We're talking about completely different things. You're talking about sane server responses, I'm talking about coding on crack:)
My issue is more to do with the nature of the meta-data. The more meta-data there is the more sensible XML becomes.
So to begin with, yes, XML is bloat-tastic. In your example, clearly it is far more sensible to send back a straight list though probably with a little more data / meta-data in it.
But if we're considering web apps and web services rather than a shopping cart the value of using XML increases. If we're writing a network monitoring tool where each node in the network could either be one machine or a sub-network, without meta-data the job becomes horrific. And there is so much meta-data that having an XML framework predefined means at least that's one less thing to worry about.
Otherwise I have to start writing some mega-complex string handling procedures, make sure I set up a protocol I keep to (and document so everyone else keeps to it too -:D ). With XML that's already written.
XML is usually overkill but when it isn't, it's very useful.
You also bring up a very valid point with regards to bandwidth. Clearly if I want a real-time system that uses AJAX-like code, I'd need to optimise it so that the amount of XML being fed out was kept to a minimum. For a real-time stock feed update something like this would be the kind of thing:
So there you have a company code (clearly your company) and the new stock value and that's it, the client decides what to do with that data and where to put it. That wouldn't have much advantage over
UPD:1123969988414:DAVDEN:901.5
except that there's no need to write your own parser and it COULD be easier to migrate between platforms.
too slow. If you have a few thousand customers online concurrently, latencies for generating then feeding that amount of data on a regular (on average every second) basis are horrific. Forex & betting apps are impossible on that basis. Any bandwidth / latency sensitive application is out of the window.
I used to do it the way you are suggesting. Not many clients took it up, not many were interested. A LOT of people are interested in AJAX which suggests that there may be some other advantage to assuming a smarter client.
Plus with the pace of tech advancement, most clients are capable of manipulating a basic DOM.
OK I admit I have a vested interest in this. I wrote an API that did exactly this (custom strings) in IE4 & NN4. This is before IE5 came out and before I'd learned to read w3c specs properly. The API sucked more suckily than anything has ever sucked before. It was a multi-car pile-up of an API. I spent months writing this crap and nearly lost my job and those of my project manager and line manager over it. It was the code no-one else would touch, despite extensive documentation. I wrote this... thing, it used invisible frames or invisible iframes (no I didn't know what XML was supposed to do either), it was supposed to implement some sort of windowing system within a browser.
Now picture this. A windowing system, to run in IE4 or Netscape 4 written by someone who doesn't know what they're doing. You want memory leaks? We had 'em. Most of the clients' machines would die after ten minutes running this. You want race conditions? Yup we those had those ose se e as we. ll This thing was so asynchronous it would frequently try to write to HTML elements that didn't exist yet... or that did exist but that the browser had decided they'd disappeared. Netscape 4 was the best at this. If a string was too long suddenly the rest of the dom disappeared into recursion hell and you couldn't drill down into the necessary layer.
In the end I had to write JavaBeans to write the HTML which would then modify itself or not as the case may be...
It was not merely a dog. It stank, whatever way you looked at it. Consequently the company never touched a DHTML project again and when they finally decided to upgrade the site they simply wrote a flat HTML version.
I get flashbacks just thinking about it.
But as a result I learnt that using a non-standard, custom server response may reduce project maintainability. And may reduce the likelihood of you keeping your job.
I don't know of any java browsers off hand - most browsers are written in C/C++. Certainly those that will support a JVM will be as the JRE will be in C to allow it to run at a half decent speed. But theoretically, if you were running a browser, written in java, with a JVM, written in java, and you had an XML Socket open you'd be using Java rather than Javascript so you wouldn't be using AJAX anyway.
Of course AJAX may allow some sites that insist on using Applets a method to reduce their dependency on client-side java.
so you're tying the page architecture, the web app architecture and potentially the back-end architecture together. And then when you want to feed the same data to a different client (mobile phone, flash, RSS feed, tv, whatever) we have to write a new hook in the API. And when the design changes we have to rebuild the middle-ware.
The point of XML is to allow us to simply send the data and let the client work out what the hell it wants to do with it. Of course it rarely works that way but AFAIK that's what's supposed to happen... or something...
Sure XML is bloated but the kind of XML a developer will want to come back to a web page is unlikely to be. What would it contain?
Well obviously the data to go on the page. In addition to that, probably some meta-data to tell the browser where to put that data on the page. And that's it.
The data coming back from the server is unlikely to be any more bloated than what would have been sent in a standard HTTP response, possibly less bloated - after all if you already have a page hierarchy set up there's no need to send another one down the tube.
