This is an interesting article debunking the myth of global warming. It’s written by John Coleman, founder of The Weather Channel.
He makes several very good points and explains why “global warming” has become politically supported these days, even though it’s been completely disproven scientifically. The article isn’t exhaustive on the topic, by any means, but quite interesting and well worth reading:
Mozilla has released Firefox 3, which has a lot of awesome new features and tons of bug fixes. Download it, use it, love it.
Read about the new features in Firefox 3
Mozilla is attempting to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours, you can see a map of their progress so far at the spreadfirefox.com world record map page (you can even get a certificate with your name on it for participating, if that kind of thing interests you).
America is in the lead with well over 2 million downloads, Germany comes in second with almost half a million (huzzah for Germany!!!). Altogether there is a total of over 7 million downloads across the entire globe, but it’s not over yet…… hurry on over and add another download to the count!
Downloads began yesterday, but so many people were trying to download that the Mozilla servers just couldn’t handle it and they were down for a good while; fortunately they’re back up now and cranking the downloads through at almost 9,000 downloads a minute.
The Mozilla Blog has a message from Paul Kim, Mozilla’s VP of marketing, concerning the slowdown:
Our systems were quite busy earlier this morning so individual requests may not have gotten through - but they are all up now and serving a tremendous amount of traffic and downloads. We are currently serving almost 9,000 downloads a minute, which puts us on track to achieve 5-7 million downloads our first day of general availability.
It’s that time of year. Be sure to set all your clocks back an hour when you go to bed tonight.
This year is a little different from all the other years though, this year the end of Daylight Saving Time comes on the first Sunday of November (November 4th) instead of the last Sunday of October as it has in the past (for the US; it’s different for other parts of the world).
On August 8, 2005, President George W. Bush signed the Energy Policy Act of 2005. This Act put into effect a change of Daylight Saving Time dates that begins in 2007, so this is the first year we’ve done this (even though the act is about two years old). The Secretary of Energy will do a study of the results of this change and submit the report to Congress, Congress will then decide if it was all worth it and may or may not wind up putting us back on the old schedule. And no… I have no idea what started all this =)
At any rate, Daylight Saving Time now starts on the second Sunday in March (”spring” forward an hour) and ends the first Sunday of November (”fall” back an hour).
It’s interesting to read the history of Daylight Saving Time to see the path its followed over time. From the clever adjustments made by the ancients, to Benjamin Franklin’s suggestion that cannons be fired off at sunrise to awaken the lazy Parisians sleeping the morning hours away.
Franklin’s famous statement: “early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise” was an urge to his fellow countrymen to work in the light of day and sleep after dark so as to save money on candles. He calculated that if all the families of Paris, who usually caroused until late at night and slept until noon, would make a habit of rising with the sun, 64 million pounds would be saved in a six month period on candle wax alone! He suggested, half jokingly: “to ring church bells at sunrise, and if that was not enough, let canon be fired in every street to wake the sluggards.”
As an amusing side-note to his interest in the saving of money on candles, Benjamin Franklin’s father, Josiah Franklin, was a tallow chandler, a maker of candles and soap; so he was intimately familiar with this topic.
You can read more on the Daylight Saving Time schedule change at http://tf.nist.gov/general/dst.htm where you can pick up bits of information such as this:
“DST was formally introduced in the United States in 1918. Today, most of the country and its territories observe DST. However, DST is not observed in Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and the state of Arizona (with the exception of the Navajo Indian Reservation, which does observe DST).”
As a final note, if you’re ever in doubt of what time it is for any of the US timezones, simply go to http://time.gov/ where you can view the official government atomic clock time (they even tell you how many fractions of a second the estimated margin of error for the displayed time is).
Apple has updated their MacBook lines; nothing revolutionary, but upgrades are always welcome.
The mid and high range MacBooks now come with the 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (upgraded from 2.16GHz).
The processors of the new MacBook’s chips have been moved from the Calistoga chipset architecture to the Santa Rosa architecture.
The frontside bus is now 800MHz (up from 667MHz).
The graphics card was upgraded to the Intel GMA X3100 with 144MB (up from the Intel GMA 950 with 64MB).
And you can now smash 4GB RAM into the MacBook, which is double what it used to max out at.
The MacBook Pro also has a build-to-order option for a 2.6GHz Core 2 Duo processor and a larger hard drive.
Today Apple released Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard,” the latest and greatest operating system for the Mac.
Be sure to check out all the awesome new features.
Panic has released version 1.0.4 of Coda, one of my favorite applications.
Here’s the release information:
Coda 1.0.4 fixes a number of issues and quirks, while offering improved text encoding detection, easier JavaScript debugging, lots of editor improvements, and more. For full details, view the complete release notes.
Don’t forget: Coda’s special introductory pricing won’t last forever. Buy Coda today, secure and easy, and we both win!
This update is free for all Coda users, and is 17 MB in size.
I ran across this news article from Reuters that really cracked me up:
KATHMANDU (Reuters) - Officials at Nepal’s state-run airline have sacrificed two goats to appease Akash Bhairab, the Hindu sky god, following technical problems with one of its Boeing 757 aircraft, the carrier said Tuesday.
Nepal Airlines, which has two Boeing aircraft, has had to suspend some services in recent weeks due [to] the problem.
The goats were sacrificed in front of the troublesome aircraft Sunday at Nepal’s only international airport in Kathmandu in accordance with Hindu traditions, an official said.
“The snag in the plane has now been fixed and the aircraft has resumed its flights,” said Raju K.C., a senior airline official, without explaining what the problem had been.
Local media last week blamed the company’s woes on an electrical fault. The carrier runs international flights to five cities in Asia.
It is common in Nepal to sacrifice animals like goats and buffaloes to appease different Hindu deities.
[ source ]