We're staying with relatives on a farm south of Chicago. All the AT&T phones lost their ability to dial out, yet they could receive incoming calls. Our T-Mobile phones were fine.
You're right, this is a case of corporate power struggles trumping customer service, as any of these phones should automatically fail over to another GSM network. In an emergency, dialing out is essential.
The $500 PC discussed in the summary only has 512 megabytes of RAM. That won't work with Vista which runs like a snail through molasses, but is it enough to run "SUSE" Linux? Or will that be running slow too?
Apparently you've never enjoyed realistic street travel in a crowded major city such as midtown New York or central London, where 28 mph would be pretty optimistic and, on some streets, illegal.
They're plenty fast enough for high-density urban surface street travel, and in India I've seen as many as 10 people crammed into one, traveling on rural highways.
I'm puzzled by the KLM-Air France connection, although I suppose these would make fine runabouts for airport workers. Sort of like golf carts.
On another note...
Most of the comments I'm reading here completely miss the point of the compressed air, which is not a carbon-neutral fuel source but essentially just the equivalent of a wind-up spring. That lets the vehicle be powered by any energy source, depending on how the air is compressed. You get to carbon-neutral by using some non-petroleum power to compress the air, such as nuclear-generated electrical energy.
Electric cars work the same way, but I have to wonder about the environmental impact of disposal of the batteries, which do wear out.
TFA misses a major misstep. Microsoft allowed Vista to be shipped on hardware that just wasn't up to the task. Vista is unusable with less than a gig of memory, but chain stores were flooded with laptops equipped with "only" 512MB. This gave new users a terrible experience. "First boot" of a new laptop took half an hour. No application, not even Solitaire, would run without freezing.
Two of my family members had Vista laptops... for a few hours, anyway, until I installed Ubuntu. Performance problems all went away after that.
TFA, which of course no one actually reads here, begins with this claim:
Admittedly, you'd have to be pretty dumb to try to use your cell phone as a modem for browsing the internet.
Why? Why not?
The problem here is NOT with the user. The problem is with a global telecom Frankensystem that's stitched together out of the parts of dead and dying old-world PTTs and monopolies and oligopolies.
I have a T-Mobile USA account that gives me unlimited GPRS/Edge to my Nokia phone. I can connect my Nokia N800 or my Macbook via bluetooth. I can roam anywhere in the United States, on any US-based GSM network, for no extra charge. Yeah, Wi-fi is better/faster, when I can get it, but GPRS goes a whole lot more places.
If I connect to a "foreign" network -- even if it's a "foreign" T-Mobile network, as in Europe -- I'll have to sell my kids on Ebay to cover the bill.
I'm going to India next week. I'll have to go into my phone's configuration and disable Bluetooth, lest I accidentally use the phone network to check my email.
There is no technological reason for this. It's not related to any legitimate cost--of-service issue.
It's simply "because they can." It's part of the whole pattern of human idiocy, carving the globe up into territories, pointing guns at one another, demanding tribute and committing extortion, that has held humanity back throughout all of time.
The extraordinary thing about the Internet that has enabled it to transform human communication is the free-sharing pattern that was established back in the days when Jon Postel could keep all the DNS details in his head. Open peering exchanges and flat-rate service let us all interact across vast distances without being fleeced by digital highwaymen. Yeah, it's all a bit naive and hippie-dippy, if your worldview is that of a corporate predator, but it works.
The Internet is increasingly falling into the hands of those predators, people who want to charge and surcharge and double-charge... because they can. Because they're not driven by an interest in technology and a desire to create a great transformative system, but rather the old hunger for confiscation and looting.
Absolutely wrong. It's unfortunate that people who make things up get modded up on Slashdot.
Liberty Media is a TV company. It has nothing to do with the Tribune Company, which owns the Los Angeles Times. The Tribune Company was taken private in a buyout led by Sam Zell, a real estate entrepreneur.
The Times has not "fired most of the staff." It has cut about 20 percent of its news staff. That's less than its circulation decline from 983,727 in 2004 to 773,884 in the most recent reports. It still has plenty of good people on its payroll.
