The biggest threat of all is human settlement
Instead, human numbers have now passed six billion and are growing at the rate of 414,000 souls every two days. Each human needs roughly two hectares of land to provide food, water, shelter, fibre, currency, fuel, medicine and a rubbish tip to sustain a lifespan. So the more land humans take, the less that is available for all other mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians... Accordingly, humans and their livestock now consume 40% of the planet's primary production, and the planet's other seven million species must scramble for the rest. Read more...
7/28/2004 12:55:00 am: permalink
Power laws: bigger gets bigger
Ever wondered about "the tendency for the rich to get richer [and] for the healthy to get healthier"? John Allen Paulos relates how mathematical power laws describe these and other disparities that we see around us. Though there is a huge difference between a description and a (justifiable?) explanation for the reason why "the net worth of the world's three richest families - the Gateses, the Sultan of Brunei and the Waltons, of Wal-Mart - exceeded the GDP of the 43 poorest nations [in the world]".
7/24/2004 03:13:00 pm: permalink
Resizing NTFS to make room for Linux
Thanks to Ryan Moffat for pointing me at this comprehensive page. And good luck with the Suse install ;-)
7/14/2004 01:16:00 pm: permalink
Journal of spontaneous networking
...pursuing the value of increasingly large networks has magnified the "fallacies of the network" that Peter Deutsch has so aptly summarized. Certainly, the network is not reliable, at least not all the time: large numbers of hosts connected shifts the chance of failure from probability to certainty. While not outright failure, latency always rears its head. Bandwidth varies widely, decreasing sharply and becoming asymmetrical towards the network's edges. Size introduces so many network participants that security and trust can no longer be assumed. While we have mostly outgrown our obsession over topology—or "topomania" in the words of Gordon Bell—networks are increasingly partitioned around administrative and security domains. And, of course, all those network partitions have their own administrators. Connecting all things has also increased the desire to transmit more things—and transmission costs, both in economic and in networking terms, will likely outpace that increased desire.
From artima.com
From artima.com
7/14/2004 02:49:00 am: permalink
