Oddly enough, some climatologists [realclimate.org] don't agree [realclimate.org] with you.
I said that a Venus atmospheric mission has good scientific value. The general circulation, composition, photochemistry, long term variation, are all interesting phenomena. I just think it is a shame the science results, whatever they are, will be hijacked, hyped, filtered, and distorted by the Kyotoist propaganda machine. Despite disclaimers realclimate.org is a mouthpiece for that machine which is desperately seeking political influence.
Does the atmosphere somehow leak away on geological timescales through the Lagrange points somehow? I've got no idea. Does anyone know?
Some gases escape like H and He. Heavier modecules like N2, O2, CO2 do not. This talks about the process. The moon plays absolutely no role in helping earth retain atmosphere.
According to the impactor theory of the moon's origin, the moon's creation was a very improbable event.
I don't see why it is so improbable. Pluto has a much larger moon relative to its size than Earth in Charon, and it orbits in extreme isolation in the outer solar system. Many Kuiper belt objects that may be larger than Pluto also have moons. Saturn/Titan and Neptune/Triton are significant planet/moon pairs. Jupiter has tons of moons. Binary pairs are an extremely stable configuration. Nature likes them.
Perhaps the intent was to insinuate that if we don't Act Soon, we'll end up just like Venus.
Don't you think that is an overreaching and absurd insinuation? Venus atmosphere is 96% CO2. Earth's is 0.0360% Doesn't Venus science have value beyond its political use by global warming enthusiasts?
If all goes well, it could shed important light on climate change here on Earth.
It is difficult to see how. Venus slow rotation rate, massive atmosphere, tiny inclination (-3 deg), and lack of a hydrologic cycle should make the climate very stable. The mission has a lot of merits on its own. Why make tenuous comparisons?
Is it conceivable that the climate there went haywire within human history? Given the current pressure, temperature, and chemical composition of the atmosphere on Venus, is there any chance that any indications at all could have survived of a possible former ecosystem there?
There is no evidence that Venus climate has changed recently. But the planet may undergo extreme resurfacing periodically due to the apparent lack of plate tectonics and high heat flow. The surface may liquify every few 100 Myr. This widespread uniform melting obliterates any geologic signature that precedes it. It also contributes to enormous outgasing of the mantle.
As an Indian...I myself use the Tamil support of KDE, and have long found it superior to that of GNOME
Interesting the Gnome/KDE Flamewar has spread to India. Fanboyism is a fundemental human trait I guess. If you took 2 Linux machines to New Guinea and gave them to the natives you'd find them waring over Gnome and KDE within an hour. I personally think KDE sucks.
Burn fossil fuels, you make things worse. Clean up your act, and you make things worse.
Kyotoists state both the reasonable and ridiculous with equally fanatical conviction. Truth is not their goal but the rejection of modern consumerism. Ask yourself is such people should have influence over global politics and economy.
No, I did read the article and I am still satisfied with everything but my spelling. I don't get distracted by the smoke and mirrors. The reseach proposal is a political troll, not a meritorious poposal of study. So the entire "debate" is artificial. Evolution serves as the perfect vehicle for the secular liberals to pick a fight. Sometimes I think they believe it is "their" theory, rather than a vehicle to promote deeper understanding.
I think SSHRC should come out and state that evolution is a scientific fact and that intelligent design is not.
This is a revealing statement that suggests these social scientists don't understand what theory is. Evolution is a prominent principle of biology that explains much about the succession of fauna. Having said that, it is quite stagnant, has little predictive value, and after 150 years is not formulated mathematically. As a physical scientist, I have never been very impressed. Compare evolution to general relativity, quantum mechanics, classical mechanics or any other theory that has predictive power. Although each is amazingly successful, debate on their deficiencies is not a taboo subject. The bar for their improvement is awesomely high, but no one goes around calling them facts. Simple minded people equate dissatisfaction with the state of evolutionary theory with support for ID, which is not the case.
So it looks like a someone fullfilled their fudiciary duty and decided not to write a $40,000 check to a McGill professor to lavishly sponsor a pointless study. And the controvercy is?
