c) Nelly recommended Munich and the Netherlands as best practice. Speaking of which. Does anyone in here knows of **actuall** changes in the usage of software within the Dutch government due to those recommendations?
I know quite a few people working in ministries in Den Haag, and as far as I hear from them the ministries continue to be a 100% MS deployment.
Does *anyone* here has first hand experience with actual changes, or at least scheduled plans to introduce any changes?
In the Netherlands saying 5+3 to small children is now considered too much of an abstraction. -Sorry I don't exactly which is the age group, but I think is something around 8, 9 years old (would be glad if someone could add more precise information about this).
The new official way to teach adding numbers is now something like "5 with 3".
So they are removing mathematical operators, and putting natural language in place, because the abstraction of the operators is considered too high.
Oh, boy. And I assume you would never buy a Volkswagen, or a Mitsubishi, and of course you would never buy anything from any of those nasty evil corporations that do business with China, or supply CCTV equipment for the Big Brother regime in the UK, etc. etc. right? I guess I see a difference between these because:
VW, and Mitsubishi coutries were beaten at war, and I can only expect that the war crimes were dealt with.
Second, you completely mis the point with the CCTV comparison. Chiquita was not selling bananas to evil people. Chiquita was directly corrupting governments, and financing the destruction of the governments that wouldn't be corrupted.
But if these countries would stand up, take their own destinies in hand, quit putting forth corrupt leaders, they could do as they wished with their land. If you actually read the articles, many of those countries tried to take matters in their own hands, by democratically electing leaders, who tried to establish control of their own lands, so that they could do as they wished with their own lands.
Then they got foreign military (read US marines, and/or CIA) invading, and reestablishing the previous situation.
Actually, I am an European, and in my personal experience I have found that most Europeans are not familiar with the history of Central America.
So while I did not conduct a survey using scientific criteria, I did conduct, what I would call, an informal survey on the topic through social contact. In other words I speak from personal experience.
Now please, calm down, start making use of your reading skills, and re-read my post. I never said that Europeans were clueless about anything, I said that
I haven't met many Europeans familiar with... etc. What is your problem with that?
But I do see a difference between getting into military operations in 60s to interfere with other countries, than with stuff that happened hundreds of years ago (as you put it yourself).
Try reading that article in wikipedia, or other resources on the web. U.F.C was also about getting military to overthrow democratically elected governments.
It is hard to compare such distinct events. But I would say that the damage caused by Pearl Harbor was "contained", and later "repaired". The US did not suffer that much from that war, and Japan was given conditions to rebuild.
Pearl Harbor did not destroy the US democracy.
The damage caused by the United Fruit Company, to that region (Central America) stability, to those countries democracies is still an issue to this day.
The land that many of those countries tried to nationalize, and died for trying it, is still in the hands of the "United Fruit Company". Now renamed "Chiquita".
The grandchildren of those who died in the 50s, 60s for it, are still workers in that same land, and did not become land-owners.
Those sitting at Chiquita today did not cause the offense. But they still make profits out of it, and the mess caused by that offense perpetuates to this day.
At least now you slashdotters know how the expression banana republichttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic came to be. A republic that a criminal banana company would be capable of destroying.
Currently there are perfectly good projects that have been abandoned by their developers despite being used by large corporations. Subsequently the projects fall out of use. This is probably true. But then, the situation with closed source is incredibly worse.
With open source, you should always be able to get your hands in code. Compare that to, unsupported & long forgotten, closed sourced binary objects necessary for a large organizations to work.
A professor I took classes from at The University of Sao Paulo, in Brazil, mentioned that the university had at some point all student grades and academic history in this proprietary program that no one knew how to use (except for the most basic commands), and that the binary executable and the database carrying the grades were a single file.
Meaning that the dammed thing would rewrite itself whenever a commit to disk was done.
No one had documentation for it, and the software provider had gone the way of dinosaur.
Mismanagement can happen anywhere. The PHB buys the wrong stuff, manuals are lost etc. With open source the re-engineering part of a rescue like that is normally much more feasible, and much cheaper.
Granted, reading code is harder than writing, but is still much easier than re-engineering.
I don't get why they aren't comfortable with Gentoo's Portage or Arch's Pacman, though, it wasn't stated anywhere into detail enough... Because it is easier to write code than to read?
Ok, ok. To be fair they made some claims on their site. I would prefer if they understood that whenever you claim to have improved something, providing a simple concrete example goes a long way towards convincing your audience that there are good reasons to fork.
