Ah, true. Though I'm sure most non-evil win devs would like to use it. And all software available via MSI could use it too. Fingers crossed for the win8 app store! I've not seen the small-print yet, hopefully win32 programs that are installed this way have to pass some pretty strict criteria.
MS wouldn't be patching 3rd party software (you're right, that'd be crazy). MS would provide a general framework for maintaining installed software which 3rd party vendors could hook into.
Instead of every package implementing its own updater with its own background service and configuration system, they'd be one updater that everyone used which presented updates to the user in a central place. Instead of 10 badly implemented updaters, you'd have one good one.
This is what all linux distributions do and it works pretty well. I expect the win8 app store will do something like this.
My understanding is that water vapour comes out of the atmosphere too quickly to be a driver of temperature change. When air temperature falls (as it does every night) water turns to dew or rain. Humidity follows temperature, not the other way around.
CO2 stays in the air causing significant warming for decades. You can estimate the degree of warming caused by CO2 very simply:
Imagine a sphere the size of the earth at the earth's distance from the sun with the earth's albedo (average reflectance). What will the surface temperature be due to solar radiation? Do the maths and you get a temperature about 33C lower than that we observe on the earth's surface today. In other words, the earth's atmosphere acts as a blanket trapping heat and raising the temperature by about 33C: the greenhouse effect.
What parts of the atmosphere are responsible for this 33C increase? By far the most important is water. As a gas and in clouds, it is responsible for up to about 90% of the effect. The remaining warming is caused by the so-called greenhouse gasses: CO2, Methane, O3, NO, etc.
If you examine the absorption spectra of these gasses and weight by atmospheric concentration, you'll find about 40% is due to CO2. So 40% of 10% of 33C is around 1C of warming due to atmospheric CO2.
Atmospheric CO2 has gone up by roughly 40% since the industrial revolution, due to fossil fuel burning (we know this because of the carbon isotope ratios we can see in the atmosphere today). So therefore so we would expect about a 0.5C rise in global temperatures due to human CO2 output.
It has a range of annoying artefacts (very oversharp, too much noise reduction, very visible chromatic aberration, etc.) but it's roughly similar to the Nokia. And of course the Nokia has four times as many pixels.
That was my first one as well. It came with 1kb of RAM, but the system took 512 bytes of that so you just had 512 bytes for typing in your BASIC. I upgraded to the high-end model with 12 kb of ram, but I wanted more. I saved and saved and got a 16 kb add-on. It took half the case and cost hundreds of pounds.
(boast) In 1992 I had a Sun workstation by my desk. A Sun 4/330 with 64MB of RAM, a 25 MHz processor and two 1 GB hard drives (from memory). Woah, I was living in the future!
Ruby is Smalltalk meets Perl, really, it's not much like Haskell. You can do some functional things in it, but many nice features of functional languages like Haskell are not present. Currying, ZF-expressions, argument pattern matching,...
I was struck by Matz's comments on Ruby when reading up on why list comprehensions never made it in.
It's too functional so that I'm afraid it would not work well with OO nature of Ruby. Maybe it's matter of notation.
Matz has said several times that he doesn't like functional programming much and has no intention of adding things like ZF-expressions (list comprehensions), operator currying, all that stuff.
You're right that it has nice support for closures.
Non-technical people don't realise that Windows Phone 7 is actually a different platform, they see the name "Windows", and remember what WinMo and WinCE (pronounced wince) was like.
Actually, wp7 is based on wince 6.5. To make wp7 you start with winmo, remove all the GUI stuff, port silverlight, and build a new gui in that. MS were short on time and couldn't make a whole new phone. By reusing as much of winmo as they could (kernel plus drivers plus some userland stuff) they were able to get to market sooner.
Sadly there was a large downside too. First, wince has some severe technical problems. Wince 6.5 has no support for multicore (so all wp7 phones are single core) and no support for more than 512mb ram (so all wp7 phones are limited to 512mb). More seriously. the security model is limited and can't support the kind of application sandboxing you see in Android and (to a lesser extent) in iOS. As a result, there's almost no support for native code either. You have to write all apps in rather slow C#.