There is no way that the lenght of the day can grow to compensate the reduced (with a sin function) solar radiation. At most, a day can have 24 hours, what is not enough. But, of course, they can produce something, just not as much as tropical areas.
This says otherwise. The lighting conditions would make such a place very interesting. Solar intensity does vary as the cosine of the incidence angle. But remember that the incidence angle must factor in earth's inclination angle of 23 deg. At midsummer at the north pole the sun is surprisingly high in the sky, and stays that way for months.
Modern economics imply that the more variety of people (and natural resources, but that is not the case here) a country have, the less it needs external commerce. That is why the United States have small exports (and imports too). It is just natural to the other developped countries to trade more. And I'm talking about developped countries here, so the rest doesn't apply.
The US is the world leader in aggregate global trade (imports + exports) by far. It is natural for rich countries to want to trade. Throughout history, it is what has made them rich. I will agree that less developed countries attract disproportionate (but fair) levels of investment. I don't mean to criticize trade surpluses achieved by fair means. That is competition. What I do critize are trade surpluses supported by currency manipulation (China) or direct state support.
That is a lie. I remember when that was on the media (worldwide, or at least here at Brazil too), some american "researches" made (very unreliable) simulations and came to this conclusion. Well, they where lying. They where confusing highter temperatures with highter amount of energy comming from the Sun. Since that is a so obvious mistake, I can tell that they where willfuly liyng to us.
That is untestable accusation, even though I am an imperialist yankee gringo pig.
By their calculations, you can expect that crop yelds wil increase on areas that are covered with ice (some of the time and all of it). But it will go down on the hotter areas, since plants don't like hot weather (they do like hight solar radiation, although). Since the areas that are now frozen receive so little solar radiation, they can't yeld so much to compensate (and the area is also not that big). And, yes, I happen to know a bit about the subject.
Solar radiation is not the problem for crop production at the poles. The incidence angle is low, but the length of the day in spring and summer compensate. Given the right conditions polar regions can be productive. The main problem is low ambient temperature.
Also, those other developped countries export more, but they have a smaller population, so that is expected. To think about the american debt, you should only considerate how much they export to the United States. And your country also have a growing fiscal debit (since the current administration), telling us that you are spending less with the military than you used to do at the Cold War doesn't change this fact.
No. Fair trade suggests that inflows and outflows are equal, period. Many developing countries use a cheap labor model in greatly increase employment and placate their populations. They are not maximizing their wealth. The governments of such countries are not comfortable with workers becoming powerful, demanding consumers owning pickup trucks, bass boats, and shotguns, so they discourage imports. The US debt has little to do with the military. That is
Warming means more energy in the system. More energy means more violent weather. The rest of the world will be dealing with either less rain or more. Not neccessarily something conducive to bigger crops.
Warmer equals more violent. That is the thinking that prevails. But energy *differences* drive weather. If you raise the ambient temperature do you enhance spacial differences as well? Does warming decrease air stability? Increase or decrease cloud cover, precipitation, desertification? It is not at all clear.
Agreed but is household consumption, for the most part, kept keen by easy credit and usurious rates? And if personal, conspicuous consumption is driven by easy credit and usurious rates then isn't the American Dream just another historical lie destined to become a nightmare.
The current historically low interest rates are a phenomenon of the last 10 years. As I said the easy credit is the result of large export economies willingness to support it through their purchase of treasuries and their manipulated currencies. Full employment seems to be more important with them that maximal growth. I don't think the American dream is a lie, but I agree the current situation cannot last for ever. The housing market could suffer badly. Asset deflation is a possibility. On the bright side, when rates do rise US exports should improve. In the end it is the US ability to efficiently flow capital to new businesses (read greed!) that sustains our prosperty. The Chinese have a hell of a job ahead to imitate that.
will entrench political and economic control in the hands of fascists.
