Weed invasion

by reophax

Weed invasion
[Via BBC News | Science/Nature]

An invasive plant is emerging as a major problem in a Nepalese national park renowned for protecting endangered wildlife species, say scientists.

The Chitwan National Park is listed as a Unesco world heritage site and is a major tourist attraction.

It has been a huge conservation success story, with nearly 100 breeding adult tigers and more than 400 rhinos roaming within its territory.

But a quiet intruder has emerged as a possible threat to the park’s ecosystem.

A native plant of Brazil, the weed Mikenia micrantha, has already covered 20% of the national park in southern Nepal.

[More]

It may be hard to understand why we need to worry about a weed in Nepal, even one that grows ‘a mile a minute.’ But invasive species can hurt a lot of ecosystems. An example is kudzu, which also grows a mile a minute – 150,000 acres a year.

But, this weed from Brazil has just recently been found for the first time here in the US – in Florida. One infestation was at a nursery. Let’s

All 5 reasons are dead on

by viagallery.com

5 Reasons Tablets Suck And You Won’t Buy One/Let’s admit it: tablets suck. They’ve been around for at least a decade and many are faster and offer more capabilities than Apple’s iPad. But why haven’t you bought one yet?
[Via MacSurfer's Oped]

Let’s admit it: tablets suck. They’ve been around for at least a decade and many are faster and offer more capabilities than Apple’s iPad. But why haven’t you bought one yet?

Back in 2002, research and analyst firm Gartner, had this to say: “Tablet PCs will have a natural fit in many vertical applications

that currently use pen-based tablets,” said Ken Dulaney, vice president and research area director for Gartner. “However, a lack of application support, clumsy hardware designs, and a price premium will be barriers for most users.”

That’s still true even today. Tablet manufacturers are doing things all wrong.

[More]

Very nice article. It gives a lot of good reasons for why tablets have been such a dud, why the iPad changes everything and also hints that future devices will be more like the iPad than like a full OS on a tablet.

The key is that the interface needs to be specific for the device. Jury-rigging a desktop OS with mouse/keyboard input into a tablet with no mouse is just arcane. The OS needs to be developed from the ground up, as is the one for the iPad.

As the article states, MS has been lazy with this and will take several years to catch up. Well, it took about 20 for it to catch up at the desktop level, so this could take quire a while.

But without an OS, there will be no apps. This is the tricky thing for Microsoft. They are lured to think that if they can only find a way to shoehorn their OS into a tablet, ALL those applications that run on the desktop will be available to the tablet.

As if any application developed for the desktop would work with a finger-driven input. This may be one of the main reasons for the lack of Flash on the iPhone/iPad – it is really the only web-based bit of software that really requires a mouse-driven input system. Think about a full blown application. How will it deal with a finger-driven world? How do you right-click with your fingers?

Apple spent the hard work modifying OS X to run in a purely finger-driven world. The iPhone/iPad OS is the first really new mainstream operating system metaphor since Apple introduced the idea of a desktop with the first Mac. Because it did this, it now has a huge base of apps ready to use, with a defined pathway for how to accomplish porting of desktop apps to the new system metaphor.

MS is a long way behind, just now talking about its new mobile system, one which still evokes Windows.The world will not really stand for kludgy approaches to hack together a device. These devices are really used by people, not businesses. They need to just work.

Apple put in the work. Microsoft rarely does. And if they won’t who else will build a successful tablet besides Apple? I would not be surprised if, in the long run, Apple’s recent lawsuits about phones are also a shot across the bow for anyone attempting to copy their tech for tablet-like devices.