This makes porting to the platform very tough. Devs can write the bulk of their projects in C/C++, add a little Java or Obj-C, and hit both Android and iOS. For wp7 they need to rewrite everything in C#, they can't reuse any code at all. For a platform that's launching last into a very competitive market this is a deadly barrier.
I can see wp7 working if the concentrate of a segment, like business perhaps, where they ought to be able to offer better Exchange and Office integration, try to get a foothold and then grow from there. Perhaps if they move to a more modern foundation and offer native, in a few years they can start to make headway in consumer.
The route passes through the Chilterns, an officially designated area of outstanding natural beauty. I'm in favour of the link but some pretty stuff will get trashed.
One of the bullet points for Apollo is support for dual core (current wp is single core only due to a limitation in wince 6), which by coincidence is also a bullet-point for wince 7 (released March 2011). I'd therefore guess they will stay with wince until at least 2013.
I wonder if wince is the thing that's also keeping them from allowing native code. It has rather poor process separation, compared to linux / osx anyway, so they would find supporting it safely difficult.
There's also environmental damage. Herbicide-tolerant crops mean the farmer can spray more and push yields higher, but greater use of herbicides damages diversity in the surrounding countryside. I suppose this is related to your point 4.
gnome3 is keyboard-only. Press the win key, type the first few characters of the application name (or some related term), press enter. Very quick, no mousing required (unless you want to).
Yes, gnome3 uses gobject-introspection. At compile time, your gobject library is scanned (part static scanning, part running the built code and introspecting) and a large lump of xml is written describing the library. It also generates this information in a compressed binary form.
When you include your library in your Python/Ruby/Javascript/whatever program, the interface is generated from this compressed binary description. The interface is generated lazilly as your program runs so there's no startup cost. Because the interface is exactly the C interface (with some simple rules to adapt it to the calling language) everyone can use the same documentation.
It's a nice system, quite a bit better than swig, in my experience.
The tree ring data works really well up to 1960-ish, it correlates to ice core reconstructions, surface temperature record, and so on... all our other proxys. It's only after 1960-ish that it starts to diverge for reasons unknown. If your aim is to estimate global surface temperature changes over the last 1,000 years, tree-ring data pre-1950 is a good source.
Post-1950 we don't need to use a proxy. We have accurate and direct surface temperature records, so it's reasonable to simply use those. When you present the estimate of course you need to make plain your various sources and how and why you combined them. This was done in the original paper.
On (c), I never used a Prada myself but it was apparently a bit different. There was no multitouch, you scrolled with the volume buttons (??), there were physical buttons at the bottom of the screen etc. etc.
It did have a grid of icons that did different things, but that's rather common I think.
Not really the same thing. The global cooling hypothesis was only in a couple of papers and, unlike global warming, never received wide scientific support. It was however widely (and inaccurately) reported in the popular media.
Re:"I hate flash" is the new "I hate Microsoft"
on
Occupy Flash?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
It's pretty awful on OS X as well. Flash 10 needed about 6x more CPU on OS X than Windows and crashed every 10 minutes or so. According to this elderly benchmark anyway.
For 1) I have a keyboard bind to open a new terminal window, and another to maximise vertically.
For 2) I use focus-follow-mouse and just drag over to a different window. On a laptop this is a tiny swipe of the thumb and does not interrupt your typing.
3) was a bit odd at first after spending years in xterm, but it's fine now. I can't remember the last time I had a problem with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, true. Though I'm sure most non-evil win devs would like to use it. And all software available via MSI could use it too. Fingers crossed for the win8 app store! I've not seen the small-print yet, hopefully win32 programs that are installed this way have to pass some pretty strict criteria.
MS wouldn't be patching 3rd party software (you're right, that'd be crazy). MS would provide a general framework for maintaining installed software which 3rd party vendors could hook into.
Instead of every package implementing its own updater with its own background service and configuration system, they'd be one updater that everyone used which presented updates to the user in a central place. Instead of 10 badly implemented updaters, you'd have one good one.