Political control is very much in the hands or corporatists (democrat and republican), not facists. Corporations must have price and political stability to function best. This best explains the US monetary policy and hard line on terror. In my opinion there is a long cycle between political control of the business elite and labor. What makes it so difficult to dislodge the corporatists today is they provide a high standard of living for many people. To them we are mindless consuming entities sitting slackjawed in front of a big screen TV, credit card at the ready! In return ofcourse they take a disproportionate share of wealth. Also the huge excess of labor in the developing world has reduced the political power of traditional labor in US and Europe considerably. I don't see an end to the current cycle.
These two are not the same. America is one of a few developed countries not to have an economy driven by exports. Almost all of our competitors - Canada, Japan, and especially China run a large trade deficit with us. The US economy is dominated by household consumption and business growth. The large profits made by our partners have to go somewhere. They can invest in overcapacity, or real estate speculation (China doesn't have a functional stock market), or stick the cash in a matress - or they can buy US treasuries. They love 'em! So we in the US get large investment inflows and low interest rates. The fun will end once these exporters realize they are getting ripped off!
America sells protection. Luckily protection frequently breeds violence which calls for protection.
Yep, and a lot of the world needs it. It isn't a big percentage of GDP (
Unfortunately the tax base in America isn't up to the job.
The short term policies driving markets that push pollutants and climatic change will be changed, at best surperficially, because alternatives require recognizing that America is broke. And waking from the American dream will be a nightmare.
Why so pessimistic? The climate will change with or without industrial civilization. We are in an interglacial period. It should be warming. This isn't necessarily bad. In much of the world there will be increased crop yields.
Apple is clearly comfortable that they have a superior platform that will can win more Windows converts. Boot Camp is the first of many Windows integration tools that will allow Windows oriented Intel Mac buyers to function as they evolve into pure Apple customers. Expect virtualization and emulation tools to allow Windows apps to run on Mac OS to follow. It is Apple's turn to embrace, extend, and extinguish.
Great point. Embedded developers need to ask what they want from an OS. Threading? There are several lighweight OS independant packages out there. pt threads is my favorite. Maybe you just need a round robin processing loop. Device driver frameworks for chip peripherals? Posix-like drivers are also easily developed without an OS. If you get to the point where you must run multiple processes and you need interprocess communication or full blown networking and have a larger device (ARM, PPC), then yes reach for Linux or an RTOS.
A related decision is whether to use C or C++. If you are writing programs of a few 1000 lines there is no point in using C++. Your code's organizational requirements simply don't demand it. Many embedded C++ compilers are very buggy compared to their C counter parts. Hopefully your processor is supported by GCC. It is a lot easier to get stdio working (putc, getc) on a new UART than iostreams (streambuf). Try it sometime. STL doesn't make much sense when you are trying to optimize for space and speed.
Check out the link from my previous post. Hansen's testimony is a matter of public record. I am not surprised that realclimate.org is backpedaling. I would be more impressed with these guys if they could model current climate conditions using historical data rather than making extravagent predictions. There's less money in that I guess.
Says something about the degree to which climatology has been politicised, doesn't it? You may not appreciate his credentials but to don't refute his argument.
I didn't say his evidence doesn't count. I am saying be skeptical of extravagent claims, especially when they are self-serving and politically motivated.
Here you will find other legitimate points of view.
"I believe that the extraordinary should be pursued. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." -- Carl Sagan
The media would like to think so. First we have the Time scare piece, then the 60 Minutes Hansen interview/Neo-con hate fest. This guy predicted 10 year warming of 0.8 degrees. We observed 0.15. Before you all put an economic gun to your head, start holding climate scientists to a higher standard or precision and accuracy in their predictions.
I don't know if you are a troll, an X fanboy, or you just plain didn't think it through, but I would suggest in the future that you argue on matters that you actually know something about and have thought through a little more. Thanks for your time.