The new publisher is Eddy Hartenstein, who is not from the newspaper business. He's the former CEO of DirecTV.
I have an image of a Radio Craft cover from that era that I frequently use when I'm speaking at journalism conferences.
It shows a guy who looks like Bob (from the Church of the Subgenius) collecting a fax paper from a radio device.
The point, of course, is that radio unfolded on a completely different path. Cars are not horseless carriages. Websites shouldn't be "online newspapers." And that sort of thing.
In the late 1990s, I attended a future scenario-planning workshop with a bunch of newspaper folks. We all broke up into groups to brainstorm products. One of the other groups -- not MY group! -- came up with a great idea: We'll deliver fax newspapers, over the Internet. It was 1939, all over again.
William Gibson said the future is already here; it's just unevenly distributed. That's true. But it's also true that when it's here, most of us can't see it, because we're so desperately trying to fit it into a framework from our own past.
Newspapers are not going bankrupt. They just have to refocus.
It's not that simple. A few big newspapers are losing lots of money, millions of dollars a month. But most smaller newspapers continue to make money with operating margins that look good by most traditional business standards.
Newspaper operating margins traditionally have run between 10 and 45 percent of gross revenues (yes, really). A margin of 10 percent is just fine, unless you borrowed money under an assumption of 25. Then you're in big trouble. That is the core of the problem facing newspaper companies today.
If you bought stock in a publicly held newspaper company and assumed you'd retire on the earnings, you can forget about it. The McClatchy Company, which bought Knight-Ridder, was worth over $74 a share about three years ago. Today it's worth less than $4. Shareholders are abandoning newspaper stocks. Why? Loans and bonds come before shareholders. A company with a lot of debt and a suddenly sinking line of business is one that shareholders quickly abandon, especially if the news is full of chatter about how the Internet is destroying its business model.
If things get bad enough, a company could go into bankruptcy -- leaving shareholders with nothing -- even while it's still making a profit on regular operations. Debt service can kill you.
The Internet really is changing the world, but that's not the biggest reason U.S. newspaper companies are hurting right now. It's the economy. Local advertisers, which are the big sources of revenue, are cutting back. Employment ads, real estate ads, used-car ads are suddenly way down.
So what's unfolding right now is largely an ownership crisis. In the long term, smearing ink on paper is a bad idea, the Internet is a better way to distribute news and information, and old business models have been disintegrated. All that stuff is true. But the crisis right now is one of ownership and finance, not continued operation.
And I will not be surprised to see one or more bankruptcies in the next year.
It's true that Viewtron was long before the Web, but it very much affected the way newspaper companies looked at new technology.
Knight-Ridder invested more than $50 million in Viewtron over six years and got nothing back. The money just went away. Gone forever. They could have bought a couple of mid-size daily newspapers at that price and had a solid rate of return.
Memories of Viewtron fed a lot of fear in the 1993-1997 era. That's actually when U.S. newspapers blew their opportunities to be leaders in what became the modern Web. Nobody was willing to place a really big bet. Nobody wanted to flush $50 million down the toilet. So newspapers got all tangled up in complicated, unworkable cooperative deals like New Century Network.
And when the dotbubble burst in 2001, people could say "see, I told you so!"
Life moves on. Suddenly everything changes, and big companies are caught napping.
So there you have it. Newspapers were among the pioneers in the online space, pushing content onto CompuServe and The Source, publishing on Prodigy, building entire national networks like Viewtron. Roll ahead a couple of decades and they're being reviled as a worst-case example of an industry caught sleeping at the switch.
Are we sure this isn't yet another case of another clueless journalist not doing a damn bit of research, just going to Google Maps and typing Georgia? Guess what comes up when you do that? Yep, good 'ol Georgia, USA.
Yes. It's also a case of another clueless Anonymous Coward posting without following the links.
Pages whose URL begins "http://afp.google.com/" are hosted on Google's servers, built by Google from the Agence France-Presse NewsML feed.
Google adds its own maps.
Proper locative tagging should make this impossible.
