OK, its not even the end of the beginning, but it is an interesting step towards MS recognising, in its full sense, the reality of the power of OS. They are in the processing of letting the Chinese government peek under the skirts of Windows and in the process of deciding whether or not to port MS server products to Linux and other OSS, and now maybe they are experimenting from the other end as well.

Microsoft opens Windows CE to third parties The vendor expands the shared-source program for its operating system for handhelds, making all source code available to third parties and dropping the ban on commercialising changes to it. Where will it end?

There have been many theories about why western post industrial societies have adopted a reproduction rate that has now fallen below replacement levels. Any number of moralisers and conspiracy theorists, ethicists and proponents of egregious selfishness litter the ground. But Nature magazine has tossed up an even more intriguing possibility, we are energy monsters and, somehow, we know it.

Westerners breed like 30-tonne gorillas.
10 April 2003

JOHN WHITFIELD


It's a paradox that people have fewer children as they get richer.
© GettyImages
The more someone consumes, the fewer children they have, US ecologists have found. This might help to explain the puzzling drop in the birth rates of countries that become technologically developed.

"Birth rates in humans are simply an extension of the trade-off between energy consumption and fertility in other mammals," says Melanie Moses of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

Across the animal kingdom, birth rate falls steadily with increasing food requirements. Energy use is closely linked to size, so bigger animals have fewer offspring.

This seemed not to hold for humans. A female gorilla weighs in at about 100 kilograms, and can expect to have between three and six offspring. The average North American woman weighs considerably less, but will have fewer than two babies.

But human birth rates fit the pattern perfectly if you look at total energy consumption, find Moses and her colleague James Brown. Considering food, transport, heating, entertainment and so on, the average North American runs at 11,000 watts.

This puts them in the King Kong range. "North Americans' energy consumption is equivalent to the metabolism of a 30,000-kilogram primate," says Moses. And they have a birth rate to match.