorists didn't need GPS to take out the World Trade Centre, and they won't need it to take out the White House.
Starwars (and missile defence) are so last century.
Is this the same 'SMART' car as the one sold by Mercedes in Europe? Sure looks like it, but I can't see any reference to that.
It is, yes. The engine is made by Mercedes. They've been around for quite some time here; economical, quick and fun. The roll cage is enormously strong, the body panels (which are plastic) just pop onto it. Two seats only but a lot of luggage room.
I worked on one (academic) project where a small group of people got dumped on to write an enormous amount of under specified code to ridiculously tight deadlines. The three of us who were in the end writing the code were working straight seventeen hour days for weeks on end, and towards the end of the project there were days when we had fifteen 'analysts', 'managers' and other pure overhead sitting in an office upstairs and coming down every few minutes to 'see how we were doing'
and consequently slowed us even more.
Needless to say the project did not get delivered, all three of the programmers burned out (the other two left and I left about six months later).
So what went wrong with the project? Well firstly, at the beginning of it it became clear that if you admitted being able to program you were going to end up programming. So everyone with any sense claimed to be unable to and got to be an 'analyst' who analysed user requirements and wrote specifications, and only those of us who had been too naive or too junior to see that one coming ended up actually building anything.
Secondly, because this was a research project, people somehow didn't often feel the need to tie their specification down to actual data-structures or algorithms. On the whole the specifications we were working from specified mostly what the user should see on the screen, with a fair amount of hand waving. As the underlying algorithms actually involved a constraint-propagating inference engine, actually working out how to tie the interface to the functionality was a fair bit of work in itself.
Thirdly, the project was way too ambitious for the performance of the available hardware. But fundamentally all of that could have been overcome with better management and a better split of the workforce between programmers and 'analysts' (and better partitioning of the application - some of the guts of it could have been offloaded onto a mainframe, which we had sitting idle for the whole of the project).
In teams I've led since that time I've insisted that there should be no division between programmer and analyst, and that everyone has to be able to specify as well as build and, as far as possible, build what they specify. This on the whole has worked.
But the other lesson I learned is that you can work sixteen hour days for three months on end. It can even, at times, be a buzz, provided you're sufficiently supported and appreciated; and you can even produce very good work while you're doing it.
But. But you aren't going to produce anything worth having for the next six months afterwards. You're going to burn out, your health is going to suffer, and your ability to do good work is going to collapse. Your net productivity over a year of working 40 hour weeks is going to be a lot higher than three months working 80 hour weeks and nine months working 40; and that in turn is going to be a lot higher than twelve months working 60 hour weeks.
You cannot sustain high levels of creativity for ever. You will burn out. When you do burn out the best thing to do (if you can afford it) seems to be to go and do something completely different - non-intellectual - for several months; ideally, take a holiday.
If you have a boss who is demanding 80 hour weeks, you need to be very confident that he has enough commitment to you to fund that several month holiday at the end of it.
...I'd say that the GPL... generally make it tougher to make a living.
And I'd say that the GPL is the one thing that guarantees we'll continue to be able to make a living. The GPL and keeping software patents out of Europe are the two things... Sorry, I'll come in again.
I've just written to my local Member of Parliament, Peter Duncan (Conservative), the following letter:
On Thursday of last week, two computers belonging to an organisation called 'Indymedia' were removed from the premises of a London ISP, Rackspace, apparently by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation, allegedly following a request by the Swiss government. Further detail of this action may be found here:
<URL:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3732718.stm>
I should be grateful if you could ask the Home Secretary:
On what legal theory was it proper for the agents of one foreign power, whether or not acting at the behest of another foreign power, to seize property within the United Kingdom?
What UK court, or other UK legal authority, authorised this seizure?
If it is the case that the seizure was made under the 'Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty', what terrorist information was supposed to have been held on these computers?
What evidence of such supposed terrorist information was supplied to the UK authorities in order to justify this seizure?