It is not trolling to express a serious point, even though it challenges your views. The original post suggested that the client server model used by tty programs is not conceptually different from web programs in a cleint server sense. My reply (modded up I might add) suggested that X also followed the same model, and offered a universe of capability over the broken, confused, shity web 2.0 "technologies" we see today. It is a valid and insightful observation. So the web programing fanboys came out of the woodwork to defend the disfunctional status quo. I read much about the minutae of HTTP extensions and justification of slow, uninteractive web pages and bloated frameworks. I don't believe that you can abstract concepts from diverse systems deeply enough to formulate a judgement. Perhaps you don't have experience with many. Get some before your start foaming at the mouth. If you don't like trolling maybe you should do less of it yourself. I hope you find happier reading elsewhere on the site. There is a Simpsons story today that you might like.
Each instance of said application is going to consume massive resources (on the server..again not the X server), and is ABSOLUTELY NOT SCALABLE!
As opposed to spawning a new process or thread to handle the HTTP connection? There really isn't much difference. Your criticism might be valid if the world still connected to the internet through ppp. It is not. Considering the explosive growth in high speed networking I think the X solution has finally come of age.
Compare the HTTP architecture with X. You have a few significantly incompatable browsers that are among the most complex programs ever written. There is no steady definition of what these cesspools of code really are. For all that complexity it is remarkable how little they do! HTTP servers are less complex but must be programmed at an absurdly low level. Get into multi-tiered architectures and you have to wonder if people are designing on acid. Page navigation is a huge problem for programs with dynamic content. Those pages are generated inefficiently again and again. Information is typically passed uncompressed across the wire, which is silly.
X client interfaces (GTK/GDK, Xt/Motif, Qt,...) are amazingly rich and robust. Your programs work perfectly remotely or locally by definition. As a programmer you never see the X protocol, which is as it should be.
Network-wise this is not ideal either as their is a tremendous amount of inefficient bi-directional communication just to click buttons and type in fields.
Bi-directional communication is sort of essential for any network app. Also all significant actions behind those HTTP button clicks are done on the server side to there is no effective difference. HTTP interfaces are very primative of course they are more efficient. Your point is invalid.
Slashdot Mirror
Oddly enough, some climatologists [realclimate.org] don't agree [realclimate.org] with you.
I said that a Venus atmospheric mission has good scientific value. The general circulation, composition, photochemistry, long term variation, are all interesting phenomena. I just think it is a shame the science results, whatever they are, will be hijacked, hyped, filtered, and distorted by the Kyotoist propaganda machine. Despite disclaimers realclimate.org is a mouthpiece for that machine which is desperately seeking political influence.
Does the atmosphere somehow leak away on geological timescales through the Lagrange points somehow? I've got no idea. Does anyone know?
Some gases escape like H and He. Heavier modecules like N2, O2, CO2 do not. This talks about the process. The moon plays absolutely no role in helping earth retain atmosphere.
According to the impactor theory of the moon's origin, the moon's creation was a very improbable event.
I don't see why it is so improbable. Pluto has a much larger moon relative to its size than Earth in Charon, and it orbits in extreme isolation in the outer solar system. Many Kuiper belt objects that may be larger than Pluto also have moons. Saturn/Titan and Neptune/Triton are significant planet/moon pairs. Jupiter has tons of moons. Binary pairs are an extremely stable configuration. Nature likes them.
Perhaps the intent was to insinuate that if we don't Act Soon, we'll end up just like Venus.
Don't you think that is an overreaching and absurd insinuation? Venus atmosphere is 96% CO2. Earth's is 0.0360% Doesn't Venus science have value beyond its political use by global warming enthusiasts?
If all goes well, it could shed important light on climate change here on Earth.
It is difficult to see how. Venus slow rotation rate, massive atmosphere, tiny inclination (-3 deg), and lack of a hydrologic cycle should make the climate very stable. The mission has a lot of merits on its own. Why make tenuous comparisons?
Is it conceivable that the climate there went haywire within human history? Given the current pressure, temperature, and chemical composition of the atmosphere on Venus, is there any chance that any indications at all could have survived of a possible former ecosystem there?
There is no evidence that Venus climate has changed recently. But the planet may undergo extreme resurfacing periodically due to the apparent lack of plate tectonics and high heat flow. The surface may liquify every few 100 Myr. This widespread uniform melting obliterates any geologic signature that precedes it. It also contributes to enormous outgasing of the mantle.
