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Done already, and it proved useful. Have a look at crashme. That program is also part of the Linux Test Project.

Can you fit your Perl/Python/Ruby interpreter in 150 kilobytes?

No, but SIOD fits into 75K, has a track record with the Gimp and game extension, and has a use-it-any-way-you-want license. I've used it for web-related stuff and sysadminish things, too.

Of the newly announced JMS projects, I'm more excited about the potential Rising Stars TV series based on the excellent comic book series JMS wrote. This project will be developed by Sam Raimi's company.

http://expat.sourceforge.net/

Crashme still exist: http://people.delphiforums.com/gjc/crashme.html

Why not use a tool like crashme to find them?

The project to create an open source version of Delphi Forums is called Project Beehive Forum.

I wonder if this is going to spark a fight for the base name?

I am using the term 'darwinism' to be a catch all phrase for, among other things:
1. All life shares a common ancestor
2. Slow, gradual change rather than punctuated equilibrium (therefore a rejection of Gould's 'Hopeful Monster')
3. Naturalism (as opposed to scientific theories that are not naturalistic)

Possibly other things I'm forgetting.

So, you can see fundamental flaws in all that then? If you have devised this concept, it's your problem then isn't it?

I'm currently writing a response to this article, but there are so many mistakes that it is getting quite long. I want to know - if I'm responding, are you interested enough to read my response?

Yes, I will, but I'd much rather hear what argument from the book you find most convincing.

To go back to your original "question", my point has been that while you may be assume readers will mentally insert "(if such problems exist)" on the end of your question, it really should have been stated that way. That's why I can't say yes or no. Given that 'darwinism' is something you have defined on your own, I'll have to say "I don't know, are there any problems? and what is darwinism anyway?"

The AC's have covered the definitions of evolution and the theory of evolution pretty well, nothing I can add to that really. As they said, the theory of evolution is *not* "change in allele frequencies in a population over time", that's the definition of evolution and an observed fact.

So? So, that means that every person on this planet has a reason to be biased about this topic. That's what.

Please explain! Every person? Why?

And just exactly how would any of these discoveries cause Dawkins or Gould to throw up their hands and say "all these years we were wrong, all living things do not share a common ancestor after all!

As the AC said, if you can show evidence of a creature with no common ancestor with all other life on Earth, then the statement "all life on earth shares a common ancestor" is false.

Unfortunately Gould passed away last year. Why are you worried about the hypothetical reaction of Dawkins on the matter? Does the opinion of an authority outweigh the facts?

Funny you should mention that. I know a biologist Christian who is exactly like I just said.

Perhaps he should read this article "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution." I'm not saying I agree with all of that by the way, but I'm not here to argue about religion.

... in K-12 education it's not cool to be smart ...

To be fair to the school system, we should not that this attitude has little to do with the schools. It pervades American society. There has long been a strong anti-intellectual steak in this society, though the schools try to counter it. But they're fighting a losing battle with the political and commercial system, which mostly prefer a citizenry that knows nothing.

Scientific training has long been a special target of American know-nothings. It's not a recent development. When I was in high school in the 1960's, the biology teachers skipped over the chapter on evolution, and told us clearly that we could read it ourselves, but if they taught anything on that topic, they would probably lose their job. In most of the schools, the only change is that many of the textbooks no longer mention the subject at all. This is because of the power of the religious fundamentalists in American society.

Some years back, Theodosius Dobzhansky made the famous remark that Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. Now that the basic biological sciences are starting to make a significant impact on the world, we can expect that America will be left behind, because our schools can't teach the basic concept of the entire subject area. As a result, at the college level we're faced with students who treat biology as a pure memory exercise, since nothing makes any sense to them. The world is just incomprehensible magic, decreed by God.

About the only way it could be worse would be if our engineering schools were forbidden to teach mathematics, and were only permitted to represent numbers with Roman notation. At least the religious folks don't consider Arabic notation a heresy (though there have been those funny incidents in which legislators tried to decree a rational value for pi ;-).

It's similar in our favorite topic here. Despite the huge changes that computers and communications have brought to the world, the fact is that most of our schools don't teach these topics at all. Typically "computer literacy" means having watched the teacher use Internet Explorer and Outlook. It's rare for schools to allow anything more than token hands-on computer access, not enough to actually understand anything about the topic. And, of course, the few students to get interested in such topics usually become social outcasts. A kid who becomes knowledgeable in computer communications is invariably labelled a "hacker", and treated as a criminal.