NITF, which is the text markup standard assumed by NewsML, supports ISO country codes in location tags, but AFP may not have used them. I don't know; I don't have access to an AFP feed. It's common for wire services (and their customers) to underutilize the capabilities of the XML standards.
In any case, either Google has corrected the error or subsequent versions of the story contained enough information for Google's algorithms not to repeat the error.
You missed a few steps. Mosaic wasn't the first, not by a long shot.
Mosaic came along a couple of years after the first CERN Web browser and originally was for Unix systems. Mosaic was created at the University of Illinois with funding from Al Gore's legislation.
By the time Mosaic became available for Windows, there were several alternatives on multiple operating systems, such as the original CERN browser, Lynx (text-mode from the University of Kansas), Cello (on Windows, from the Cornell Law School) and Viola (on Windows, from a UC-Berkeley student).
All of these were developed in academic research settings, not by commercial enterprises. Sometimes the source code was distributed, sometimes it wasn't. Sometimes there were licenses permitting derivative works, sometimes there weren't.
In early 1994 I contacted NCSA about licensing the Mosaic Windows source code for a newspaper online project I was working on. The price I was quoted was $50,000 for the source code and rights to create derivative works.
NCSA transferred the Mosaic technology and rights to a local firm, Spyglass, which marketed "Spyglass Mosaic" with little success.
Several years after the arrival of Mosaic (and Cello and Viola), Microsoft finally figured out that its proprietary Blackbird online technology wasn't going to survive the growth of the open Web. It then licensed Mosaic from Spyglass and used it as the basis for Internet Explorer.
The right way to conduct such a test would be to pull a random low-end, Vista-certified PC from the shelf at Wal-Mart or Best Buy and then see what happens, starting with the unboxing process.
One of the many ways in which Microsoft aimed a BFG9000 at its own feet was certifying hardware incapable of running Vista. Hundreds of thousands of laptops were shipped with 512MB of memory. "First run" on such a system can take up to 45 minutes as Vista actually has to install itself first. Then the machine is so crippled by lack of RAM that even running Solitaire is interrupted by wild disk activity accompanied by random lockups of the user interface.
If you want to run Vista, you need to spend the price of an Macintosh on the hardware. And if you're going to do that, you might as well get a Mac in the first place.
There's nothing wrong with those half-gig laptops, by the way. They're great when running Ubuntu.
Linux kernel... check. Touchscreen interface... check. Firefox... Gecko-based browser, so check. Skype... check. Also all the other IM protocols. Wifi... check. Also Bluetooth to my EDGE phone. Headphones, mike, camera... check. Google Gears... still waiting. But I have abiword. About $100 over the target price, but not bad. http://www.nseries.com/products/n800/#l=products,n800
I'd like a bigger touchscreen, but then it wouldn't fit in my pocket.
Drupal 6 is absolutely unsupported by the rest of the community so far,
We are continuing to base our site development work on Drupal 5 at this point because a couple of key modules aren't ready for 6.
But there are more than 700 Drupal contributed modules with released versions for Drupal 6, and that's far from "absolutely unsupported."
The biggest barrier to Drupal 6 implementation has been the Views module, which many of us regard as a requirement. The developer chose to undertake a complete rethink/rewrite rather than porting the existing version. Views 2 is now at Release Candidate status. Everything will be better in the morning.
Contrib authors are encouraged, but not required, to follow it. The good ones do.
The Drupal Coder module does a very good job of nagging at you until you get the formatting right, and also helps with code migration and updating when the API changes. And it finds some common bonehead mistakes that can create security issues.
Adhering to a standard doesn't have to be painful. Using a properly configured text editor helps. There is good support for Drupal standards and conventions in OpenKomodo and the commercial Komodo IDE, as well as some other editors.
I always thought the marker for material being quoted as it was spoken or written was [sic].
In printing, the word "stet" has, for generations, been used to indicate matter that should be allowed to stand in its original form, overriding any blue-pencil changes introduced by another editor.
Since hardly anybody actually edits on paper any more, I doubt that the term is taught these days. Similarly, there's no reason to teach copyfitting, headline counting, or strange marks added to penciled copy above the lower-case n and below the lower-case u.