How dare you! vi is a shameful editor. GNU/Emacs uber alles!
As an Indian...I myself use the Tamil support of KDE, and have long found it superior to that of GNOME
Interesting the Gnome/KDE Flamewar has spread to India. Fanboyism is a fundemental human trait I guess. If you took 2 Linux machines to New Guinea and gave them to the natives you'd find them waring over Gnome and KDE within an hour. I personally think KDE sucks.
Burn fossil fuels, you make things worse. Clean up your act, and you make things worse.
Kyotoists state both the reasonable and ridiculous with equally fanatical conviction. Truth is not their goal but the rejection of modern consumerism. Ask yourself is such people should have influence over global politics and economy.
No, I did read the article and I am still satisfied with everything but my spelling. I don't get distracted by the smoke and mirrors. The reseach proposal is a political troll, not a meritorious poposal of study. So the entire "debate" is artificial. Evolution serves as the perfect vehicle for the secular liberals to pick a fight. Sometimes I think they believe it is "their" theory, rather than a vehicle to promote deeper understanding.
I think SSHRC should come out and state that evolution is a scientific fact and that intelligent design is not.
This is a revealing statement that suggests these social scientists don't understand what theory is. Evolution is a prominent principle of biology that explains much about the succession of fauna. Having said that, it is quite stagnant, has little predictive value, and after 150 years is not formulated mathematically. As a physical scientist, I have never been very impressed. Compare evolution to general relativity, quantum mechanics, classical mechanics or any other theory that has predictive power. Although each is amazingly successful, debate on their deficiencies is not a taboo subject. The bar for their improvement is awesomely high, but no one goes around calling them facts. Simple minded people equate dissatisfaction with the state of evolutionary theory with support for ID, which is not the case.
So it looks like a someone fullfilled their fudiciary duty and decided not to write a $40,000 check to a McGill professor to lavishly sponsor a pointless study. And the controvercy is?
There is no way that the lenght of the day can grow to compensate the reduced (with a sin function) solar radiation. At most, a day can have 24 hours, what is not enough. But, of course, they can produce something, just not as much as tropical areas.
This says otherwise. The lighting conditions would make such a place very interesting. Solar intensity does vary as the cosine of the incidence angle. But remember that the incidence angle must factor in earth's inclination angle of 23 deg. At midsummer at the north pole the sun is surprisingly high in the sky, and stays that way for months.
Modern economics imply that the more variety of people (and natural resources, but that is not the case here) a country have, the less it needs external commerce. That is why the United States have small exports (and imports too). It is just natural to the other developped countries to trade more. And I'm talking about developped countries here, so the rest doesn't apply.
The US is the world leader in aggregate global trade (imports + exports) by far. It is natural for rich countries to want to trade. Throughout history, it is what has made them rich. I will agree that less developed countries attract disproportionate (but fair) levels of investment. I don't mean to criticize trade surpluses achieved by fair means. That is competition. What I do critize are trade surpluses supported by currency manipulation (China) or direct state support.
That is a lie. I remember when that was on the media (worldwide, or at least here at Brazil too), some american "researches" made (very unreliable) simulations and came to this conclusion. Well, they where lying. They where confusing highter temperatures with highter amount of energy comming from the Sun. Since that is a so obvious mistake, I can tell that they where willfuly liyng to us.
That is untestable accusation, even though I am an imperialist yankee gringo pig.
By their calculations, you can expect that crop yelds wil increase on areas that are covered with ice (some of the time and all of it). But it will go down on the hotter areas, since plants don't like hot weather (they do like hight solar radiation, although). Since the areas that are now frozen receive so little solar radiation, they can't yeld so much to compensate (and the area is also not that big). And, yes, I happen to know a bit about the subject.
Solar radiation is not the problem for crop production at the poles. The incidence angle is low, but the length of the day in spring and summer compensate. Given the right conditions polar regions can be productive. The main problem is low ambient temperature.
