Is Charlie D on drugs?

I think that the majority of us is too concerned about the gestation period of an elephant or a mole. Drugs do strange things to the mind. Charlie?

Name, email address supplied

Subject: Uncertain Link

Mr. Magee:

1. Before you ask "Why am I getting this mail?", I ask you to bear with me, as I will get to that. I would first like to address my concern with one of your stories.

2. In your story "AMD 'wire up the poor' scheme seems to run out of steam", located at:

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=34984

The last sentence refers to an AMD Web page as evidence:

http://www.amd.com/us-en/Weblets/0,,7832_12095_12104_12106,00.html

That page lists only two press releases:
---------- Partner Press Releases October 28, 2004 Solectron to Manufacture the Personal Internet Communicator Introduced by AMD
October 28, 2004 Samsung Sees Large Market for AMD Personal Internet Communicator; Says Its Memory a Key Aspect of PIC Design
----------
However, there is another AMD Web page that seems to indicate that something is still happening in 50x15:

http://www.amd.com/us-en/Weblets/0,,7832_12095_12104_12105,00.html

That page lists 11 AMD press releases - 3 in 2004, 4 in 2005, and 4 to date in 2006. Five of those releases (1 in 2004, 3 in 2005, 1 to date in 2006) indicate activity with three other partners - Telmex (Mexico), Telefonica (Brazil), and Cable & Wireless.

While the 50x15 program may not be measuring up to what AMD would like others to think it is, I believe that the Web page cited in your article is misleading about how moribund the program is. By the way, 50x15.com is the program home page.

3. You are receiving this mail because the "INQUIRER newsdesk" and "Flame Author" links in the article are Javascript links. I keep Javascript disabled for security reasons, about which your site has published at least 3 articles (discovered within the first 50 results of a Google search):

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=32402
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=24110
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=13741

I do not see why an alternate mail form could not be available through a standard HTML link. As far as Javascript doing things like auto-returning the article URL (if it can do that - I don't use Javascript), I think that dinosaurs like me would be willing to put up with additional fields to fill out (copy-and-paste isn't that hard - just say what to copy).

4. I hope you take this missive in the proper spirit, find it to be useful, and make use of it. Frankly, if not, I won't lose sleep.

P.S.: I put your address in MailTester.com, which said that your mailserver doesn't allow address verification. Curmudgeons like me see that as "OK, if this one doesn't work, I WILL find one that does. I've thrown spaghetti against the wall to see if it sticks!"

Glenn Elliott

Subject: GravityZoo vs. REBOL

As y'all might have noticed, GravityZoo's concept shares a lot in common with Carl Sassenrath's REBOL "Internet OS" (or "Internetty application-hosting environment," anyway) -- see http://rebol.com/reblets.html for its approach, basically using a Perl/Python/Ruby-style environment with some theoretically nifty object replication sugar.

GZ gets points for being open-source, however it's certainly not clear what, if anything, they might offer above and beyond a splash of VNC and NFS. (Of course, nobody's made it braindead simple to serve individual application windows vs. full desktops as VNC sessions, so even that could be an improvement on the present state of the world.

I suppose it'll be interesting to compare and contrast approaches when they actually have something out, though you could probably apply that to Java, Flash, and whatever's left of .NET, too. (REBOL and this new project share a distinct similarity in making the direct applications! on! the! internets! pitch, which has always had the 'oh, cool, but what to do with it?' cachet.)

jkanowitz

Subject: Climate catastrophe to cost trillions by 2100

These Al Gore fear mongers are kooks. If the Earth goes down it will not be from our actions. There are and is credible evidence that shows the Earths orbit and other factors change the climate over time and it is a cycle. But the liberal fear monger kooks don't want to look at any of that evidence. They want to say its all George Bush's fault. He is even responsible for and the reason we have all this oil to burn. Idiots + kooks Equals Democrats

The US is a Republic anyway not a Democracy.

Have a great day
Glenn

Subject: Vista Eula

Well

That buggers up remote connections then doesnt it? Does that mean if I want to do a remote desktop to help a collegue with Vista I have to purchase a licence as well......

ckd

Subject: NTP-admins has lost it?

"Thieves steal 7,000 D-Link broadband routers" any relation to this ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTP_vandalism#D-Link_and_Poul-Henning_Kamp

Btw, the Hermitscave link (Discuss) at the bottom of each article is confusing.

ciantic

Subject: Friends of the Earth and mathematical skills

Friends of the earth are projecting a cost of £11 trillion per year by the end of the century, and claim that spending 1.6 trillion per year will be required to prevent it. Now assuming that the 11 trillion cost is only in the final year, as they seem to imply, then we can guess that the total cost for the century will be something like 200 trillion, possibly a little more. Now their estimate for the cost per year of their various pet projects is 1.6 trillion which, over the course of a century, will amount to approximately £160 trillion. On face this looks like a significant saving, however there are other factors that come in to play. The first is cost overruns which, based on the performance of various green projects around the globa, can be something on the level of 100% to 200%, or *more*, on top of the original price. In the worst case this can lead to costs of around 4.8 trillion per year, which instantly renders the whole thing uneconomical, as there's no point in spending 480 trillion to save on 200 trillion.

Next, they evidently don't work in the fact that a free market economy will adapt to changing conditions. A changing environment will simply force the econopmy to adapt to it and change its behaviour depending on what effects happen in any given area. This is because a free market economy responds well to external changes, where the sort of command and control economy Friends of the Earth and other AGW advocates envision would be hoplessly unable to keep up with the constant changes of a global economy. That sort of thing would probably be the worst possible solution to any global crisis, yet it's always the one advocated.

Finally there's the question of whether global climate change is something we can effect. There's already an acknolwedgment in the AGW side of the scientific community that the sun affects global temperatures more than previously admitted. Recent research has revealed the mechanism by which interstellar radiation (commonly known as "cosmic rays") can alter cloud cover - and hence albedo - which is partly a result of the relative strength of the sun's magnetic field. Since the sun's magnetic field alters strength in concert with its radiation output (or how much light it shoots at us), the two effects together have a greater net effect than each on its own. This leaves us a mechanism by which the sun itself can account for nearly all the global temperature changes recorded over history, which puts climate change right out of our hands.

They're already predicting a cooling period over the next 30years as a result of the sun's changing activity. If the sun can cause the planet to cool... well.

Graham Dawson