My gut feeling is that people will read these pages and decide whether or not AJAX is a "good thing" or not from what they read here, rather than RTFA. I'm not advocating censorship but I do think given the choice of forcing javascript developers to write an LDIF parser or getting them to use the built-in XML parsing capabilities, XML would win out for sheer convenience. Though watching them try to write an LDIF parser would be amusing...
I think it's more to do with the nature of the response. If you have a browser that is capable of dealing with an XML response (same as an HTML response without the page refresh) then all well and good. If you don't then your response will be ignored.
You could feed vast amounts of HTML over the XML connection. Or you can just feed the relevant data and get the browser to reformat the page. The former is the old style of server-side coding. And sending through all those table and cell tags would be a nightmare in terms of server load. The latter is more elegant - you send what you need and only what you need. The ideal of course being pages that need only the minimum amount of refreshing.
Unless of course I'm missing the point of your post which is entirely possible and for which I apologise in advance.
on the other hand the article as posted above goes into detail on degradability whereas JSON-RPC is specifically latest versions only. Of course the advantage of latest version use is that your machine is unlikely to be owned by one of the many nefarious sites out there just waiting to infiltrate and destroy you. On the other hand if your IT department is run by any one of the dolts I've seen managing IT departments, you won't have permission to update your browser and they won't bother.
why would anyone use a headphone adapter to connect to a fiber network?
what about heat dissipation - given the voltages you'd need to transmit through metal wires, across a plug with contact resistance, with data at the proposed speeds a shitty fan ain't gonna do much other than melt.
The operating temp range for their solar panel (supposedly for powering memory in satellites) is too narrow. 5 minutes sunlight for a 24 hr charge - work out the size of the solar array and the amount of light hitting it and the stated power usage and you have > 1000% energy efficiency.
I'm obviously missing something here. Clearly energy efficiency is important for some reason, though I've no idea why that would be?
Sure, when burning fossil fuels and causing global warming (or not - here's not the place to argue that one) energy efficiency is vital. The more you burn the more damage you do.
But the whole point of using hydrogen is that we're running out of fossil fuels. The power for electrolysis will either be solar, wind, tidal or some other renewable source. The only reason we aren't using these directly on cars is that it's not practical so there has to be this extra step.
As far as I'm aware solar energy is not in any danger of running out so efficiency is less of an issue.
> You don't take action to prevent a problem that you don't know exists.
No we know the problem exists, even George Bush's friends in the oil industry recognise that the problem exists. They just don't think that we're definitely causing the problem. All I'm saying is that even if we're not sure about the extent of our contribution we should err on the side of caution with regards to the impact we intend to make on the environment and take steps to reduce carbon emissions in case we are causing the problem.
> Besides, the simple response to this virtual problem is to plant more trees.
How many? Sorry - how many millions of acres. And what about when we've normalised the CO2 concentration do we then cut down the trees so that they don't remove too much CO2? And how much CO2 do we emit planting trees? And what about at night when trees absorb oxygen and emit CO2? Or do we uproot them every evening?
> Plant more trees and you fix the problem.
Most scientists agree that oceanic absorbtion is the method that will work. Over about 900 years.
> Deforestation is by far the biggest environmental disaster we face today, look at what is going on in Haiti.
Haiti? OK - let's look at a slightly longer scale at slightly larger parts of the planet than Haiti. Let's look at Brazil where there's no political or business will to reduce deforestation. Let's look at the levels of deforestation not over the last 50 years but since the start of the industrial revolution. Vast forests across Europe, Russia, America and Africa have been destroyed since the 1700s. And also in Haiti since you mention it.
> We dont need a bunch of fuck nuts going berzerk over the kyoto protocol.
I didn't realised that the elected president of the United States of America was a fuck nut (Clinton was pro Kyoto). I didn't realise that the majority of governments of the developed world were a bunch of fuck nuts. You may know better than me but remember just how much environmental research designed to disprove human contributions into global warming is funded by American oil companies.
It's entirely possible you're right. So what to do? Let's look into the records we have available to us - the ice-cores from Antarctica, the rock record in sedimentary troughs. Let's see if we can use oxygen isotopes to work out levels of atmospheric carbon and let's see, from the fauna in the fossil record, what was alive where to work out the temperatures.
I've seen that data, dating back from now through to the Jurassic. I've seen that pCO2 was way higher than 1000 parts per million (that's 0.1% atmospheric CO2 - a little less than 100%) and I've seen what the atmospheric temperatures were.