Also, those other developped countries export more, but they have a smaller population, so that is expected. To think about the american debt, you should only considerate how much they export to the United States. And your country also have a growing fiscal debit (since the current administration), telling us that you are spending less with the military than you used to do at the Cold War doesn't change this fact.
No. Fair trade suggests that inflows and outflows are equal, period. Many developing countries use a cheap labor model in greatly increase employment and placate their populations. They are not maximizing their wealth. The governments of such countries are not comfortable with workers becoming powerful, demanding consumers owning pickup trucks, bass boats, and shotguns, so they discourage imports. The US debt has little to do with the military. That is
Warming means more energy in the system. More energy means more violent weather. The rest of the world will be dealing with either less rain or more. Not neccessarily something conducive to bigger crops.
Warmer equals more violent. That is the thinking that prevails. But energy *differences* drive weather. If you raise the ambient temperature do you enhance spacial differences as well? Does warming decrease air stability? Increase or decrease cloud cover, precipitation, desertification? It is not at all clear.
Agreed but is household consumption, for the most part, kept keen by easy credit and usurious rates? And if personal, conspicuous consumption is driven by easy credit and usurious rates then isn't the American Dream just another historical lie destined to become a nightmare.
The current historically low interest rates are a phenomenon of the last 10 years. As I said the easy credit is the result of large export economies willingness to support it through their purchase of treasuries and their manipulated currencies. Full employment seems to be more important with them that maximal growth. I don't think the American dream is a lie, but I agree the current situation cannot last for ever. The housing market could suffer badly. Asset deflation is a possibility. On the bright side, when rates do rise US exports should improve. In the end it is the US ability to efficiently flow capital to new businesses (read greed!) that sustains our prosperty. The Chinese have a hell of a job ahead to imitate that.
will entrench political and economic control in the hands of fascists.
Political control is very much in the hands or corporatists (democrat and republican), not facists. Corporations must have price and political stability to function best. This best explains the US monetary policy and hard line on terror. In my opinion there is a long cycle between political control of the business elite and labor. What makes it so difficult to dislodge the corporatists today is they provide a high standard of living for many people. To them we are mindless consuming entities sitting slackjawed in front of a big screen TV, credit card at the ready! In return ofcourse they take a disproportionate share of wealth. Also the huge excess of labor in the developing world has reduced the political power of traditional labor in US and Europe considerably. I don't see an end to the current cycle.
America is broke. America is deeply in debt.
These two are not the same. America is one of a few developed countries not to have an economy driven by exports. Almost all of our competitors - Canada, Japan, and especially China run a large trade deficit with us. The US economy is dominated by household consumption and business growth. The large profits made by our partners have to go somewhere. They can invest in overcapacity, or real estate speculation (China doesn't have a functional stock market), or stick the cash in a matress - or they can buy US treasuries. They love 'em! So we in the US get large investment inflows and low interest rates. The fun will end once these exporters realize they are getting ripped off!
America sells protection. Luckily protection frequently breeds violence which calls for protection.
Yep, and a lot of the world needs it. It isn't a big percentage of GDP (
Unfortunately the tax base in America isn't up to the job.
This suggests otherwise.
The short term policies driving markets that push pollutants and climatic change will be changed, at best surperficially, because alternatives require recognizing that America is broke. And waking from the American dream will be a nightmare.
Why so pessimistic? The climate will change with or without industrial civilization. We are in an interglacial period. It should be warming. This isn't necessarily bad. In much of the world there will be increased crop yields.
Apple is clearly comfortable that they have a superior platform that will can win more Windows converts. Boot Camp is the first of many Windows integration tools that will allow Windows oriented Intel Mac buyers to function as they evolve into pure Apple customers. Expect virtualization and emulation tools to allow Windows apps to run on Mac OS to follow. It is Apple's turn to embrace, extend, and extinguish.
Great point. Embedded developers need to ask what they want from an OS. Threading? There are several lighweight OS independant packages out there. pt threads is my favorite. Maybe you just need a round robin processing loop. Device driver frameworks for chip peripherals? Posix-like drivers are also easily developed without an OS. If you get to the point where you must run multiple processes and you need interprocess communication or full blown networking and have a larger device (ARM, PPC), then yes reach for Linux or an RTOS.