You are missing the point that that is a new functionality being added to a motherboard. You don't like it? You still have a motherboard with the same functionality you had up to now.
You *really* don;t want it? Overwrite the flash where the image lies. Rip it off from the board.
My Dell Inspiron also had a built-in OS (though not on the board) that would load much faster (than XP), and play media files. Extra functionality. Don't like, don't use.
Besides, as a lot of people are pointing, the problem is not bundling, the problem is when you have (1) a monopolist (2) abusing its monopoly position.
I believe that this miracle you are bragging about doesn't lie on the "mac brand" part of the story but on the "OS well configured for its video card, for which there were good drivers".
Windows will work just as well, if you buy a quality machine from a brand with good support.
The key is "certified and tested software, on certified and tested hardware".
A Linux dist that you download on an ISO attempts to work on pretty much any graphic card. There lies the difference.
Having to write these hardware detectors that will work on any brand of card, as well as in any copycat card of any "name brand" is not easy.
I could just as well say: some mac fans disagree that being UNable to install my OS on (almost;-)) **ANY** combination of hardware parts is ridiculous.
There is a point that it is easier (but not cheap) to buy a well-certified desktop from Apple than something with Linux. But the fact is that MS keeps the OEMs from doing that.
But a simple example: Debian, for the longest time, had/bin/sh linked to/bin/bash, although they did have a rule that any script requiring/bin/sh should only use POSIX syntax, and not bash-isms. Sometime in 2006, I think, Ubuntu switched/bin/sh to/bin/dash. Dash is much faster than Bash -- so much so that this switch is the main reason that version of Ubuntu booted so much faster than previous versions (it was also when Upstart was first integrated, though Upstart is barely used)...
And since then, certainly, fixes to various packages' scripts which claim #!/bin/sh, but really want bash, have been sent back to Debian. (Either POSIX-ify them, or make them explicitly ask for bash.) If your shell script is not POSIX/bin/sh, don't mark it as a POSIX/bin/sh script. Is that difficult?
FWIW The trick to use dash as/bin/sh was well known by loads of Debian users back in the day when it was still called "ash". It did wonders to the boot time of my old ole PentiumII.
FWIW 2 The first people to actually make the choice of setting dash as/bin/sh, were the Nokia folks that released the N770 internet tablet that runs a Debian based system.
The use of it in N770 lead to loads of scripts being made clean of bashisms. But now with the popularity of Ubuntu, many, many people are forcing "#!/bin/bash" down everyones throats even in cases when it is not necessary.
As fas as I can tell, the reason for it is the good & old NIH complex from which so many GNU fans seem to suffer from. But I could be in wrong on that (but not that much:-P).
In any case, currently "grep bin/bash/etc/init.d/* | wc -l" gives me a count of 5. Why? I mean why on the scripts I use to boot? Five stupid unnecessary reasons for my computer to boot slower, and to force me to have bash installed no matter what. I mean, what harm can it cause to add (truly) unnecessary bloat to a critical part of the system?
Perhaps I am being picky. But IMHO that goes so deeply against what *I* would call "good software engineering" that it really annoys me.
I found it ran like my 256mb system on 512MB, everything would get done but stuff tended to freeze up for abit when doing anything intensive (ironically other than using firefox, which performed fine). I think that it has moved towards being like gnome, run everything though 1 program and it figures out what your trying to do, or in the place of one program 1 interface. I wasn't sure you were talking about Vista or Kubuntu. If it was Kubuntu, please keep in mind that both Ubuntu and Kubuntu have been suffering from desktop responsiveness:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/131094
I am afraid that your university is the exception to the rule.
At least the big companies I have direct contact with, have a police in place to require IE.
Honestly I don't think many companies would switch to more secure, and less capable browser. If they would, there would be many more companies with policies requiring Firefox, and I at least don't see that (stated my personal limited experience, but its the only one I have;-)). Besides, if there is a problem with IE specific code that won't render in *Firefox*, I don't even want to think about the trouble using a much simpler browser.
On the top of that, their web publishing people have already bought expensive Web publishing frameworks to develop upon, which most likely won't work on a simpler browser. Most of these web published will fight to death to keep their "special effects" pages.
There is no such thing as "the Muslims", but many Muslims clearly are.
Many Muslims clearly are. Just as many Christians, and Jews, and Hindus as well. But somehow people only remember the Muslims when having these discussions. Please Google for Christian/Jew/Hindu groups doing terrorism, before thinking about saying that Muslims are special because of "their" terrorist inclinations.