Models and data are good. Records from history and prehistory are good. Most of the changes would take 100s of years to reverse and might push meta-stable equilibria into other meta-stable states (migration of weather patterns, ocean currents, that sort of thing).
El Nino & La Nina have everything to do with summer hurricanes. I'll agree.
But the warming is indisputable. Even anti-CO2ists agree that.
Possible cause might be human carbon output. As posted by others more eloquent than myself, if you think you're doing something to screw up the world isn't it a good idea to take remedial action? Even if you're not 100% sure that your action is causing the problem you should take action.
Hahaha I'm a scientist? Love to see your geology degree mate. Mine's from University College London.
This is what DIDN'T happen: Intel: If you use any AMD chips we won't sell you ANY of our Intel chips.
This is what DID happen: Intel: If you use AMD chips the Intel chips we sell you will be more expensive.
Have a look at that list of companies. They must buy millions of chips. Some of them are known for very expensive, but quite sexy, products such as Sony. Sony stuff is so damn expensive anyway that their profit margin can incroporate an increase in price thanks to Intel being a pain in the butt.
Some of those companies, eg Dell, try to make their machines as cheap as... er... chips. So to save money they ONLY use Intel.
Someone else mentioned that the prompt here might be the Turion chip. So far only AMD has released a 64-bit low voltage PC chip. They must be confused as to why very few manufacturers, other than Acer, will use it. Maybe Intel are saying to manufacturers "If you want to buy our fancy centrino chipsets with our Pentium M processors and everything guaranteed to work together, we'll charge you more if you are making Turion based laptops too".
Why would they do this?
Would a low voltage 64 bit chip outperform a low voltage 32 bit chip? Even on 64-bit XP?
# Earth comes closer and farther from the sun right in cycles, ham radio operators love this.
these cycles are in the range of 10s of thousands of years, not a couple of hundred, irrelevant
# Solar storms
these cycles are in the range of 10s of years, not a couple of hundred, irrelevant
# Increased volcanic activity
about 1% of atmospheric carbon, irrelevant
# Ocean current cycles, more warm water where it matters
these aren't going to suddenly start dumping warm water at the poles (which would reduce ice-pack density and lower the amount of light and heat reflected back into space).
# Atmospheric cycles
such as?
# Differences in equipment used to measure the temperature in the last 10 years
irrelevant because our climate record can be implied over 100,000 years through ice-cores and millions of years implied through sedimentary and fossil record data
# Human error
10s of thousands of scientists are clearly wrong if it means paying more the gas.
# Corrupt political interests
BINGO - why drive political interests through science when the public can be bought
OK I'm a scientist and I'm telling you this has f### all to do with El Nino.
El Nino is about a bulge in warm water in the pacific WHICH IS CYCLICAL.
It happens once every 8 - 11 years. Then it stops. Then it builds up. Then after 8 - 11 years it happens again.
Then it stops. Then it builds up. Then after 8 - 11 years it happens again.
Then it stops. Then it builds up. Then after 8 - 11 years it happens again.
Then it stops. Then it builds up. Then after 8 - 11 years it happens again.
Then it stops. Then it builds up. Then after 8 - 11 years it happens again.
Do you get the idea of cyclical?
Are you sure?
Good.
Now tell me whether there were massive destructive hurricanes flooding New Orleans / the rest of the gulf coast 8 - 11 years ago. And 8 - 11 years before that. And 8 - 11 years before that. And 8 - 11 years before that. And 8 - 11 years before that.
No?
Then it's not caused by El Nino is it?
Well not quite - hurricane Andrew was about 9 years ago, again an El Nino year. However what needs to be compared here is intensity. The trend is for bigger hurricanes over time as global sea temperatures rise (global warming has almost nothing to do with atmospheric temperatures - the consequences of oceanic warming are far scarier)
No the fact is that a number of things need to occur before the US will significantly reduce emissions:
1.) It has to be proved beyond any scientific fact in words of 1 syllable or less that carbon emissions cause global warming. In addition we would need to be able to trace every single atom of atmospheric carbon and prove exactly how that atom was contributing to the warming and to what extent.
2.) In order not to be labelled "unpatriotic" this proof must be proved conclusively over a 100 year period during which oil prices must be kept to a maximum of $40/barrel.
3.) Only after this proof period is complete, a method to reduce emissions must then be developed, privately and not at any expense at all to the American public, which will remove carbon from the atmosphere for free and simultaneously generate vast sums of revenue for the US by converting it back into gasoline.
