Posts by jerwin

Apple hardware priced so high that no one wants to buy it? It's 1983 all over again

Re: As a dev system?

February, 1983.

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1983-02-rescan

Re: As a dev system?

Chris Crawford said as much

"Programming begins

During this time I had been designing without programming. I had a Macintosh but no development system for the Mac. In those days, the only way to develop serious Macintosh programs was on a Lisa computer. I had ordered a Lisa from Apple in May, 1984, but I did not receive the machine until August 1. So I spent the first three months of the project doing paper design. Without a development system, all I could do was read the manuals, study my references, and write proposals. As it happens, this can be a good thing...If it does not go on for too long. Too many games are hacked together at the keyboard rather than designed from the ground up. In this case, however, three months of paper design was too long because during the process I needed to test some ideas on the computer before I could proceed with other aspects of the design. It was with great relief that I took delivery of my Lisa and set to work on learning the system."

http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/my-books/balance-of-power-the-book/chapter-8-how-balance-of.html

Study: Climate was hotter in Roman, medieval times than now

Wait, wait.. There's no variation from season to season? It's just a steady 311 ppm? Are you sure that your equipment is sensitive enough to detect a change from 300-400 ppm?

Consider this paper

http://www.pnas.org/content/104/48/18925.ful An atmospheric perspective on North American carbon dioxide exchange: CarbonTracker and in particular . the supplemental information. You'll see that the seasonal variation can be as much as ten to fifteen ppm, depending on the site's latitude.

USA to bin colour-code terror warning system - report

"Maximum Fear" mode initiated.

The problem with the terror alert system is that paranoia is expensive, and it's more economically efficient to only become paranoid when specific threats are identified. The normal condition should be blue. If the government raises it from blue to green, yellow, orange, red or crimson, the security department should lay on extra shifts, and so on, until the threat of the moment has passed.

However, the color alert system is also useful as a psychological tool for inducing fear in the electorate. Lowering it to green or blue would signal to the populace that normal sleeping hours should be resumed; buttocks, unclenched, and lives resumed. This cannot happen, so it bobs between yellow and orange.

Drought effect on rainforests is negligible

Read the paper

http://www.leif.org/EOS/2009GL042154.pdf

Although it is especially critical of claims that the Amazon greened in 2007, and somewhat less passionately so about claims that link browning to drought severity, the dataset they're using is rubbish.

"The remaining 60% of EVI data are invalid, being atmosphere‐corrupted."

I don't suppose it would be possible to design a remote sensing program that better distinguishes vegetation from aerosols.

Server virtualisation beyond the x86 environment

What's with the gradients?

The graphs are difficult to read. Simplify, simplify.

Aiptek MobileCinema D10

no surround sound

David, even if you had a bit of surround sound kit lying about, you couldn't even plug it in. A proper DVD/projector combo would at least have a headphonesocket, perhaps even a spdif output. It's meant for kids and it aspires to no more. Film buffs would probably be disappointed in the low resolution anyway.