Really? I thought that it was the dutch ***christian*** prime minister, and the other ***christian*** party (sorry don't remember the name) who were just some weeks ago trying to maintain legal restrictions to "blasphemy".
You are quite right that it is an embarrassment that European nations nominally still have "Christian" parties and blasphemy laws. However, these are relics of little practical significance, which is why people are trying to get rid of them. Little significance? I am not so sure.
People are trying to get rid of this law, and these Christian parties in The Netherlands, are working against it. Note that I mentioned that the prime minister belongs to one of these parties. The CDA (Christian Democrats) is the biggest party in the country. So the biggest party in the country is trying to maintain the blasphemy laws.
Please note as well, that living in the Netherlands, ****starting next year**** I won't be able to make my groceries on a Sunday. You know why? Because they are going to stop supermarkets and commerce in general to open on Sundays.
The reason **stated** for it is that, well, Christian parties got big, and the Bible says that people should rest on a Sunday.
This is clearly not Saudi Arabia, but if anything, these religious motivated laws are actually gaining (not losing) momentum (in The Netherlands at least).
My point is that the power unbalance is just too large.
My proposal is not to just put lots out of the office, and simply trust the new people; but to (try to) accomplish real separation of powers between the three traditional government branches. So that these, highly funded, highly empowered branches, assigned to serve the public interest can restrict each other.
Note that having all these branches in place will lead to nowhere if there is no public interest in what & how they are doing.
A published protocol? What gives? What forces them to respect the protocol? Would you trust them to respect this published protocol forcing two-way surveillance? (not a rhetorical question dude!).
Aren't all those laws in the line of "don't listen to my phone calls without a judicial order. If you do (without order), you get jail time." a very honest and serious attempt of an "two-way surveillance" protocol? Executive & judiciary controlling each other?
Having all the cryptography in the planet won't help you, if they can make arbitrary laws, making a criminal out of you, and then send trained armed people to your house, and send you to Gitmo.
AIR makes it a lot easier for web developers to create apps on the desktop. You can write apps in either Flash, Flex (now open source) or HTML and Javascript. Or GWT.
There are way too many people who wouldn't consider buying it without XP, so they have good reasons to sell it with XP. However unless MS is willing to subsidise it, IF they get sold at the same price point, as the article suggests, (even with more memory on the Linux machine) I would expect Asus to have a higher margin selling EEE with Linux loaded.
The point is that Asus has started a price war for sub-notebooks. There are loads of vendors joining, anyone of these offering Linux will be able to either sell for less, or have a higher margin for selling it with Linux.
Sorry, you miss the point. Biometrics are not private and any biometric system which is built with that assumption is flawed.
But I suppose you wear a tinfoil mask to guard against those face recognition systems tied to cameras because your face data is yours and only yours.
You are confusing the ethics, legality and technology behind biometrics in a bad way.
I am confusing so much? Really? Please tell where is the police state where you live. Since your biometrics are not private (as you say it yourself), I assume your government has the right to request your DNA sample (or iris scan) in order to allow you to enjoy public services. Or not?
Get a grip dude:
My blood type is (still) legally private.
My iris scan is (still) legally private.
My DNA is (still) legally private.
I am still allowed to walk down the street anonymously, with a cap, and dark glasses own, and a police officer still needs probable cause to ask me to remove those. A police officer also needs cause to request a fully, well made iris scan.
But if I need to: travel abroad, or while living in another EU country, get any paperwork done. (Both rights I have, mind you). I need a passport.
To have a passport I need to surrender my fingerprints. My fingerprints are no longer private, the government has the right to request them. I fully understand that, and I do oppose it.
Not only that, the government also made my fingerprints much, much less private. Now people don't need special permits or access to a (well kept?) database to have a copy of a very good scan of my fingerprints. Because now for every service I need to present a passport, I'll need to handle over these (high quality) files (kept in the passport) for copy if so desired.
Before, if a hotel clerk wanted my fingerprints it would be manual job, it would be time costing, expensive, and the quality would be poor. Now he buys a reader, asks to take a look at my passport, and voila! High quality copies made in a second, to extra costs, no extraordinary effort. My government after all, took good care and spend good money for it to be easy.
So now, not only my central government has access to these (high quality) scans, but also a bunch of other people as well. Which is, lets face it, a much worse problem.
I reckon you hint at the point that people confuse anonymity with privacy. But trust me, I am pretty aware of the difference.
The whole point of the parent poster is apparently lost to you.