Which geological records would these be? I have never seen geological records with resolution down to scales of less than 1,000 years except when there are catastrophic markers such as large asteroid impacts or freak environmental conditions such as tsunami.
Most of the geological records I ever looked at resolved down to about 1 million years. A few resolve down to tens of thousands of years. A few resolve down to indiviual millennia but only when there is a LOT of deposition.
An increase of 20% in atmospheric carbon over 50 years would resolve to a spike that would indicate some kind of massive catastrophic process, probably predicting some kind of mass-extinction. This is just a note, in the vain hope that it's saved somewhere for perpetuity, to let anyone from the future know that we did this ourselves. The mess that is going to result over the next 50 years, that is probably going to wipe out most of the biodiversity on this planet and that will probably take a couple of million years to recover from was all our own doing. Sorry chaps.
What you need to understand here is a marketing concept, not a scientific one. People will make decisions based on emotion and try to bend the facts to support them. The emotional decision here is simple. Anti-darwinists - oops sorry, freudian slip there - anti-CO2ists realise the impact on their way of life resulting from the overwhelming evidence from thousands of studies in global warming being true.
Of course most normal scientists who deal with atmostpheric processes accepted the correlation between CO2 / methane and global temperature decades ago. I did my geology degree between '94 & '97 at UCL here in London and it wasn't even a subject for debate. People we were using the concept of correlation between atmospheric carbon and sea / atmospheric temperature to go back in time before ice-cores, using the geological record. Rather than using bubbles of air you use fossils of the animals that used that air, dissolved in sea-water, for respiration. Micropalaeontology and micro-fauna aren't my thing at all but scientists at UCL were (and are) well into it.
So why the small, but vocal, opposition to
1.) the role of atmospheric carbon in global temperatures.
2.) the concept that human intervention has lead to an increase in atmospheric carbon.
The answer is of course simple. The changes we will all have to make when these idiots eventually give in to overwhelming scientific evidence are profound. In fact given the current US attitude of completely ignoring even the Kyoto agreement, which in itself is a drop in the ocean compared to the emissions reductions that WOULD be required, the changes would be catastrophic for some.
Imagine having to pay the kinds of prices for gasoline that we do here in the UK. Our gas is the cheapest in the world but one the most heavily taxed, we pay getting on for £1/litre which is ~$6.84 / US gallon. The tax is designed to stop people using their cars and move them onto public transport or at least into more environmentally friendly transportation.
The emissions quotas and laws here in the EU are strict especially wrt the production of energy.
All this is to try to leave the planet by and large as we found it, for the generations to come. All of which falls on deaf ears if the US, a nation consisting merely 2% of the world's population, continues consuming 25% of the world's resources and pumping the waste from this consumption into the atmosphere, into the sea and into the ground.
The onus is on the US to become less wasteful and the anti-CO2ists are desperately clinging to any straw they can find to delay such moves which would require taxes to be raised far beyond what current presidents could lose their tenure over.
Of course the other alternatives are:
1.) The rest of the world gangs up against the US and forces changes through.
2.) US citizens get it into their heads that the current environmental nightmares being experienced along the gulf coast are driven by the changes in the carbon cycle. Regardless of the truth of this (it's a bitch to prove) if it were to cause mass-hysteria and panicking there MIGHT be the political will to deal with it.
But our anti-CO2 friends shove their fingers in their ears and sing "la la la can't hear you, you must be wrong because I say so" or stick their heads in the sand.
This is linked to that new thing ASUS have brought out that lets Pentium M processors run on PCs. Turns out that with lower power consumption they're also more effective as processors - judging by the benchmarking against AMD64 and Intel P4. As you say the economies of scale would allow them to compete with AMD in AMD's price bracket. Cheap as chips:)
The other option is that RAID on a laptop might become standard. It will need a hell of a lot of work from hard-drive manufacturers to make their laptop hard-drives
a.) fast b.) cheap c.) very economical in terms of power draw
but it could be done.
Finally someone in Intel has clearly done their homework:
q.) Who is least likely to backup on a regular basis? a.) The kinds of executives who prefer laptops to desktops.
The market is sat there waiting for Intel to capitalize on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Thoughts?
:)
:D ). With XML that's already written.
We're talking about completely different things. You're talking about sane server responses, I'm talking about coding on crack
My issue is more to do with the nature of the meta-data. The more meta-data there is the more sensible XML becomes.
So to begin with, yes, XML is bloat-tastic. In your example, clearly it is far more sensible to send back a straight list though probably with a little more data / meta-data in it.