A related decision is whether to use C or C++. If you are writing programs of a few 1000 lines there is no point in using C++. Your code's organizational requirements simply don't demand it. Many embedded C++ compilers are very buggy compared to their C counter parts. Hopefully your processor is supported by GCC. It is a lot easier to get stdio working (putc, getc) on a new UART than iostreams (streambuf). Try it sometime. STL doesn't make much sense when you are trying to optimize for space and speed.
Check out the link from my previous post. Hansen's testimony is a matter of public record. I am not surprised that realclimate.org is backpedaling. I would be more impressed with these guys if they could model current climate conditions using historical data rather than making extravagent predictions. There's less money in that I guess.
Yes, his scientific credentials are impeccable.
Says something about the degree to which climatology has been politicised, doesn't it? You may not appreciate his credentials but to don't refute his argument.
Has some interesting commentary about this madness.
I didn't say his evidence doesn't count. I am saying be skeptical of extravagent claims, especially when they are self-serving and politically motivated.
Here you will find other legitimate points of view.
"I believe that the extraordinary should be pursued. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." -- Carl Sagan
Americans Gearing up to Fight Global Warming
The media would like to think so. First we have the Time scare piece, then the 60 Minutes Hansen interview/Neo-con hate fest. This guy predicted 10 year warming of 0.8 degrees. We observed 0.15. Before you all put an economic gun to your head, start holding climate scientists to a higher standard or precision and accuracy in their predictions.
I don't know if you are a troll, an X fanboy, or you just plain didn't think it through, but I would suggest in the future that you argue on matters that you actually know something about and have thought through a little more. Thanks for your time.
It is not trolling to express a serious point, even though it challenges your views. The original post suggested that the client server model used by tty programs is not conceptually different from web programs in a cleint server sense. My reply (modded up I might add) suggested that X also followed the same model, and offered a universe of capability over the broken, confused, shity web 2.0 "technologies" we see today. It is a valid and insightful observation. So the web programing fanboys came out of the woodwork to defend the disfunctional status quo. I read much about the minutae of HTTP extensions and justification of slow, uninteractive web pages and bloated frameworks. I don't believe that you can abstract concepts from diverse systems deeply enough to formulate a judgement. Perhaps you don't have experience with many. Get some before your start foaming at the mouth. If you don't like trolling maybe you should do less of it yourself. I hope you find happier reading elsewhere on the site. There is a Simpsons story today that you might like.
Well yes it would be silly if it were true. HTTP has compression and caching built in. You don't seem very familiar with HTTP at all.
You argue like a North Korean arms negotiator - vigorously from a position of weakness.
Each instance of said application is going to consume massive resources (on the server..again not the X server), and is ABSOLUTELY NOT SCALABLE!
As opposed to spawning a new process or thread to handle the HTTP connection? There really isn't much difference. Your criticism might be valid if the world still connected to the internet through ppp. It is not. Considering the explosive growth in high speed networking I think the X solution has finally come of age.
Compare the HTTP architecture with X. You have a few significantly incompatable browsers that are among the most complex programs ever written. There is no steady definition of what these cesspools of code really are. For all that complexity it is remarkable how little they do! HTTP servers are less complex but must be programmed at an absurdly low level. Get into multi-tiered architectures and you have to wonder if people are designing on acid. Page navigation is a huge problem for programs with dynamic content. Those pages are generated inefficiently again and again. Information is typically passed uncompressed across the wire, which is silly.
X client interfaces (GTK/GDK, Xt/Motif, Qt, ...) are amazingly rich and robust. Your programs work perfectly remotely or locally by definition. As a programmer you never see the X protocol, which is as it should be.
Network-wise this is not ideal either as their is a tremendous amount of inefficient bi-directional communication just to click buttons and type in fields.
Bi-directional communication is sort of essential for any network app. Also all significant actions behind those HTTP button clicks are done on the server side to there is no effective difference. HTTP interfaces are very primative of course they are more efficient. Your point is invalid.