Skype for Linux is available as a native app, prepackaged for all the popular desktop distributions, as well as in a Maemo/ARM version for the Nokia Internet Tablet.
It's not unstable. It works fine. I've used it to call home while traveling all over the world.
I run Skype because I can reach the people I want to talk with. Ekiga is useless to me. I can't track down everybody I know and force them to switch, even if I wanted to dig through the bad documentation and figure out how to get it working with a SIP provider. The whole "free SIP" landscape is a real mess. Skype just works.
"2) During that previous warm period europe did really really really well."
This is remarkably naive. The same warm period worked utter devastation in other parts of the world. We live in a globalized economy. Unless you intend to live like a 12th-century serf, you might want to consider the point of origin of your gasoline, clothing, computer equipment and much of what you buy at the supermarket. We live in a globalized economy.
"The debit side is appalling: widespread drought, catastrophic rainfall, toppled dynasties, ruined civilizations. Abandoned Maya temples in the Yucatan and the desolation of Angkor Wat, supreme achievement of the Khmer empire, bear witness to climatic change against which royal power and priestly magic proved impotent."
Slashdot Mirror
We're staying with relatives on a farm south of Chicago. All the AT&T phones lost their ability to dial out, yet they could receive incoming calls. Our T-Mobile phones were fine.
You're right, this is a case of corporate power struggles trumping customer service, as any of these phones should automatically fail over to another GSM network. In an emergency, dialing out is essential.
I use Mollom because of its excellent integration with Drupal. It's free for up to 100 legitimate posts per day, 30 euros/month after that.
It works very well for stopping spambots without annoying real humans (which a plain captcha will do).
Human spammers still slip through, but when you delete their work, it's fed back to the Mollom database, protecting you and others from repeats.
curl http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4300/4300-8.txt >/dev/your/new/toy
The $500 PC discussed in the summary only has 512 megabytes of RAM. That won't work with Vista which runs like a snail through molasses, but is it enough to run "SUSE" Linux? Or will that be running slow too?
You must be new here.
China Daily's report is dated 2006.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2006-07/07/content_636244.htm
Most big cities aren't in North America.
In fact, in a list of the 50 biggest cities in the world, the only ones in North America are Mexico City, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Toronto.
Portland and Seattle are nice places but they don't even rank in the top 100 in terms of population, and certainly not in density.
The American pattern of suburban living and 40-minute freeway commuting is not at all representative of the global market, which is much, much bigger.
Apparently you've never enjoyed realistic street travel in a crowded major city such as midtown New York or central London, where 28 mph would be pretty optimistic and, on some streets, illegal.
The AirPod looks oddly like the auto-rickshaws used in Delhi, or the tuk-tuk of Bangkok. These devices generally are powered by internal-combustion engines that burn CNG (compressed natural gas).
They're plenty fast enough for high-density urban surface street travel, and in India I've seen as many as 10 people crammed into one, traveling on rural highways.
I'm puzzled by the KLM-Air France connection, although I suppose these would make fine runabouts for airport workers. Sort of like golf carts.
On another note ...
Most of the comments I'm reading here completely miss the point of the compressed air, which is not a carbon-neutral fuel source but essentially just the equivalent of a wind-up spring. That lets the vehicle be powered by any energy source, depending on how the air is compressed. You get to carbon-neutral by using some non-petroleum power to compress the air, such as nuclear-generated electrical energy.
Electric cars work the same way, but I have to wonder about the environmental impact of disposal of the batteries, which do wear out.
TFA misses a major misstep. Microsoft allowed Vista to be shipped on hardware that just wasn't up to the task. Vista is unusable with less than a gig of memory, but chain stores were flooded with laptops equipped with "only" 512MB. This gave new users a terrible experience. "First boot" of a new laptop took half an hour. No application, not even Solitaire, would run without freezing.
Two of my family members had Vista laptops ... for a few hours, anyway, until I installed Ubuntu. Performance problems all went away after that.
TFA, which of course no one actually reads here, begins with this claim:
Why? Why not?