But if we're considering web apps and web services rather than a shopping cart the value of using XML increases. If we're writing a network monitoring tool where each node in the network could either be one machine or a sub-network, without meta-data the job becomes horrific. And there is so much meta-data that having an XML framework predefined means at least that's one less thing to worry about.
Otherwise I have to start writing some mega-complex string handling procedures, make sure I set up a protocol I keep to (and document so everyone else keeps to it too -
XML is usually overkill but when it isn't, it's very useful.
You also bring up a very valid point with regards to bandwidth. Clearly if I want a real-time system that uses AJAX-like code, I'd need to optimise it so that the amount of XML being fed out was kept to a minimum. For a real-time stock feed update something like this would be the kind of thing:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<upd gen="1123969988414">
<it cd="DAVDEN">
<nuval>901.5</nuval>
</it>
</upd>
So there you have a company code (clearly your company) and the new stock value and that's it, the client decides what to do with that data and where to put it. That wouldn't have much advantage over
UPD:1123969988414:DAVDEN:901.5
except that there's no need to write your own parser and it COULD be easier to migrate between platforms.
too slow. If you have a few thousand customers online concurrently, latencies for generating then feeding that amount of data on a regular (on average every second) basis are horrific. Forex & betting apps are impossible on that basis. Any bandwidth / latency sensitive application is out of the window.
I used to do it the way you are suggesting. Not many clients took it up, not many were interested. A LOT of people are interested in AJAX which suggests that there may be some other advantage to assuming a smarter client.
Plus with the pace of tech advancement, most clients are capable of manipulating a basic DOM.
OK I admit I have a vested interest in this. I wrote an API that did exactly this (custom strings) in IE4 & NN4. This is before IE5 came out and before I'd learned to read w3c specs properly. The API sucked more suckily than anything has ever sucked before. It was a multi-car pile-up of an API. I spent months writing this crap and nearly lost my job and those of my project manager and line manager over it. It was the code no-one else would touch, despite extensive documentation. I wrote this... thing, it used invisible frames or invisible iframes (no I didn't know what XML was supposed to do either), it was supposed to implement some sort of windowing system within a browser.
Now picture this. A windowing system, to run in IE4 or Netscape 4 written by someone who doesn't know what they're doing. You want memory leaks? We had 'em. Most of the clients' machines would die after ten minutes running this. You want race conditions? Yup we those had those ose se e as we.
ll
This thing was so asynchronous it would frequently try to write to HTML elements that didn't exist yet... or that did exist but that the browser had decided they'd disappeared. Netscape 4 was the best at this. If a string was too long suddenly the rest of the dom disappeared into recursion hell and you couldn't drill down into the necessary layer.
In the end I had to write JavaBeans to write the HTML which would then modify itself or not as the case may be...
It was not merely a dog. It stank, whatever way you looked at it. Consequently the company never touched a DHTML project again and when they finally decided to upgrade the site they simply wrote a flat HTML version.
I get flashbacks just thinking about it.
But as a result I learnt that using a non-standard, custom server response may reduce project maintainability. And may reduce the likelihood of you keeping your job.
boo.com?
I don't know of any java browsers off hand - most browsers are written in C/C++. Certainly those that will support a JVM will be as the JRE will be in C to allow it to run at a half decent speed. But theoretically, if you were running a browser, written in java, with a JVM, written in java, and you had an XML Socket open you'd be using Java rather than Javascript so you wouldn't be using AJAX anyway.
Of course AJAX may allow some sites that insist on using Applets a method to reduce their dependency on client-side java.
so you're tying the page architecture, the web app architecture and potentially the back-end architecture together. And then when you want to feed the same data to a different client (mobile phone, flash, RSS feed, tv, whatever) we have to write a new hook in the API. And when the design changes we have to rebuild the middle-ware.
The point of XML is to allow us to simply send the data and let the client work out what the hell it wants to do with it. Of course it rarely works that way but AFAIK that's what's supposed to happen... or something...
Sure XML is bloated but the kind of XML a developer will want to come back to a web page is unlikely to be. What would it contain?
Well obviously the data to go on the page. In addition to that, probably some meta-data to tell the browser where to put that data on the page. And that's it.
The data coming back from the server is unlikely to be any more bloated than what would have been sent in a standard HTTP response, possibly less bloated - after all if you already have a page hierarchy set up there's no need to send another one down the tube.