American science and engineering has always strongly depended on immigrants and their children, because those are mostly the people who have a pro-education attitude. We can expect this to continue.

Of course, for us few weirdo nerds and geeks, it has been a pretty good deal. Better than slinging burgers for a living.

But we can expect that, as the rest of the world's education systems continue their improvement, America will probably be left behind. Well, it was fun while it lasted.

OTOH, maybe the rest of the world will commit economic and social suicide, as it did back in the 1940's. Stay tuned ...

I'd reccomend siod, or perhaps guile.

http://people.delphiforums.com/gjc/siod.html

I've done a fair bit with siod lately, and can say that while it's not the most sophisticated scheme interpreter around, it dovetails very nicely with C code. It's trivial to write new functions, and defining new data types isn't that much more difficult at all.

That's as close to Lisp macros as you can get.


For people looking for Lisp-style macros, siod includes a simple implementation of a feature that works very much like macros. If the symbol in the function spot of a list itself refers to a symbol, the referred to symbol's binding is evaluated as a macro rewriting function.

Oh, and as an example of its simplicity, the whole thing fits in something like 10,000 lines of code. That's garbage collection, a library of simple string functions, a Scheme evaluator, file I/O, and a bunch of stuff I'm probably forgetting...

IIRC, SCM and Guile are both derivations of the original siod code base. For that matter, so is STk, as it it itself based on SCM. Either of those would likely be a good choice too.

Opps, slipped and hit submit before preview
Here is the corrected URL:
This was the Warren Ellis Forum

http://forums.delphiforums.com/ellis/start

You can still see it here.

So what your saying is XFree86 and Cygwin are big peices of shit? Yeah, I'll buy that.

No, he's saying that a user level app shouldn't be able to crash the kernel. All kernel accesses (through system calls) should be checked by the kernel so that nothing untoward could happen.

He's in fact saying that it's a crap kernel that lets itself be crashed by a user level app. If Cygwin/Xfree86 was crap, then that's all that should be able to crash! Not the kernel.

In fact, any decent kernel should be able to survive programs that do system calls with random parameters.

Exceptions in C. You can get quite natural-looking exception handling in C, with some convoluted macros. I'm sure most hardcore C coders have come up with their own implementations.

Actually, the 68K emulator on PPC macs WAS there to run the OS. The OS wasn't fully PPC native til around System 8.5. The PPC macs were launched long before this.

Yes. You are right, and i probably should have mentioned this.

It is probably worth noting that the emulator in an x86 mac os x would not have to run the os, however, as os x has a very flexible, platform-agnostic architecture that it inherited from NeXTSTep (which was a cross-platform OS)..

Secondly, I suspect the lack of PPC emulation on x86 is more to do with it being a significant project that doesn't actually have a great deal of use right now. After all, mac owners have often wished to emulate x86 for the sheer weight of the app support -- but how many x86 people have been bothered about PPC?

This is an excellent point. However, i wasn't really trying to say PPC emulation on x86 isn't possible; just that it is really, really hard. :) I would suggest you take a look at this list of various mac emulators for various platforms; clearly, someone has an interest in emulating macs. There's 18 different packages listed there (although apparently a couple of them are for platforms other than windows). All 18 are 68k-only.

So, yeah, the nonexistence of a PPC-on-x86 emulator doesn't say a *lot*, but it does say something interesting. At the least, i think it says that if apple tried to include a PPC emulator layer with an x86 OS X, it would be a really expensive undertaking, and maybe not worth the trouble.

And the really important thing is that every time in the last 8 years i've seen a PPC-emu project give up, the complaint wasn't that they couldn't make it work, but that they couldn't make it work with acceptable enough performance to justify completing the project. This has happened two or three times, but unfortunately i don't have documentation (links) of this, so you'll just have to trust my (admittedly rather unreliable) memory. You may want to plow through that emulators.com site i addressed earlier; they've been saying for years that they're going to have a PPC-on-x86 emulator done, like, any day now, man, for years, and produced nothing (although they seem to be actually nearing a release date now.. or so they say..)-- but i seem to remember that periodically they will release a kind of progress update, which mostly consists of complaining about how hard it is to emulate a PPC :)