The problem here is NOT with the user. The problem is with a global telecom Frankensystem that's stitched together out of the parts of dead and dying old-world PTTs and monopolies and oligopolies.
I have a T-Mobile USA account that gives me unlimited GPRS/Edge to my Nokia phone. I can connect my Nokia N800 or my Macbook via bluetooth. I can roam anywhere in the United States, on any US-based GSM network, for no extra charge. Yeah, Wi-fi is better/faster, when I can get it, but GPRS goes a whole lot more places.
If I connect to a "foreign" network -- even if it's a "foreign" T-Mobile network, as in Europe -- I'll have to sell my kids on Ebay to cover the bill.
I'm going to India next week. I'll have to go into my phone's configuration and disable Bluetooth, lest I accidentally use the phone network to check my email.
There is no technological reason for this. It's not related to any legitimate cost--of-service issue.
It's simply "because they can." It's part of the whole pattern of human idiocy, carving the globe up into territories, pointing guns at one another, demanding tribute and committing extortion, that has held humanity back throughout all of time.
The extraordinary thing about the Internet that has enabled it to transform human communication is the free-sharing pattern that was established back in the days when Jon Postel could keep all the DNS details in his head. Open peering exchanges and flat-rate service let us all interact across vast distances without being fleeced by digital highwaymen. Yeah, it's all a bit naive and hippie-dippy, if your worldview is that of a corporate predator, but it works.
The Internet is increasingly falling into the hands of those predators, people who want to charge and surcharge and double-charge ... because they can. Because they're not driven by an interest in technology and a desire to create a great transformative system, but rather the old hunger for confiscation and looting.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nTX-oJUCaU
"Ted Stevens endorses Palin for governor"
I know I could not light my fire with my laptop.
Apparently you don't have a Sony battery.
Absolutely wrong. It's unfortunate that people who make things up get modded up on Slashdot.
Liberty Media is a TV company. It has nothing to do with the Tribune Company, which owns the Los Angeles Times. The Tribune Company was taken private in a buyout led by Sam Zell, a real estate entrepreneur.
The Times has not "fired most of the staff." It has cut about 20 percent of its news staff. That's less than its circulation decline from 983,727 in 2004 to 773,884 in the most recent reports. It still has plenty of good people on its payroll.
The new publisher is Eddy Hartenstein, who is not from the newspaper business. He's the former CEO of DirecTV.
That's a great link!
I have an image of a Radio Craft cover from that era that I frequently use when I'm speaking at journalism conferences.
It shows a guy who looks like Bob (from the Church of the Subgenius) collecting a fax paper from a radio device.
The point, of course, is that radio unfolded on a completely different path. Cars are not horseless carriages. Websites shouldn't be "online newspapers." And that sort of thing.
In the late 1990s, I attended a future scenario-planning workshop with a bunch of newspaper folks. We all broke up into groups to brainstorm products. One of the other groups -- not MY group! -- came up with a great idea: We'll deliver fax newspapers, over the Internet. It was 1939, all over again.
William Gibson said the future is already here; it's just unevenly distributed. That's true. But it's also true that when it's here, most of us can't see it, because we're so desperately trying to fit it into a framework from our own past.
Newspapers are not going bankrupt. They just have to refocus.
It's not that simple. A few big newspapers are losing lots of money, millions of dollars a month. But most smaller newspapers continue to make money with operating margins that look good by most traditional business standards.
Newspaper operating margins traditionally have run between 10 and 45 percent of gross revenues (yes, really). A margin of 10 percent is just fine, unless you borrowed money under an assumption of 25. Then you're in big trouble. That is the core of the problem facing newspaper companies today.
If you bought stock in a publicly held newspaper company and assumed you'd retire on the earnings, you can forget about it. The McClatchy Company, which bought Knight-Ridder, was worth over $74 a share about three years ago. Today it's worth less than $4. Shareholders are abandoning newspaper stocks. Why? Loans and bonds come before shareholders. A company with a lot of debt and a suddenly sinking line of business is one that shareholders quickly abandon, especially if the news is full of chatter about how the Internet is destroying its business model.