My gut feeling is that people will read these pages and decide whether or not AJAX is a "good thing" or not from what they read here, rather than RTFA. I'm not advocating censorship but I do think given the choice of forcing javascript developers to write an LDIF parser or getting them to use the built-in XML parsing capabilities, XML would win out for sheer convenience. Though watching them try to write an LDIF parser would be amusing...
yes
I think it's more to do with the nature of the response. If you have a browser that is capable of dealing with an XML response (same as an HTML response without the page refresh) then all well and good. If you don't then your response will be ignored.
You could feed vast amounts of HTML over the XML connection. Or you can just feed the relevant data and get the browser to reformat the page. The former is the old style of server-side coding. And sending through all those table and cell tags would be a nightmare in terms of server load. The latter is more elegant - you send what you need and only what you need. The ideal of course being pages that need only the minimum amount of refreshing.
Unless of course I'm missing the point of your post which is entirely possible and for which I apologise in advance.
on the other hand the article as posted above goes into detail on degradability whereas JSON-RPC is specifically latest versions only. Of course the advantage of latest version use is that your machine is unlikely to be owned by one of the many nefarious sites out there just waiting to infiltrate and destroy you. On the other hand if your IT department is run by any one of the dolts I've seen managing IT departments, you won't have permission to update your browser and they won't bother.
:)
Still - got a version for php?
almost as though there was nothing there. Except the concept...
By the by, from the IBM site:
> Server load
>
> Implementing an Ajax UI in place of a regular forms-based one may dramatically
> increase the number of requests made to the server.
Will be interesting to see how it responds to a slashdotting...
but it would of definately anoyyed you...
tee hee - sorry
why would anyone use a headphone adapter to connect to a fiber network?
what about heat dissipation - given the voltages you'd need to transmit through metal wires, across a plug with contact resistance, with data at the proposed speeds a shitty fan ain't gonna do much other than melt.
The operating temp range for their solar panel (supposedly for powering memory in satellites) is too narrow. 5 minutes sunlight for a 24 hr charge - work out the size of the solar array and the amount of light hitting it and the stated power usage and you have > 1000% energy efficiency.
Hilarious
I'm obviously missing something here. Clearly energy efficiency is important for some reason, though I've no idea why that would be?
Sure, when burning fossil fuels and causing global warming (or not - here's not the place to argue that one) energy efficiency is vital. The more you burn the more damage you do.
But the whole point of using hydrogen is that we're running out of fossil fuels. The power for electrolysis will either be solar, wind, tidal or some other renewable source. The only reason we aren't using these directly on cars is that it's not practical so there has to be this extra step.
As far as I'm aware solar energy is not in any danger of running out so efficiency is less of an issue.
> You don't take action to prevent a problem that you don't know exists.
No we know the problem exists, even George Bush's friends in the oil industry recognise that the problem exists. They just don't think that we're definitely causing the problem. All I'm saying is that even if we're not sure about the extent of our contribution we should err on the side of caution with regards to the impact we intend to make on the environment and take steps to reduce carbon emissions in case we are causing the problem.
> Besides, the simple response to this virtual problem is to plant more trees.
How many? Sorry - how many millions of acres. And what about when we've normalised the CO2 concentration do we then cut down the trees so that they don't remove too much CO2? And how much CO2 do we emit planting trees? And what about at night when trees absorb oxygen and emit CO2? Or do we uproot them every evening?
> Plant more trees and you fix the problem.
Most scientists agree that oceanic absorbtion is the method that will work. Over about 900 years.
> Deforestation is by far the biggest environmental disaster we face today, look at what is going on in Haiti.
Haiti? OK - let's look at a slightly longer scale at slightly larger parts of the planet than Haiti. Let's look at Brazil where there's no political or business will to reduce deforestation. Let's look at the levels of deforestation not over the last 50 years but since the start of the industrial revolution. Vast forests across Europe, Russia, America and Africa have been destroyed since the 1700s. And also in Haiti since you mention it.
> We dont need a bunch of fuck nuts going berzerk over the kyoto protocol.
I didn't realised that the elected president of the United States of America was a fuck nut (Clinton was pro Kyoto). I didn't realise that the majority of governments of the developed world were a bunch of fuck nuts. You may know better than me but remember just how much environmental research designed to disprove human contributions into global warming is funded by American oil companies.
It's entirely possible you're right. So what to do? Let's look into the records we have available to us - the ice-cores from Antarctica, the rock record in sedimentary troughs. Let's see if we can use oxygen isotopes to work out levels of atmospheric carbon and let's see, from the fauna in the fossil record, what was alive where to work out the temperatures.
