I think it's a reference to the Winter of Discontent, which I'm old enough to remember well.
This was a wave of strikes triggered by the government's cap on public sector wages in a period of high inflation. From the article above:
The most notorious action during the winter was the unofficial strike by gravediggers, members of the GMWU in Liverpool and in Tameside near Manchester. As coffins piled up, Liverpool City Council hired a factory in Speke to store them. On 1 February a persistent journalist asked the Medical Officer of Health for Liverpool, Dr Duncan Dolton, what would be done if the strike continued for months, Dolton speculated that burial at sea would be considered. Although his response was hypothetical, in the circumstances it caused great alarm. The gravediggers eventually settled for a 14% rise after a fortnight's strike.
(not a maggie fan, just providing some background)
You can type any part of the description as well, you don't need to know the app name.
There's also the traditional category view. Press the win key to get the overview, click on the "Applications" button and you get a big grid of icons showing all the installed programs in alphabetical order. A set of filters down the right let you reduce the list to just "Sound & Video" (for example), or "System Tools".
Your figures are a bit high. The hue is $199 for three bulbs plus bridge, $60 for each extra bulb thereafter. Each bridge can control 50 bulbs, enough for most houses. You don't need an electrician.
It's not cheap, sadly:-( but less than you suggested.
I've made a disco lighting system for my kitchen for 'only' a few hundred, it's been fun. I'm not sure I'd do the whole house though.
No one cares, but here's what I think they should fix. I wrote this ages ago for a mailing list, so sorry about the formatting. And it's just things that annoy me, I'm sure other people would have other ideas. And I've not tried to list the nice things, so it seems one sided.
Since I wrote this, windows does seem to have moved a good way in this direction, so that's nice. It needs to move a bit more though.
I've been thinking a little about what sucks in windows (I've been
having to work on it this week) and made a list. I'm sure I've missed
or misunderstood lots of things because I don't really understand it:-(
* architecture
Very general: windows is a huge collection of interconnected services
that have built up over a period of decades. It's a right old pickle.
Everything seems to depend on everything else. This causes two
problems that annoy me:
1) Why does windows need a firewall at all? Can't they just not open
the ports in the first place? It's apparently because the clipboard
depends on DCOM, DCOM depends on the RPC daemon, the RPC
daemon needs an open port. So unless you have port whatever open,
you can't copy-paste in your desktop apps.
2) You can't strip it down. This is (largely) why WinCE exists (IMO).
You can't just remove stuff you don't need. Because everything is
interconnected, everything stops working if you take anything away. So
to make a tiny windows they need a (largely) separate codebase. Which
pollutes google with crap when I'm trying to search for API stuff,
gah!
Solution: reorganise stuff in a nice layered structure the way every
sane computer does. Don't make dependencies unless it really makes
sense, and never, ever make circular ones. Also, sort out the
who-owns-the-desktop thing so more than one person can be logged in at
once and use that to implement fast user switcing in a non-stupid way.
It sounds like w2k8 has moved a long way in the direction, hoorah!
* API
The win32 API is horrible. I've been fighting CreateProcess() and it's
a disaster of race conditions, deadlocks and inflexibility that programmers
have to work their way around. Make something nicer and put win32 into a
compatibility layer somewhere.
* FS semantics
Gah for not being able to delete open files. They need something like
*nix's refcounting thing. There you can delete open files and the
delete actually occurs when the last close happens.
Also: needs proper symlinks and mount points and everything should
support them. Do something clever about dangling symlinks for extra
points! And driver letters must die.
I don't like case-insensitivity. It means you have to have a complete
unicode engine in the kernel, which seems like bad engineering to me. And the library that's available to programs does not use the same case folding rules as the ones the kernel uses, so you can't predict when filenames will clash.
I'd also like to scrap all charset encodings except UTF-8. Just have
UTF-8 everywhere, much simpler.
NTFS is extremely slow at creating and deleting files, perhaps more than 100 times slower than *nix, maybe it's ACL? I'm not sure. It needs fixing.