If things get bad enough, a company could go into bankruptcy -- leaving shareholders with nothing -- even while it's still making a profit on regular operations. Debt service can kill you.
The Internet really is changing the world, but that's not the biggest reason U.S. newspaper companies are hurting right now. It's the economy. Local advertisers, which are the big sources of revenue, are cutting back. Employment ads, real estate ads, used-car ads are suddenly way down.
So what's unfolding right now is largely an ownership crisis. In the long term, smearing ink on paper is a bad idea, the Internet is a better way to distribute news and information, and old business models have been disintegrated. All that stuff is true. But the crisis right now is one of ownership and finance, not continued operation.
And I will not be surprised to see one or more bankruptcies in the next year.
It's true that Viewtron was long before the Web, but it very much affected the way newspaper companies looked at new technology.
Knight-Ridder invested more than $50 million in Viewtron over six years and got nothing back. The money just went away. Gone forever. They could have bought a couple of mid-size daily newspapers at that price and had a solid rate of return.
Memories of Viewtron fed a lot of fear in the 1993-1997 era. That's actually when U.S. newspapers blew their opportunities to be leaders in what became the modern Web. Nobody was willing to place a really big bet. Nobody wanted to flush $50 million down the toilet. So newspapers got all tangled up in complicated, unworkable cooperative deals like New Century Network.
And when the dotbubble burst in 2001, people could say "see, I told you so!"
Life moves on. Suddenly everything changes, and big companies are caught napping.
So there you have it. Newspapers were among the pioneers in the online space, pushing content onto CompuServe and The Source, publishing on Prodigy, building entire national networks like Viewtron. Roll ahead a couple of decades and they're being reviled as a worst-case example of an industry caught sleeping at the switch.
Are we sure this isn't yet another case of another clueless journalist not doing a damn bit of research, just going to Google Maps and typing Georgia? Guess what comes up when you do that? Yep, good 'ol Georgia, USA.
Yes. It's also a case of another clueless Anonymous Coward posting without following the links.
Pages whose URL begins "http://afp.google.com/" are hosted on Google's servers, built by Google from the Agence France-Presse NewsML feed.
Google adds its own maps.
Proper locative tagging should make this impossible.
NITF, which is the text markup standard assumed by NewsML, supports ISO country codes in location tags, but AFP may not have used them. I don't know; I don't have access to an AFP feed. It's common for wire services (and their customers) to underutilize the capabilities of the XML standards.
In any case, either Google has corrected the error or subsequent versions of the story contained enough information for Google's algorithms not to repeat the error.
You missed a few steps. Mosaic wasn't the first, not by a long shot.
Mosaic came along a couple of years after the first CERN Web browser and originally was for Unix systems. Mosaic was created at the University of Illinois with funding from Al Gore's legislation.
By the time Mosaic became available for Windows, there were several alternatives on multiple operating systems, such as the original CERN browser, Lynx (text-mode from the University of Kansas), Cello (on Windows, from the Cornell Law School) and Viola (on Windows, from a UC-Berkeley student).
All of these were developed in academic research settings, not by commercial enterprises. Sometimes the source code was distributed, sometimes it wasn't. Sometimes there were licenses permitting derivative works, sometimes there weren't.
In early 1994 I contacted NCSA about licensing the Mosaic Windows source code for a newspaper online project I was working on. The price I was quoted was $50,000 for the source code and rights to create derivative works.
NCSA transferred the Mosaic technology and rights to a local firm, Spyglass, which marketed "Spyglass Mosaic" with little success.
Several years after the arrival of Mosaic (and Cello and Viola), Microsoft finally figured out that its proprietary Blackbird online technology wasn't going to survive the growth of the open Web. It then licensed Mosaic from Spyglass and used it as the basis for Internet Explorer.
The right way to conduct such a test would be to pull a random low-end, Vista-certified PC from the shelf at Wal-Mart or Best Buy and then see what happens, starting with the unboxing process.