I've seen that data, dating back from now through to the Jurassic. I've seen that pCO2 was way higher than 1000 parts per million (that's 0.1% atmospheric CO2 - a little less than 100%) and I've seen what the atmospheric temperatures were.
Models and data are good. Records from history and prehistory are good. Most of the changes would take 100s of years to reverse and might push meta-stable equilibria into other meta-stable states (migration of weather patterns, ocean currents, that sort of thing).
Is it a risk we want to take?
El Nino & La Nina have everything to do with summer hurricanes. I'll agree.
But the warming is indisputable. Even anti-CO2ists agree that.
Possible cause might be human carbon output. As posted by others more eloquent than myself, if you think you're doing something to screw up the world isn't it a good idea to take remedial action? Even if you're not 100% sure that your action is causing the problem you should take action.
Hahaha I'm a scientist? Love to see your geology degree mate. Mine's from University College London.
This is what DIDN'T happen: Intel: If you use any AMD chips we won't sell you ANY of our Intel chips.
... er ... chips. So to save money they ONLY use Intel.
This is what DID happen: Intel: If you use AMD chips the Intel chips we sell you will be more expensive.
Have a look at that list of companies. They must buy millions of chips. Some of them are known for very expensive, but quite sexy, products such as Sony. Sony stuff is so damn expensive anyway that their profit margin can incroporate an increase in price thanks to Intel being a pain in the butt.
Some of those companies, eg Dell, try to make their machines as cheap as
Someone else mentioned that the prompt here might be the Turion chip. So far only AMD has released a 64-bit low voltage PC chip. They must be confused as to why very few manufacturers, other than Acer, will use it. Maybe Intel are saying to manufacturers "If you want to buy our fancy centrino chipsets with our Pentium M processors and everything guaranteed to work together, we'll charge you more if you are making Turion based laptops too".
Why would they do this?
Would a low voltage 64 bit chip outperform a low voltage 32 bit chip? Even on 64-bit XP?
Hey I thought we were blaming the muslims now. Are we still blaming the jews too?
Perhaps there were some gypsies and homosexuals involved in it too?
# Earth comes closer and farther from the sun right in cycles, ham radio operators love this.
these cycles are in the range of 10s of thousands of years, not a couple of hundred, irrelevant
# Solar storms
these cycles are in the range of 10s of years, not a couple of hundred, irrelevant
# Increased volcanic activity
about 1% of atmospheric carbon, irrelevant
# Ocean current cycles, more warm water where it matters
these aren't going to suddenly start dumping warm water at the poles (which would reduce ice-pack density and lower the amount of light and heat reflected back into space).
# Atmospheric cycles
such as?
# Differences in equipment used to measure the temperature in the last 10 years
irrelevant because our climate record can be implied over 100,000 years through ice-cores and millions of years implied through sedimentary and fossil record data
# Human error
10s of thousands of scientists are clearly wrong if it means paying more the gas.
# Corrupt political interests
BINGO - why drive political interests through science when the public can be bought
OK I'm a scientist and I'm telling you this has f### all to do with El Nino.
El Nino is about a bulge in warm water in the pacific WHICH IS CYCLICAL.
It happens once every 8 - 11 years. Then it stops. Then it builds up. Then after 8 - 11 years it happens again.
Then it stops. Then it builds up. Then after 8 - 11 years it happens again.
Then it stops. Then it builds up. Then after 8 - 11 years it happens again.
Then it stops. Then it builds up. Then after 8 - 11 years it happens again.
Then it stops. Then it builds up. Then after 8 - 11 years it happens again.
Do you get the idea of cyclical?
Are you sure?
Good.
Now tell me whether there were massive destructive hurricanes flooding New Orleans / the rest of the gulf coast 8 - 11 years ago. And 8 - 11 years before that. And 8 - 11 years before that. And 8 - 11 years before that. And 8 - 11 years before that.
No?
Then it's not caused by El Nino is it?
Well not quite - hurricane Andrew was about 9 years ago, again an El Nino year. However what needs to be compared here is intensity. The trend is for bigger hurricanes over time as global sea temperatures rise (global warming has almost nothing to do with atmospheric temperatures - the consequences of oceanic warming are far scarier)
No the fact is that a number of things need to occur before the US will significantly reduce emissions:
1.) It has to be proved beyond any scientific fact in words of 1 syllable or less that carbon emissions cause global warming. In addition we would need to be able to trace every single atom of atmospheric carbon and prove exactly how that atom was contributing to the warming and to what extent.