What action is he taking to prevent such seizures or property by agents of foreign powers in future?
This action cuts to the very heart of civil society in Britain: to the right of free speech, of citizens to publish news and opinion. Without this, democratic governance is impossible. For foreign powers to thus interfere in the democratic process in the United Kingdom is utterly intolerable, and wholly undermines the theory of a sovereign UK government.
Yours sincerely
It will be interesting to see whether I get a reply, and if so what reply I get. The more MPs are asking questions of the Home Office on this issue, the better, so if you're a UK voter, write to your MP. Obviously, don't copy my letter exactly, because the objective is to get them to understand a lot of different people are upset about this one.
This (more hurricanes) comes as a surprise to anyone? The atmosphere is a heat engine. You put more heat energy in, you get more wind energy out. It's as simple as that. Of course you're going to get more high wind events. In the Carribean, you call those Hurricanes.
What's bemusing to a European eye is that it seems to be the places which are most likely to be devastated by global warming that are most likely to vote for Bush.
According to Box Office Mojo The thing cost around 70 million to make and it's estimated that Paramount spent 35 million in marketing. That brings the total cost of this movie to around 105 million. If the movie pulls in 35 million domestically and the same overseas, you're looking at 70 million in profits at best.
And they wonder why geeks don't make it in business... If it cost 105 and it takes 70 that's 35 loss, no profit at all. Trying to call that '70 profit' is dot-bomb economics.
It'll probably end up losing money. It's a failure.
It's a good thing. And an interesting one. With the ability to stream radio online, the tax dollars that are spent by the public of the UK potentially benefit more than just those in the UK.
I listen to the BBC (not just radio 4) quite a bit off their website.
I think those of us who do pay our license fee to the BBC are extremely happy to think that people in the rest of the world - and particularly the United States - have free access to a news service which is free of commercial bias and which strives very hard to be free of political bias.
Part of what's frightening about the US as 'the World's only Super Power' is that, in the Land of the Free, your news media is so tightly controlled by a narrow commercial and political agenda that it is very hard for you to get any unbiased or balancing view of foreign news, and in consequence the electorate of the US is so under-informed on foreign policy.
You see anti-Americanism where there isn't any. If I dislike the way your media companies deal with things how does that make me anti-American? What if I hate how my Prime Minister deals with something, would that make me anti-Canadian?
Surely if someone is anti-American they must necessarily be anti-Canadian (and anti-Brazilian as well), since both Canada and Brazil are part of America. Or was he just using the blinkered, parochial view that the United States were sole owners of the entire continent, and if so where did he think Canada was?
Of course we ought to be opposing software patents, but this is a total gift to the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt merchants. The Munich project has been a flagship for Open Source rollouts world-wide. That is one hell of a hole the
German Greens have blown in the feet of the open source movement, all for the sake of cheap political posturing. Microsoft will be laughing all the way to the bank.
Your hypothesis is certainly one I wouldn't dismiss immediately, but do you know in what kind of timeframe the SVR4.2 release was made? i.e. Who is the cart and who is the horse, with respect to Linux & SCO.
System V Release 4 dates from 1991, according to th copyright statement in my manuals. That makes it older than Linux, though not by much. This is irrelevant anyway because ELF is a published standard with an open license, and if it should not have been so published that is an issue between SCO and the people who licensed it, i.e. themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
You're missing the point (yes, there is one).
Graphical user interfaces work and leverage user experience by being consistent. Inconsistent user interfaces are a bad thing. Conequently, taking an application with one style of user interaction and dropping it onto a screen where every other application has a different style of user interaction is going to make things more difficult for users.
This has nothing to do with whether or not you use X11 as your basic underlying windowing layer. As you say, there are lots of nice GUI toolkits for X. But it has a lot to do with how you abstract your user interface controls. Sun has a lot of experience of doing this, and, frankly, a lot of experience of getting it wrong.
Look at Java. Originally it came with the Abstract Window Toolkit, which was the right idea if not brilliantly executed. Whatever platform you used, an AWT application had menus which looked like and worked like the menus of the platform - because they _were_ the menus of the platform, mapping Java methods onto the windowing API of the platform; and similarly for all other UI widgets. It was lightweight, looked consistent and, to a considerable extent, worked consistently. But because Sun wanted AWT apps to work exactly alike on all platforms, AWT had to be the lowest common denominator of the GUI features of those platforms: if you had two, or three, or more buttons on your mouse you could still only use one. There's no mechanism in AWT to allow you to specify how to react to a second mouse button, or a scroll-wheel, if it happens to be present... but it would have been so easy to do.
So next Sun brough out Swing, which is a mighty piece of bloat and a heroic processor hog, which ignores all the high level GUI API of the host operating system and instead provides its own GUI components, guaranteed to be inconsistent with the user interaction style of every platform. Cle-ver.
If Open Office had adopted an AWT-like approach to interacting with the GUI components of the host platform (but extended to make use of extra features when present), the problem of supporting Aqua would cease to be a problem.
As of 17:03 GMT, I am getting (via British Telecom's nameservers):
Domain Name.......... panix.com
Creation Date........ 1991-04-22
Registration Date.... 2005-01-15
Expiry Date.......... 2006-04-23
Organisation Name.... vanessa Miranda
Organisation Address. 1010 Grand Cerritos Ave
Organisation Address.
Organisation Address. Las Vegas
Organisation Address. 89123
Organisation Address. NV
Organisation Address. UNITED STATES
Admin Name........... na vanessa Miranda
Admin Address........ 1010 Grand Cerritos Ave
Admin Address........
Admin Address........ Las Vegas
Admin Address........ 89123
Admin Address........ NV
Admin Address........ UNITED STATES
Admin Email.......... jzoh@yahoo.com
Admin Phone.......... +44.702413697
Admin Fax............ +44.7026413697
Tech Name............ Domain Admin
Tech Address......... Burnhill Business Centre
Tech Address.........
Tech Address......... Beckenham
Tech Address......... BR3 3LA
Tech Address......... Kent
Tech Address......... GREAT BRITAIN (UK)
Tech Email........... admin@powerhost.co.uk
Tech Phone........... +44.2082496081
Tech Fax............. +44.2082496076
Name Server.......... ns1.ukdnsservers.co.uk
Name Server.......... ns2.ukdnsservers.co.uk
It's not about the filename extension (if any), silly. It's about the data. Valid RDF data may be stored in files with a wire range of extensions, or even (how radical is this?) generated on the fly.
What matters is first the mime type (which is most likely application/xml or preferably text/xml), and the data in it.
Oh, and, First Post, BTW.
Ye Gods!
The scary thing is I don't think that's meant to be a joke, do you?
Let's get this straight. What we're dealing with here may be a 'puff' piece - a bit of political spin - telling people how rich and powerful Solomon was. If so, it may have been written down at the time - but it is written by someone trying to impress. It probably isn't written by the architect; it was probably written by Solomon's equivalent of a PR department, and you don't expect precise technical accuracy from a PR department. If it was written down at the time, it's probably just not very precise.
But the second thing is, Solomon was the Israeli's Golden Age. He was the most powerful king they ever had. This passage may have been written down two or three generations later, when Solomon's palace was ruined or redeveloped. It could be old mens' memories of what their grandfather's said. It may be highly exaggerated.
And let's face it, Solomon was rich and powerful, but the amount of energy to maintain 32 cubic metres of some unspecified (but by implication not normally molten) substance in a molten state would be very high. Yes, ancient kings did indulge in huge spectaular showpieces, but nevertheless I think it's more likely that this detail is either a huge exaggeration or just untrue.
Either way it can't be taken as 'proving' that either the contemporary Jews or their God thought that the diameter of a circle of exactly thirty cubits perimeter was exactly ten cubits. After all, to the degree of accuracy needed by either a PR piece or an old man's story telling, the diameter of a roughly thirty cubit circle is roughly ten cubits: you're investing these statements with a degree of accuracy that the author never intended.
No.
Yes, there is geothermal energy everywhere on the planet. Yes, we could tap it. But that's just falling back into the trap the last few generations have got us into, of living way beyond our energy means, and it is just storing up more trouble for future generations.
The planet receives locally 'new' energy only from the sun. Solar energy, which we can trap either directly with photovoltaic arrays and photosynthesis or indirectly with wind-turbines. That's our income. And actually, provided we use it efficiently, it's plenty.
But geothermal energy, like fossil fuel, is capital. Spending it has consequences. The consequence of spending geothermal energy is that we cool the planet's core. Frankly, I don't know what effects that will have, and on the precautionary principal I think that's a very good reason for not doing it. Isn't it time we learned the lessons of quick technical fixes?
I've been to Iceland. I like it there. The stuff those folk have done with geothermal energy is really impressive. But in Iceland sunny days are so rare that they get an automatic school holiday! I don't think it's a solution that scales for the rest of us.
...from which the 'industrialised world' is already a net importer of food...
This is based on a bit of profound misunderstanding about the shape of the planet.
Sunlight falling in the tropics meets the surface of the planet at near enough 90 degrees (indeed, the definition of the tropics is that at some point in the year sunlight falls there at exactly 90 degrees). So one square metre of sunlight is available for photosynthesis to the plants on one square metre of surface.
At 60 degrees north (or south) latitude the amount of sunlight (average throught the year) available to plants on one square metre of surface is cosine( 60), or one half, as much. So the maximum total productiveness per unit area is half as much.
Now, assume for a moment there are no oceans, and the planet is a smooth round billiard ball of potentially usable agricultural land. What happens when you increase the temperature of the atmosphere and thus shift the arable zone away from the equator? The total area of the arable zone gets smaller, is what. Because the planet isn't a cylinder, as the mercator projection maps we all look at suggests. The diameter of the earth at 60 north is half what it is at the equator, so there's half as much land at 60 north as at the equator.
And finally, the distribution of land masses on the planet isn't even. Between 40 degrees and 60 degrees south there's virtually no land at all. So if you shift the arable band away from the equator, you decrease the proportion of the arable band which is land as opposed to ocean. Which means you have even less food production.
And that's before you notice the fact (which should be obvious) that the effects of global warming aren't distributed evenly. If, as is suggested, the warm water circulation of the North Atlantic is changing, then the eastern seaboard of the United States and the whole of Western Europe - historically important agricultural and industrial areas - are going to get a lot less productive. If, as is suggested, the Mid West of the United States becomes desert, an enormous proportion of the food producing capacity of the temperate world is going to be lost.
So you need to get away from this idea that 'global warming isn't going to hurt us here'.
One fat American in one Humvee, no. But one fat American in one Humvee is burning far more fossil fuel than the same fat American would burn if he rode a bicycle (he'd also be less fat, which wouldn't benefit the planet but it might benefit him). And one fat American in a Humvee driving to work fifty miles from his home is burning far more fossil fuel than the same fat American sitting at his desk in his home telecommuting (although he'd still be just as fat).
The problem is that there isn't just one fat American in a Humvee. There are 293 million Americans, most of whom are fat, in 24 million SUVs. And the difference in energy usage between 24 million SUVs and 24 million bicycles is enough - more than enough - to make a difference.
That may be true, but what is significant is that human beings did not evolve during that period. We're evolved to cope with a world which does have permanent ice and is on the whole temperate. While we're individually very adaptable and I have no doubt that some human population could survive in a world ten degrees warmer, considered as a total population we need a huge amount of food which in turn means a huge amount of arable land.