* Object formats
.exe and.dll need to be thrown away. Dlls are a particular cause of
suckage and are missing basic features like back linking and lazy
linking and undefined symbols.
Speed up process launch too pls. Win at the moment is two orders of
magnitude slower than linux at launching processes and I don't really
understand why.
Get rid of the distinction between GUI and CLI.exes, there's no point to
it and it just causes pain.
* CLI
I'm not sure about PowerShell, it seems to 'heavy' to me (it needs about 20x
more memory than dash, for example), it's more like perl# than a cli. Make a simple, lightweight scripting
engine to automate stuff and put a nice terminal app on top of it.
A lot of UK housing stock is pretty dismal for insulation. For example, Victorian homes generally have walls which are a single layer of brick with no possibility for cavity insulation, and the original, single-pane sash windows. The house I live in has a maid's room built into the roof and it's just not possible to fit loft insulation either.
Fixing this really requires new build to a good standard. New building regs are coming in 2016 which will require all new homes to be zero carbon. In other words, they will require no energy at all for heating or cooling:
So hopefully we'll see a 100% improvement over a large section of the existing stock. It'll be a very, very long time before a large proportion of housing becomes as good as this, sadly.
On your southern / northern point, CO2 mixes rather evenly throughout the atmosphere in only a few years.
Here's a great animation from NOAA showing global CO2 distribution and putting recent changes in the context of the last million years or so. It takes a few minutes to watch, but it's worth seeing to the end, in my opinion.
There's almost no modelling there, it's just plotting two sets of measurements together.
If you think CO2 is not the cause, you need to find two things: another warming effect that fits the data at least as well as CO2 (and it has to be a huge warming effect that no one's noticed before), plus an equally large cooling effect to cancel out all the heat that we know the CO2 will have added to the atmosphere. This is possible, of course, but not very likely.
My understanding is that there's a delay between a CO2 change and its full consequences of perhaps up to several hundred years.
If atmospheric CO2 rises by 10% (for example), slightly more solar heat is retained by the earth, and this extra retention will cause the global temperature to rise. As the temperature goes up the amount of energy radiated into space will increase until eventually the system find equilibrium again at the new (marginally) higher temperature.
Looking at the ice core record, there seems to be a lag of around 800 years between temperature changes and CO2 changes. That's the time for temperature changes due to orbital variations to trigger large scale CO2 release, not the time for CO2 to warm the atmosphere as is happening now, but it might give an upper bound to the length of time we can expect change to occur over.
You're right, the Mauna Loa CO2 record is localised and only goes back 50 years.
Here's a great animation from NOAA showing global CO2 distribution and putting recent changes in the context of the last million years or so. It takes a few minutes to watch, but it's worth seeing to the end, in my opinion.
You're right, the Mauna Loa CO2 record only goes back 50 years.
Here's a great animation from NOAA showing global CO2 distribution and putting recent changes in the context of the last million years or so. It takes a few minutes to watch, but it's worth seeing to the end, in my opinion.
The problem is very rapid change. If the climate changes very quickly even humans will find it hard to adapt fast enough, never mind the various other species we depend upon directly and indirectly.
If we can see rapid change coming (and it now seems likely that we can) and we can do something to slow or even limit that change, shouldn't we do it? Or at least have a debate about whether we should act or not.
Attacking scientists seems to be shooting the messenger.
I timed the slashdot homepage on an ipad1: 1.5s for something to appear, 5s for the whole thing to finish. Seems fine to me. The BBC homepage takes less than 3s and appears fully-functional.
I agree, I hate the politicisation of science. Seeing bitter, politically-motivated attacks on hard-working scientists is especially sad.
I'd like to see the discussion split into "what's going on and what's likely to happen next" (the domain of science) and "what (if anything) should we do about it?" (the domain of politics and elected government).
Obviously that's CO2 at a particular spot on the planet --- there are plenty of other records though. Here's a great animation from NOAA showing global CO2 distribution and putting recent changes in the context of the last million years or so. It takes a few minutes to watch, but it's worth seeing to the end, in my opinion.