2.) In order not to be labelled "unpatriotic" this proof must be proved conclusively over a 100 year period during which oil prices must be kept to a maximum of $40/barrel.
3.) Only after this proof period is complete, a method to reduce emissions must then be developed, privately and not at any expense at all to the American public, which will remove carbon from the atmosphere for free and simultaneously generate vast sums of revenue for the US by converting it back into gasoline.
Which geological records would these be? I have never seen geological records with resolution down to scales of less than 1,000 years except when there are catastrophic markers such as large asteroid impacts or freak environmental conditions such as tsunami.
Most of the geological records I ever looked at resolved down to about 1 million years. A few resolve down to tens of thousands of years. A few resolve down to indiviual millennia but only when there is a LOT of deposition.
An increase of 20% in atmospheric carbon over 50 years would resolve to a spike that would indicate some kind of massive catastrophic process, probably predicting some kind of mass-extinction. This is just a note, in the vain hope that it's saved somewhere for perpetuity, to let anyone from the future know that we did this ourselves. The mess that is going to result over the next 50 years, that is probably going to wipe out most of the biodiversity on this planet and that will probably take a couple of million years to recover from was all our own doing. Sorry chaps.
What you need to understand here is a marketing concept, not a scientific one. People will make decisions based on emotion and try to bend the facts to support them. The emotional decision here is simple. Anti-darwinists - oops sorry, freudian slip there - anti-CO2ists realise the impact on their way of life resulting from the overwhelming evidence from thousands of studies in global warming being true.
Of course most normal scientists who deal with atmostpheric processes accepted the correlation between CO2 / methane and global temperature decades ago. I did my geology degree between '94 & '97 at UCL here in London and it wasn't even a subject for debate. People we were using the concept of correlation between atmospheric carbon and sea / atmospheric temperature to go back in time before ice-cores, using the geological record. Rather than using bubbles of air you use fossils of the animals that used that air, dissolved in sea-water, for respiration. Micropalaeontology and micro-fauna aren't my thing at all but scientists at UCL were (and are) well into it.
So why the small, but vocal, opposition to
1.) the role of atmospheric carbon in global temperatures.
2.) the concept that human intervention has lead to an increase in atmospheric carbon.
The answer is of course simple. The changes we will all have to make when these idiots eventually give in to overwhelming scientific evidence are profound. In fact given the current US attitude of completely ignoring even the Kyoto agreement, which in itself is a drop in the ocean compared to the emissions reductions that WOULD be required, the changes would be catastrophic for some.
Imagine having to pay the kinds of prices for gasoline that we do here in the UK. Our gas is the cheapest in the world but one the most heavily taxed, we pay getting on for £1/litre which is ~$6.84 / US gallon. The tax is designed to stop people using their cars and move them onto public transport or at least into more environmentally friendly transportation.
The emissions quotas and laws here in the EU are strict especially wrt the production of energy.
All this is to try to leave the planet by and large as we found it, for the generations to come. All of which falls on deaf ears if the US, a nation consisting merely 2% of the world's population, continues consuming 25% of the world's resources and pumping the waste from this consumption into the atmosphere, into the sea and into the ground.
The onus is on the US to become less wasteful and the anti-CO2ists are desperately clinging to any straw they can find to delay such moves which would require taxes to be raised far beyond what current presidents could lose their tenure over.
Of course the other alternatives are:
1.) The rest of the world gangs up against the US and forces changes through.
2.) US citizens get it into their heads that the current environmental nightmares being experienced along the gulf coast are driven by the changes in the carbon cycle. Regardless of the truth of this (it's a bitch to prove) if it were to cause mass-hysteria and panicking there MIGHT be the political will to deal with it.
But our anti-CO2 friends shove their fingers in their ears and sing "la la la can't hear you, you must be wrong because I say so" or stick their heads in the sand.
This is linked to that new thing ASUS have brought out that lets Pentium M processors run on PCs. Turns out that with lower power consumption they're also more effective as processors - judging by the benchmarking against AMD64 and Intel P4. As you say the economies of scale would allow them to compete with AMD in AMD's price bracket. Cheap as chips :)
The other option is that RAID on a laptop might become standard. It will need a hell of a lot of work from hard-drive manufacturers to make their laptop hard-drives
a.) fast
b.) cheap
c.) very economical in terms of power draw
but it could be done.
Finally someone in Intel has clearly done their homework:
q.) Who is least likely to backup on a regular basis?
a.) The kinds of executives who prefer laptops to desktops.
The market is sat there waiting for Intel to capitalize on it.