As the planet warms, so the climate belts not affected by drought get shifted up the latitudes where, because of the curvature of the earth, the amount of solar radiation per unit area is less, and consequently the available energy for photosynthesis is less, and consequently plants are less productive. So as you shift agriculture progressively away from the equator you get progressively less food per unit area.
So the bottom line is a warmer planet means a lot fewer people. It doesn't mean we all die off like dinosaurs, but it does mean most of us die off.
Personally, I feel that the planet is pretty grossly overcrowded anyway and a lot fewer people would be a very good thing, but try telling that to the people who are going to have to get off.
Global warming, of course.
Not that, as others have pointed out, that changes in wind patterns are the only things causing increased drought; but the atmsophere is a heat engine, and wind is (by and large) air moved by heat differential - in other words, convection. The hotter the atmosphere, the more powerful the wind movements (have you noticed we've been having a lot of hurricanes lately?).
Of course there is a bit of coriolis effect in the overall wind movement, leading to the great westerly wind belts of the forties and fifties of latitude, but that doesn't change the fact that wind is largely heat driven, and global warming directly changes wind patterns.
Fix the problem.
The problem isn't with Mozilla; Mozilla renders valid HTML very well indeed. The problem is that Slashcode doesn't emit valid HTML. And frankly, for something that claims to be a geek site, that's shameful.
Not much, if you live in Montana.
But if you live in Texas, or Louisiana, or Florida, it's got quite a lot of consequence. Ice melts on its exposed edges. So break it up into smaller pieces and it melts faster, decreasing the salinity of the ocean, and thus affecting circulation, which leads to changes in storm patterns. Had any hurricanes lately?
Melting of floating ice, of course, doesn't change the sea level. But the floating glacier provides back-pressure which holds back the much larger glacier on shore. If you break off the floating part of the glacier and release the back-pressure, more of the non-floating part slides down into the sea and starts to float, and that does change the sea level. How high do you want your tide today?
Just as a point of information, people are writing as if there is one unified 'UK' legal system. There isn't. Scots law (in Scotland) is completely different from English law (England and Wales) - not even the same basic legal principles apply.
I think Northern Ireland is different again but I'm not certain of that. The Isle of Man certainly has a separate legal system, as do the Channel Islands and other bits and bats that people think of as part of the United Kingdom but which technically are not. Even within Scotland, Orkney and Shetland use old Norse ('Udal') law for some civil matters which is different from Scots law.
SCO are almost certainly talking about bringing action in the English courts against Linux users in England. But, as we've seen before many times, SCO talks a lot about bringing these actions. They don't actually do it. And given their 4th Quarter license revenues have dropped $10M to $120K over the past year, even the threats aren't working any more.
Anyone with the competence to build a nuclear or biological weapon isn't going to bother with a missile. They're going to enter the country - probably perfectly legally, with valid, genuine documents, rent a house, build the weapon, and deliver it to the target in a pickup. Terrorists didn't need GPS to take out the World Trade Centre, and they won't need it to take out the White House.
Starwars (and missile defence) are so last century.
Otherwise known as Daimler Benz; been making quality automobiles since 1886. So, not much track record there.
It is, yes. The engine is made by Mercedes. They've been around for quite some time here; economical, quick and fun. The roll cage is enormously strong, the body panels (which are plastic) just pop onto it. Two seats only but a lot of luggage room.
Needless to say the project did not get delivered, all three of the programmers burned out (the other two left and I left about six months later).
So what went wrong with the project? Well firstly, at the beginning of it it became clear that if you admitted being able to program you were going to end up programming. So everyone with any sense claimed to be unable to and got to be an 'analyst' who analysed user requirements and wrote specifications, and only those of us who had been too naive or too junior to see that one coming ended up actually building anything.
Secondly, because this was a research project, people somehow didn't often feel the need to tie their specification down to actual data-structures or algorithms. On the whole the specifications we were working from specified mostly what the user should see on the screen, with a fair amount of hand waving. As the underlying algorithms actually involved a constraint-propagating inference engine, actually working out how to tie the interface to the functionality was a fair bit of work in itself.
