Rare Birds Yearbook 2008: The World’s 189 Most Threatened Birds
Last year’s Rare Birds Yearbook photo competition was a huge success with more than 1,000 images being submitted and the best were presented in Rare Birds Yearbook 2008, with each published photographer receiving a free copy of the book.The photo competition for Rare Birds Yearbook 2009 has just been launched and will run until 31 May 2008. This year sees a few exciting differences in the competition format.A new category, with a top prize of a travel-friendly Minox telescope, has been introduced for the best photo – or painting – of those species that did not feature with photos in the 2008 edition.There is a completely new contest for this year, a writer’s competition on the subject “My Encounter with a Critically Endangered Bird”. The first prize for this is a copy of the wonderful The Fifty Rarest Birds of the World. This leatherbound volume features stunning images painted by world-renowned wildlife artist Blake Twigden.An important objective of Rare Birds Yearbook is to create funds to save these Critically Endangered birds. That is why for every book sold £4 is donated to BirdLife International, to be used exclusively for the protection and conservation of these species.
For the most part, computer operating systems all have a “shell.” When people talk about the “command line” … they are talking about the prompt in a shell. The concept of a shell, and the way we think of a shell today mostly stems from its implementation on Unix systems. A shell is a computer program that has a human interface and a number of built in or accessible functions (mostly other programs) that humans can invoke to make the computer do something. On ‘servers’ and on most computers back in the old days, the shell would typically appear as a prompt on a computer screen, and that would be all you would get. You type stuff in, and the computer types stuff as well, and between the two of you, stuff happens. On a computer with a graphical user interface (GUI), there is still a shell, but it looks different. The shell is less tangible to the human user, but the GUI itself is a program that provides the user interface, and it may either be the shell itself or it may be invoked automatically as the computer starts up by the shell. 
Dialog from Annie Hall: