I think that biodiesel certainly makes sense in the short term since it can be made from waste cooking oils, animal by-products etc which today are mostly put in dog food or simply sent down the drain - causing more environmental problems. Furthermore, it fits in quite well with current engine technologies and gas distribution infrastructure.
My second comment regards hydrogen production in the future becuase of course there is pretty much no way we could grow enough crops to fuel all our bloody cars with biodiesel so moving to hydrogen produced using renewable (biomass, solar, wind etc) electricity is a good option. As fas fusion goes, it won't be ready for some time (if ever) and it still creates radioactive materials to be disposed of and uses large amounts of water for cooling which could be used, in places with poor water resources, for better things like keeping people alive! So if we spent the $100 billion on solar energy or wind, we could get (at $1/Wp solar and $0.3/Wp wind) about 200GWp installed which is something on the order of 2,000TWh/year - just to get an idea of how much that is, Canada uses about 0.5TWh/year (http://www.statcan.ca/english/Pgdb/prim71.htm).
And finally, climate change IS a problem, current temperature change is not within the natural variability (http://www.ipcc.ch/present/graphics/2001syr/large/05.16.jpg), we are going to lose massive amounts of agricultural land making it more difficult to feed a growing population and we are already seeing more violent weather like heat waves in Europe, forest fires on North American West Coast etc. Not to mention all the animal habitats that will be lost. Anyhow, two final sites for good reading about climate change - http://www.sierraclub.ca/national/programs/atmosph ere-energy/climate-change/ten-myths.html and http://www.ipcc.ch/
On the one hand I think that you are absolutely right and X-Forms will provide a simple way to help developers have their required field checking and all those dreadfully tedious things done for them. However, I am not yet convinced that it will pave the way for truly "rich" client applications.
To date, you can find rich client applications such as Oddpost http://www.oddpost.com/ that use Javascript and other IE *features* (sorry but I'm not sure if Mozilla has this) such as XML HTTP Posting to create a desktop like environment on the web with server calls behind the scenes to collect/store data. It is really a beautiful thing. There are also vendors who develop usable Javascript based components http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=java script+grid+control such as a grid controls, comboboxes (which someone was asking about before) and tree controls. All of which can generally be plugged into your database through the language/platform of choice.
I am not yet convinced that the presence of X-Forms or any other lets-use-XML-for-the-sake-of-XML type technology for web interfaces will make creating usable web applications easier any time soon.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that biodiesel certainly makes sense in the short term since it can be made from waste cooking oils, animal by-products etc which today are mostly put in dog food or simply sent down the drain - causing more environmental problems. Furthermore, it fits in quite well with current engine technologies and gas distribution infrastructure.
e /05.16.jpg), we are going to lose massive amounts of agricultural land making it more difficult to feed a growing population and we are already seeing more violent weather like heat waves in Europe, forest fires on North American West Coast etc. Not to mention all the animal habitats that will be lost. Anyhow, two final sites for good reading about climate change - http://www.sierraclub.ca/national/programs/atmosph ere-energy/climate-change/ten-myths.html and http://www.ipcc.ch/
My second comment regards hydrogen production in the future becuase of course there is pretty much no way we could grow enough crops to fuel all our bloody cars with biodiesel so moving to hydrogen produced using renewable (biomass, solar, wind etc) electricity is a good option. As fas fusion goes, it won't be ready for some time (if ever) and it still creates radioactive materials to be disposed of and uses large amounts of water for cooling which could be used, in places with poor water resources, for better things like keeping people alive! So if we spent the $100 billion on solar energy or wind, we could get (at $1/Wp solar and $0.3/Wp wind) about 200GWp installed which is something on the order of 2,000TWh/year - just to get an idea of how much that is, Canada uses about 0.5TWh/year (http://www.statcan.ca/english/Pgdb/prim71.htm).
And finally, climate change IS a problem, current temperature change is not within the natural variability (http://www.ipcc.ch/present/graphics/2001syr/larg
On the one hand I think that you are absolutely right and X-Forms will provide a simple way to help developers have their required field checking and all those dreadfully tedious things done for them. However, I am not yet convinced that it will pave the way for truly "rich" client applications.
a script+grid+control such as a grid controls, comboboxes (which someone was asking about before) and tree controls. All of which can generally be plugged into your database through the language/platform of choice.
To date, you can find rich client applications such as Oddpost http://www.oddpost.com/ that use Javascript and other IE *features* (sorry but I'm not sure if Mozilla has this) such as XML HTTP Posting to create a desktop like environment on the web with server calls behind the scenes to collect/store data. It is really a beautiful thing. There are also vendors who develop usable Javascript based components http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=jav
I am not yet convinced that the presence of X-Forms or any other lets-use-XML-for-the-sake-of-XML type technology for web interfaces will make creating usable web applications easier any time soon.
I am not sure how X-Forms would replace ActiveX since I don't think ActiveX has anything to do with how IE displays an html form tag???