One of the many ways in which Microsoft aimed a BFG9000 at its own feet was certifying hardware incapable of running Vista. Hundreds of thousands of laptops were shipped with 512MB of memory. "First run" on such a system can take up to 45 minutes as Vista actually has to install itself first. Then the machine is so crippled by lack of RAM that even running Solitaire is interrupted by wild disk activity accompanied by random lockups of the user interface.
If you want to run Vista, you need to spend the price of an Macintosh on the hardware. And if you're going to do that, you might as well get a Mac in the first place.
There's nothing wrong with those half-gig laptops, by the way. They're great when running Ubuntu.
Linux kernel ... check. ... check. ... Gecko-based browser, so check. ... check. Also all the other IM protocols. ... check. Also Bluetooth to my EDGE phone. ... check. ... still waiting. But I have abiword.
Touchscreen interface
Firefox
Skype
Wifi
Headphones, mike, camera
Google Gears
About $100 over the target price, but not bad.
http://www.nseries.com/products/n800/#l=products,n800
I'd like a bigger touchscreen, but then it wouldn't fit in my pocket.
Drupal 6 is absolutely unsupported by the rest of the community so far,
We are continuing to base our site development work on Drupal 5 at this point because a couple of key modules aren't ready for 6.
But there are more than 700 Drupal contributed modules with released versions for Drupal 6, and that's far from "absolutely unsupported."
The biggest barrier to Drupal 6 implementation has been the Views module, which many of us regard as a requirement. The developer chose to undertake a complete rethink/rewrite rather than porting the existing version. Views 2 is now at Release Candidate status. Everything will be better in the morning.
API: http://api.drupal.org/
Unit tests: http://www.lullabot.com/articles/introduction-unit-testing
Upgrading cues: http://drupal.org/project/coder
Some programmers think they should be able to do anything they want.
That might be OK if you live in your parents' basement and code for yourself, but in the real world it's a bad (and selfish) idea.
Strict adherence to a standard is helpful in code review and in cases where a component is taken over by a new maintainer.
This is always important, but it's particularly important in a genuinely open, community-driven project.
The Drupal project is an example. It has a coding standard derived from the PEAR project that applies to any code submitted for inclusion in the core.
Contrib authors are encouraged, but not required, to follow it. The good ones do.
The Drupal Coder module does a very good job of nagging at you until you get the formatting right, and also helps with code migration and updating when the API changes. And it finds some common bonehead mistakes that can create security issues.
Adhering to a standard doesn't have to be painful. Using a properly configured text editor helps. There is good support for Drupal standards and conventions in OpenKomodo and the commercial Komodo IDE, as well as some other editors.
In printing, the word "stet" has, for generations, been used to indicate matter that should be allowed to stand in its original form, overriding any blue-pencil changes introduced by another editor.
Since hardly anybody actually edits on paper any more, I doubt that the term is taught these days. Similarly, there's no reason to teach copyfitting, headline counting, or strange marks added to penciled copy above the lower-case n and below the lower-case u.
Why would you want to run Skype under Wine?
Skype for Linux is available as a native app, prepackaged for all the popular desktop distributions, as well as in a Maemo/ARM version for the Nokia Internet Tablet.
It's not unstable. It works fine. I've used it to call home while traveling all over the world.
I run Skype because I can reach the people I want to talk with. Ekiga is useless to me. I can't track down everybody I know and force them to switch, even if I wanted to dig through the bad documentation and figure out how to get it working with a SIP provider. The whole "free SIP" landscape is a real mess. Skype just works.
"2) During that previous warm period europe did really really really well."
This is remarkably naive. The same warm period worked utter devastation in other parts of the world. We live in a globalized economy. Unless you intend to live like a 12th-century serf, you might want to consider the point of origin of your gasoline, clothing, computer equipment and much of what you buy at the supermarket. We live in a globalized economy.
From a review of Brian Fagan's "The Great Warming" http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/books/21book.html :
"The debit side is appalling: widespread drought, catastrophic rainfall, toppled dynasties, ruined civilizations. Abandoned Maya temples in the Yucatan and the desolation of Angkor Wat, supreme achievement of the Khmer empire, bear witness to climatic change against which royal power and priestly magic proved impotent."