Thirdly, the project was way too ambitious for the performance of the available hardware. But fundamentally all of that could have been overcome with better management and a better split of the workforce between programmers and 'analysts' (and better partitioning of the application - some of the guts of it could have been offloaded onto a mainframe, which we had sitting idle for the whole of the project).
In teams I've led since that time I've insisted that there should be no division between programmer and analyst, and that everyone has to be able to specify as well as build and, as far as possible, build what they specify. This on the whole has worked.
But the other lesson I learned is that you can work sixteen hour days for three months on end. It can even, at times, be a buzz, provided you're sufficiently supported and appreciated; and you can even produce very good work while you're doing it.
But. But you aren't going to produce anything worth having for the next six months afterwards. You're going to burn out, your health is going to suffer, and your ability to do good work is going to collapse. Your net productivity over a year of working 40 hour weeks is going to be a lot higher than three months working 80 hour weeks and nine months working 40; and that in turn is going to be a lot higher than twelve months working 60 hour weeks.
You cannot sustain high levels of creativity for ever. You will burn out. When you do burn out the best thing to do (if you can afford it) seems to be to go and do something completely different - non-intellectual - for several months; ideally, take a holiday.
If you have a boss who is demanding 80 hour weeks, you need to be very confident that he has enough commitment to you to fund that several month holiday at the end of it.
<aol> Me too </aol>
And I'd say that the GPL is the one thing that guarantees we'll continue to be able to make a living. The GPL and keeping software patents out of Europe are the two things... Sorry, I'll come in again.
No-one expects the Polish Opposition!
It will be interesting to see whether I get a reply, and if so what reply I get. The more MPs are asking questions of the Home Office on this issue, the better, so if you're a UK voter, write to your MP. Obviously, don't copy my letter exactly, because the objective is to get them to understand a lot of different people are upset about this one.
This (more hurricanes) comes as a surprise to anyone? The atmosphere is a heat engine. You put more heat energy in, you get more wind energy out. It's as simple as that. Of course you're going to get more high wind events. In the Carribean, you call those Hurricanes.
What's bemusing to a European eye is that it seems to be the places which are most likely to be devastated by global warming that are most likely to vote for Bush.
And they wonder why geeks don't make it in business... If it cost 105 and it takes 70 that's 35 loss, no profit at all. Trying to call that '70 profit' is dot-bomb economics.
Precisely.
I think those of us who do pay our license fee to the BBC are extremely happy to think that people in the rest of the world - and particularly the United States - have free access to a news service which is free of commercial bias and which strives very hard to be free of political bias.
Part of what's frightening about the US as 'the World's only Super Power' is that, in the Land of the Free, your news media is so tightly controlled by a narrow commercial and political agenda that it is very hard for you to get any unbiased or balancing view of foreign news, and in consequence the electorate of the US is so under-informed on foreign policy.
Surely if someone is anti-American they must necessarily be anti-Canadian (and anti-Brazilian as well), since both Canada and Brazil are part of America. Or was he just using the blinkered, parochial view that the United States were sole owners of the entire continent, and if so where did he think Canada was?
Oh, come on, that's a poor troll. The USA doesn't yet have a national firewall like China's, and the BBC certainly aren't geo-censoring their output.
Of course we ought to be opposing software patents, but this is a total gift to the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt merchants. The Munich project has been a flagship for Open Source rollouts world-wide. That is one hell of a hole the German Greens have blown in the feet of the open source movement, all for the sake of cheap political posturing. Microsoft will be laughing all the way to the bank.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.
Mind you I'm more a Kropotkin man than a Bakunin man myself.
System V Release 4 dates from 1991, according to th copyright statement in my manuals. That makes it older than Linux, though not by much. This is irrelevant anyway because ELF is a published standard with an open license, and if it should not have been so published that is an issue between SCO and the people who licensed it, i.e. themselves.