This is what all linux distributions do and it works pretty well. I expect the win8 app store will do something like this.
My understanding is that water vapour comes out of the atmosphere too quickly to be a driver of temperature change. When air temperature falls (as it does every night) water turns to dew or rain. Humidity follows temperature, not the other way around.
CO2 stays in the air causing significant warming for decades. You can estimate the degree of warming caused by CO2 very simply:
Imagine a sphere the size of the earth at the earth's distance from the sun with the earth's albedo (average reflectance). What will the surface temperature be due to solar radiation? Do the maths and you get a temperature about 33C lower than that we observe on the earth's surface today. In other words, the earth's atmosphere acts as a blanket trapping heat and raising the temperature by about 33C: the greenhouse effect.
What parts of the atmosphere are responsible for this 33C increase? By far the most important is water. As a gas and in clouds, it is responsible for up to about 90% of the effect. The remaining warming is caused by the so-called greenhouse gasses: CO2, Methane, O3, NO, etc.
If you examine the absorption spectra of these gasses and weight by atmospheric concentration, you'll find about 40% is due to CO2. So 40% of 10% of 33C is around 1C of warming due to atmospheric CO2.
Atmospheric CO2 has gone up by roughly 40% since the industrial revolution, due to fossil fuel burning (we know this because of the carbon isotope ratios we can see in the atmosphere today). So therefore so we would expect about a 0.5C rise in global temperatures due to human CO2 output.
Yes, though (as I understand it) giffgaff are actually part of O2 and are just a brand for their no-phone SIMs. It's all marketing!
Oh I agree it's no DSLR, but they compare well to a compact camera. Here's a pic from a Canon S90:
http://www.rollthepotato.net/~john/img_0900.jpg
It has a range of annoying artefacts (very oversharp, too much noise reduction, very visible chromatic aberration, etc.) but it's roughly similar to the Nokia. And of course the Nokia has four times as many pixels.
Some sample pics, apparently:
http://cdn.conversations.nokia.com.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Archive2.zip
They look OK, and amazing for a phone.
That was my first one as well. It came with 1kb of RAM, but the system took 512 bytes of that so you just had 512 bytes for typing in your BASIC. I upgraded to the high-end model with 12 kb of ram, but I wanted more. I saved and saved and got a 16 kb add-on. It took half the case and cost hundreds of pounds.
(boast) In 1992 I had a Sun workstation by my desk. A Sun 4/330 with 64MB of RAM, a 25 MHz processor and two 1 GB hard drives (from memory). Woah, I was living in the future!
Ruby is Smalltalk meets Perl, really, it's not much like Haskell. You can do some functional things in it, but many nice features of functional languages like Haskell are not present. Currying, ZF-expressions, argument pattern matching, ...
I was struck by Matz's comments on Ruby when reading up on why list comprehensions never made it in.
http://markmail.org/message/agv5qlyrh2hhncuw (I can't find the original source, annoyingly)
Matz has said several times that he doesn't like functional programming much and has no intention of adding things like ZF-expressions (list comprehensions), operator currying, all that stuff.
You're right that it has nice support for closures.
I know you said to ignore the operator-as-function thing, but it looks so nice in Ruby:
Not that Ruby is very functional, sadly.
Actually, wp7 is based on wince 6.5. To make wp7 you start with winmo, remove all the GUI stuff, port silverlight, and build a new gui in that. MS were short on time and couldn't make a whole new phone. By reusing as much of winmo as they could (kernel plus drivers plus some userland stuff) they were able to get to market sooner.
Sadly there was a large downside too. First, wince has some severe technical problems. Wince 6.5 has no support for multicore (so all wp7 phones are single core) and no support for more than 512mb ram (so all wp7 phones are limited to 512mb). More seriously. the security model is limited and can't support the kind of application sandboxing you see in Android and (to a lesser extent) in iOS. As a result, there's almost no support for native code either. You have to write all apps in rather slow C#.
