08 May 2010
by Davidin News Tags: flash, html5, new trend
Apple has a long relationship with Adobe. In fact, we met Adobe’s founders when they were in their proverbial garage. Apple was their first big customer, adopting their Postscript language for our new Laserwriter printer. Apple invested in Adobe and owned around 20% of the company for many years. The two companies worked closely together to pioneer desktop publishing and there were many good times. Since that golden era, the companies have grown apart. Apple went through its near death experience, and Adobe was drawn to the corporate market with their Acrobat products. Today the two companies still work together to serve their joint creative customers – Mac users buy around half of Adobe’s Creative Suite products – but beyond that there are few joint interests.
I wanted to jot down some of our thoughts on Adobe’s Flash products so that customers and critics may better understand why we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. Adobe has characterized our decision as being primarily business driven – they say we want to protect our App Store – but in reality it is based on technology issues. Adobe claims that we are a closed system, and that Flash is open, but in fact the opposite is true. Let me explain.
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06 Apr 2010
by Davidin News Tags: city, dangerous, earth, Life
Climate-related controversies and the outcome of the Copenhagen summit widely regarded as a failure have left a sense of hopelessness in climate policy, says Lord Chris Smith. In this week’s Green Room, he stresses the soundness of the fundamental climate science and the need to continue pushing for meaningful climate deals.
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The worst response to Copenhagen would be to throw up our hands in horror and say nothing was achieved and therefore we should give up
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The myth fostered by some parts of the media in recent months – that somehow the scientific evidence for climate change is deeply flawed – needs to be laid to rest, and soon.
Sloppily expressed e-mail exchanges involving researchers from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), and a blithe assumption that the Himalayan glaciers may melt by 2035, were both irresponsible and damaging.
But we cannot allow a few errors to undermine the overwhelming strength of evidence that has been painstakingly accumulated, peer-reviewed, tested and tested again.
That evidence shows overwhelmingly that our emissions of greenhouse gases are having a serious impact on the Earth’s atmosphere, and that – as a result – climate change is happening and will accelerate.
The damage that has been done by the glee with which sceptics have seized on one or two scientific mistakes and attempted to use them to undermine the whole consensus about the evidence for climate change cannot be underestimated.
Not if but when
In recent years, the public here in the UK, and across much of Europe, had come to accept the reality and the urgency of climate change.
There were still debates about what precisely to do to counter it, but at least the fundamental recognition was there.
I think that is probably less true now than it was four months ago – and that is a tragedy.
We need to take the argument back to the sceptics, and make the powerful, convincing and necessary case about climate change much clearer to everyone.
There may still be a degree of uncertainty, and we need continuously to test the scientific evidence with rigour.
But the uncertainties are not primarily about whether or not climate change is happening, but about how fast the change will come and how bad it will be.
Flooding might not be climate change’s smoking gun, but it is part of a trend
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The evidence of change is indeed there.
The glaciers of the Alps and the Himalayas are retreating. Weather patterns around the world are becoming more erratic and more extreme.
The most intensive rainfall ever experienced in one location over a 24-hour period in England fell on Cumbria last November, and caused the tragic consequences of the severe flooding that we saw in Cockermouth, Keswick and Workington.
We cannot say for certain that these things – or indeed the intense heat recently experienced in Australia, or the droughts in Kenya – were caused by climate change.
But we can see with our own eyes that climatic, weather and temperature trends are changing, and we know that these hitherto exceptional events are likely to become more frequent over coming years.
Here in England and Wales, the Environment Agency works at the very point where people’s lives intersect with environmental change.
We help people prevent and cope with flooding, environmental degradation, water depletion, and pollution.
In our day-to-day work, we can see small things that are happening all around us.
Damselflies and dragonflies are being found much further north than before, as they move with the warming climate.
The rare vendace fish is disappearing from its former stronghold in the Lake District, and is having to be re-introduced into the colder waters of Scotland.
Our yearly water testing over 20 years has shown an average rise in temperature in our rivers of 0.6C (1.1F). These are small signals, but like the canary in the mine, they foretell greater danger in the future.