Page 10 has a summary table with some examples of banned (ie. explicit permission required) and OK cookies:
ALLOWED
shopping basket cookies
security cookies (banking, session id, etc.)
load balancing track things
BANNED
analytical cookies (eg. count unique users)
advertising, both first and third party
remembering users between sessions for trivial purposes, eg. display a "welcome back" banner
Ahem, excuse my maths, the annual variation at Mauna Loa is nearer 1% than 10%.
Here's a nice animation from NOAA showing global CO2 distribution and putting recent changes in the context of the last million years or so. It takes a few minutes to watch, but worth seeing to the end, in my opinion.
You can see that global CO2 levels rise fairly evenly, with Antarctica only lagging the Northern Hemisphere by a few years. Over the time scales involved in the ice cores this lag would be invisible. Also note the scale: it's 360 to 390 ppm, so although the colours look dramatic, the differences being shown are mostly less than 10% of the total and roughly equal to the annual variation.
Do you mean the Mauna Loa site? CO2 is measured upwind of vents and samples high, well-mixed air directly off the Pacific. It gives results in very good agreement with CO2 measurements from other sites around the world.
The ice cores cover very long periods of time and atmospheric gasses are well-mixed everywhere over that scale, so the Vostok cores are a good representation of global CO2.
I think you're misreading the graph. As I said, it shows CO2 peaking at about 300 ppm and we are currently at about 400, way way way off the top of the graph. It does not show the current CO2 levels or current temperature since they are so (geologically) recent.
Current CO2 levels are far higher than at any point in the last 8 ice ages. This is outside the range of normal variation.
You're correct that we are currently in an interglacial, and long may it last!
As your link says, we have ice-core data going back up to about 750,000 years. This gives CO2 and temperature readings for the last 8 ice ages. Over this period CO2 has varied between about 180 and 300 ppm.
Currently, CO2 is at about 390 ppm, significantly higher than at any point in at least the last 750,000 years. Since CO2 drives temperature, we can expect global temperatures to rise to higher than at any point in the last 750,000 years.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's a reference to the Winter of Discontent, which I'm old enough to remember well.
This was a wave of strikes triggered by the government's cap on public sector wages in a period of high inflation. From the article above:
(not a maggie fan, just providing some background)
You can type any part of the description as well, you don't need to know the app name.
There's also the traditional category view. Press the win key to get the overview, click on the "Applications" button and you get a big grid of icons showing all the installed programs in alphabetical order. A set of filters down the right let you reduce the list to just "Sound & Video" (for example), or "System Tools".
You can turn min and max back on with tweak-tool. You can also disable dynamic workspaces. Handy!
Your figures are a bit high. The hue is $199 for three bulbs plus bridge, $60 for each extra bulb thereafter. Each bridge can control 50 bulbs, enough for most houses. You don't need an electrician.
It's not cheap, sadly :-( but less than you suggested.
I've made a disco lighting system for my kitchen for 'only' a few hundred, it's been fun. I'm not sure I'd do the whole house though.
No one cares, but here's what I think they should fix. I wrote this ages ago for a mailing list, so sorry about the formatting. And it's just things that annoy me, I'm sure other people would have other ideas. And I've not tried to list the nice things, so it seems one sided.
Since I wrote this, windows does seem to have moved a good way in this direction, so that's nice. It needs to move a bit more though.
I've been thinking a little about what sucks in windows (I've been having to work on it this week) and made a list. I'm sure I've missed or misunderstood lots of things because I don't really understand it :-(
* architecture
Very general: windows is a huge collection of interconnected services that have built up over a period of decades. It's a right old pickle. Everything seems to depend on everything else. This causes two problems that annoy me:
Solution: reorganise stuff in a nice layered structure the way every sane computer does. Don't make dependencies unless it really makes sense, and never, ever make circular ones. Also, sort out the who-owns-the-desktop thing so more than one person can be logged in at once and use that to implement fast user switcing in a non-stupid way.
It sounds like w2k8 has moved a long way in the direction, hoorah!