This makes porting to the platform very tough. Devs can write the bulk of their projects in C/C++, add a little Java or Obj-C, and hit both Android and iOS. For wp7 they need to rewrite everything in C#, they can't reuse any code at all. For a platform that's launching last into a very competitive market this is a deadly barrier.
I can see wp7 working if the concentrate of a segment, like business perhaps, where they ought to be able to offer better Exchange and Office integration, try to get a foothold and then grow from there. Perhaps if they move to a more modern foundation and offer native, in a few years they can start to make headway in consumer.
The route passes through the Chilterns, an officially designated area of outstanding natural beauty. I'm in favour of the link but some pretty stuff will get trashed.
http://blog.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/2011/04/cycling-in-the-chilterns
I don't think Apollo will be on the NT kernel.
One of the bullet points for Apollo is support for dual core (current wp is single core only due to a limitation in wince 6), which by coincidence is also a bullet-point for wince 7 (released March 2011). I'd therefore guess they will stay with wince until at least 2013.
I wonder if wince is the thing that's also keeping them from allowing native code. It has rather poor process separation, compared to linux / osx anyway, so they would find supporting it safely difficult.
There's also environmental damage. Herbicide-tolerant crops mean the farmer can spray more and push yields higher, but greater use of herbicides damages diversity in the surrounding countryside. I suppose this is related to your point 4.
Evince on current Ubuntu remembers its window size, if that's any help.
gnome3 is keyboard-only. Press the win key, type the first few characters of the application name (or some related term), press enter. Very quick, no mousing required (unless you want to).
Yes, gnome3 uses gobject-introspection. At compile time, your gobject library is scanned (part static scanning, part running the built code and introspecting) and a large lump of xml is written describing the library. It also generates this information in a compressed binary form.
When you include your library in your Python/Ruby/Javascript/whatever program, the interface is generated from this compressed binary description. The interface is generated lazilly as your program runs so there's no startup cost. Because the interface is exactly the C interface (with some simple rules to adapt it to the calling language) everyone can use the same documentation.
It's a nice system, quite a bit better than swig, in my experience.
The tree ring data works really well up to 1960-ish, it correlates to ice core reconstructions, surface temperature record, and so on ... all our other proxys. It's only after 1960-ish that it starts to diverge for reasons unknown. If your aim is to estimate global surface temperature changes over the last 1,000 years, tree-ring data pre-1950 is a good source.
Post-1950 we don't need to use a proxy. We have accurate and direct surface temperature records, so it's reasonable to simply use those. When you present the estimate of course you need to make plain your various sources and how and why you combined them. This was done in the original paper.
Google will find many discussions of this, for example: http://www.skepticalscience.com/Mikes-Nature-trick-hide-the-decline.htm
On (c), I never used a Prada myself but it was apparently a bit different. There was no multitouch, you scrolled with the volume buttons (??), there were physical buttons at the bottom of the screen etc. etc.
It did have a grid of icons that did different things, but that's rather common I think.
I'm 46, I remember seeing TV specials about snowball earth. Read the wikipedia article, it's interesting and won't take you long.
Not really the same thing. The global cooling hypothesis was only in a couple of papers and, unlike global warming, never received wide scientific support. It was however widely (and inaccurately) reported in the popular media.
You can read about it on (where else) wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
It's pretty awful on OS X as well. Flash 10 needed about 6x more CPU on OS X than Windows and crashed every 10 minutes or so. According to this elderly benchmark anyway.
http://arstechnica.com/software/news/2008/10/benchmarking-flash-player-10.ars
Gnome3 supports focus-follows-mouse. You can enable it in the advanced settings thing. I also wish it was the default :/
For 1) I have a keyboard bind to open a new terminal window, and another to maximise vertically.
For 2) I use focus-follow-mouse and just drag over to a different window. On a laptop this is a tiny swipe of the thumb and does not interrupt your typing.
3) was a bit odd at first after spending years in xterm, but it's fine now. I can't remember the last time I had a problem with it.
For launching a terminal, you can make a keyboard shortcut. I have win-t, which is very handy.
I think Unity only has two serious problems:
I've switched to gnome-shell and it's pretty nice.