* API
The win32 API is horrible. I've been fighting CreateProcess() and it's a disaster of race conditions, deadlocks and inflexibility that programmers have to work their way around. Make something nicer and put win32 into a compatibility layer somewhere.
* FS semantics
Gah for not being able to delete open files. They need something like *nix's refcounting thing. There you can delete open files and the delete actually occurs when the last close happens.
Also: needs proper symlinks and mount points and everything should support them. Do something clever about dangling symlinks for extra points! And driver letters must die.
I don't like case-insensitivity. It means you have to have a complete unicode engine in the kernel, which seems like bad engineering to me. And the library that's available to programs does not use the same case folding rules as the ones the kernel uses, so you can't predict when filenames will clash. I'd also like to scrap all charset encodings except UTF-8. Just have UTF-8 everywhere, much simpler.
NTFS is extremely slow at creating and deleting files, perhaps more than 100 times slower than *nix, maybe it's ACL? I'm not sure. It needs fixing.
* Object formats
.exe and .dll need to be thrown away. Dlls are a particular cause of
suckage and are missing basic features like back linking and lazy
linking and undefined symbols.
Speed up process launch too pls. Win at the moment is two orders of magnitude slower than linux at launching processes and I don't really understand why.
Get rid of the distinction between GUI and CLI .exes, there's no point to
it and it just causes pain.
* CLI
I'm not sure about PowerShell, it seems to 'heavy' to me (it needs about 20x more memory than dash, for example), it's more like perl# than a cli. Make a simple, lightweight scripting engine to automate stuff and put a nice terminal app on top of it.
* Desktop
Explorer should be able to ha
A lot of UK housing stock is pretty dismal for insulation. For example, Victorian homes generally have walls which are a single layer of brick with no possibility for cavity insulation, and the original, single-pane sash windows. The house I live in has a maid's room built into the roof and it's just not possible to fit loft insulation either.
Fixing this really requires new build to a good standard. New building regs are coming in 2016 which will require all new homes to be zero carbon. In other words, they will require no energy at all for heating or cooling:
http://www.zerocarbonhub.org/
So hopefully we'll see a 100% improvement over a large section of the existing stock. It'll be a very, very long time before a large proportion of housing becomes as good as this, sadly.
On your southern / northern point, CO2 mixes rather evenly throughout the atmosphere in only a few years.
Here's a great animation from NOAA showing global CO2 distribution and putting recent changes in the context of the last million years or so. It takes a few minutes to watch, but it's worth seeing to the end, in my opinion.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/history.html
Exactly. Look at global temperature for the last 250 years plotted with CO2+volcanos and a simple fit:
http://berkeleyearth.org/images/annual-with-forcing-small.png
There's almost no modelling there, it's just plotting two sets of measurements together.
If you think CO2 is not the cause, you need to find two things: another warming effect that fits the data at least as well as CO2 (and it has to be a huge warming effect that no one's noticed before), plus an equally large cooling effect to cancel out all the heat that we know the CO2 will have added to the atmosphere. This is possible, of course, but not very likely.
My understanding is that there's a delay between a CO2 change and its full consequences of perhaps up to several hundred years.
If atmospheric CO2 rises by 10% (for example), slightly more solar heat is retained by the earth, and this extra retention will cause the global temperature to rise. As the temperature goes up the amount of energy radiated into space will increase until eventually the system find equilibrium again at the new (marginally) higher temperature.
Looking at the ice core record, there seems to be a lag of around 800 years between temperature changes and CO2 changes. That's the time for temperature changes due to orbital variations to trigger large scale CO2 release, not the time for CO2 to warm the atmosphere as is happening now, but it might give an upper bound to the length of time we can expect change to occur over.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Co2-temperature-plot.svg
You're right, the Mauna Loa CO2 record is localised and only goes back 50 years.
Here's a great animation from NOAA showing global CO2 distribution and putting recent changes in the context of the last million years or so. It takes a few minutes to watch, but it's worth seeing to the end, in my opinion.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/history.html
You're right, the Mauna Loa CO2 record only goes back 50 years.
Here's a great animation from NOAA showing global CO2 distribution and putting recent changes in the context of the last million years or so. It takes a few minutes to watch, but it's worth seeing to the end, in my opinion.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/history.html
"I hold far too many opinions to be able to remember the reasons for all of them", as Shaw once said.
The problem is very rapid change. If the climate changes very quickly even humans will find it hard to adapt fast enough, never mind the various other species we depend upon directly and indirectly.
If we can see rapid change coming (and it now seems likely that we can) and we can do something to slow or even limit that change, shouldn't we do it? Or at least have a debate about whether we should act or not.
Attacking scientists seems to be shooting the messenger.
I timed the slashdot homepage on an ipad1: 1.5s for something to appear, 5s for the whole thing to finish. Seems fine to me. The BBC homepage takes less than 3s and appears fully-functional.
Slashdot is horribly broken on mobile, but most other sites that aren't daft work well on an ipad1. It's certainly fine for casual use.
The mobile browsers work OK in that much memory. My ipad1 can browse fairly well and "only" has 256mb of ram.
I agree, I hate the politicisation of science. Seeing bitter, politically-motivated attacks on hard-working scientists is especially sad.
I'd like to see the discussion split into "what's going on and what's likely to happen next" (the domain of science) and "what (if anything) should we do about it?" (the domain of politics and elected government).
One can dream!
The Mauna Loa CO2 record goes back 50 years:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mauna_Loa_Carbon_Dioxide.png
Obviously that's CO2 at a particular spot on the planet --- there are plenty of other records though. Here's a great animation from NOAA showing global CO2 distribution and putting recent changes in the context of the last million years or so. It takes a few minutes to watch, but it's worth seeing to the end, in my opinion.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/history.html
The regulations are not actually as crazy as this story makes them out to be. Here are the latest guidance notes from ICO:
http://www.ico.gov.uk/news/blog/2011/~/media/documents/library/Privacy_and_electronic/Practical_application/guidance_on_the_new_cookies_regulations.ashx (PDF)
Page 10 has a summary table with some examples of banned (ie. explicit permission required) and OK cookies:
MS threatened to cancel OEM's cheap Windows licenses unless they stopped preinstalling Netscape for users. It was nothing to do with bundling IE.
You may be thinking of the media player wars, which were a bit dumberer :(
Ahem, excuse my maths, the annual variation at Mauna Loa is nearer 1% than 10%.
Here's a nice animation from NOAA showing global CO2 distribution and putting recent changes in the context of the last million years or so. It takes a few minutes to watch, but worth seeing to the end, in my opinion.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/history.html
Here's a nice movie from the NASA CO2 satellite:
http://airs.jpl.nasa.gov/news_archive/2010-03-30-CO2-Movie/
You can see that global CO2 levels rise fairly evenly, with Antarctica only lagging the Northern Hemisphere by a few years. Over the time scales involved in the ice cores this lag would be invisible. Also note the scale: it's 360 to 390 ppm, so although the colours look dramatic, the differences being shown are mostly less than 10% of the total and roughly equal to the annual variation.
Do you mean the Mauna Loa site? CO2 is measured upwind of vents and samples high, well-mixed air directly off the Pacific. It gives results in very good agreement with CO2 measurements from other sites around the world.
The ice cores cover very long periods of time and atmospheric gasses are well-mixed everywhere over that scale, so the Vostok cores are a good representation of global CO2.
I think you're misreading the graph. As I said, it shows CO2 peaking at about 300 ppm and we are currently at about 400, way way way off the top of the graph. It does not show the current CO2 levels or current temperature since they are so (geologically) recent.
Current CO2 levels are far higher than at any point in the last 8 ice ages. This is outside the range of normal variation.
You're correct that we are currently in an interglacial, and long may it last!
As your link says, we have ice-core data going back up to about 750,000 years. This gives CO2 and temperature readings for the last 8 ice ages. Over this period CO2 has varied between about 180 and 300 ppm.
Currently, CO2 is at about 390 ppm, significantly higher than at any point in at least the last 750,000 years. Since CO2 drives temperature, we can expect global temperatures to rise to higher than at any point in the last 750,000 years.