The point being that my biometric data is mine. It is private. It is not the government's business to have my blood samples, or DNA, or finger print. I am not a criminal, and therefore I expect to be entitled to some privacy from the BigBrother.
Once some retarded government bureaucrat decides to leave a laptop inside a taxi or something, my private data is lost, and I can never get a new fingerprint, or iris scan. I can get a new social security number, I can get a new passport, a new bank account number, but I **cannot** get a new DNA.
Slashdot Mirror
I know quite a few people working in ministries in Den Haag, and as far as I hear from them the ministries continue to be a 100% MS deployment.
Does *anyone* here has first hand experience with actual changes, or at least scheduled plans to introduce any changes?
The new official way to teach adding numbers is now something like "5 with 3".
So they are removing mathematical operators, and putting natural language in place, because the abstraction of the operators is considered too high.
No joke.
BTW, as I mentioned elsewhere it is not as if they have stopped these practices
http://www.peuples-solidaires.org/article801.html
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=2952161&page=1
Where, and when are we getting to see the browser usage distribution of Slashdot?
I bet you could have one of those stories with more than 1000 posts by publishing it in the "Taco Blog", and linking to it.
It would probably be very interesting to see how (if?) the distribution varies depending on section (games, linux, mac etc).
Then they got foreign military (read US marines, and/or CIA) invading, and reestablishing the previous situation.
Get a sense of perspective will you? It is not as if Chiquita stopped doing dirty operations a long time ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doe_v._Chiquita_Brands_International
So while I did not conduct a survey using scientific criteria, I did conduct, what I would call, an informal survey on the topic through social contact. In other words I speak from personal experience.
Now please, calm down, start making use of your reading skills, and re-read my post. I never said that Europeans were clueless about anything, I said that
I haven't met many Europeans familiar with... etc. What is your problem with that?But I do see a difference between getting into military operations in 60s to interfere with other countries, than with stuff that happened hundreds of years ago (as you put it yourself).
In the case you haven't noticed there is a lot more to Slashdot than just US-educated readers.
Chiquitas sell a lot in, for instance, Europe; and I haven't met many Europeans familiar with the actual meaning of "banana republics".
Try reading that article in wikipedia, or other resources on the web. U.F.C was also about getting military to overthrow democratically elected governments.
This is not your regular bribing company.
You have a valid point.
It is hard to compare such distinct events. But I would say that the damage caused by Pearl Harbor was "contained", and later "repaired". The US did not suffer that much from that war, and Japan was given conditions to rebuild.
Pearl Harbor did not destroy the US democracy.
The damage caused by the United Fruit Company, to that region (Central America) stability, to those countries democracies is still an issue to this day.
The land that many of those countries tried to nationalize, and died for trying it, is still in the hands of the "United Fruit Company". Now renamed "Chiquita".
The grandchildren of those who died in the 50s, 60s for it, are still workers in that same land, and did not become land-owners.
Those sitting at Chiquita today did not cause the offense. But they still make profits out of it, and the mess caused by that offense perpetuates to this day.
I find it funny how the wikipedia article on Chiquita just mentions the name change but none of the history it was meant to hide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiquita_Brands_International
At least now you slashdotters know how the expression banana republic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic came to be. A republic that a criminal banana company would be capable of destroying.
With open source, you should always be able to get your hands in code. Compare that to, unsupported & long forgotten, closed sourced binary objects necessary for a large organizations to work.
A professor I took classes from at The University of Sao Paulo, in Brazil, mentioned that the university had at some point all student grades and academic history in this proprietary program that no one knew how to use (except for the most basic commands), and that the binary executable and the database carrying the grades were a single file.
Meaning that the dammed thing would rewrite itself whenever a commit to disk was done.
No one had documentation for it, and the software provider had gone the way of dinosaur.
Mismanagement can happen anywhere. The PHB buys the wrong stuff, manuals are lost etc. With open source the re-engineering part of a rescue like that is normally much more feasible, and much cheaper.
Granted, reading code is harder than writing, but is still much easier than re-engineering.
Ok, ok. To be fair they made some claims on their site. I would prefer if they understood that whenever you claim to have improved something, providing a simple concrete example goes a long way towards convincing your audience that there are good reasons to fork.
You *really* don;t want it? Overwrite the flash where the image lies. Rip it off from the board.
My Dell Inspiron also had a built-in OS (though not on the board) that would load much faster (than XP), and play media files. Extra functionality. Don't like, don't use.
Besides, as a lot of people are pointing, the problem is not bundling, the problem is when you have (1) a monopolist (2) abusing its monopoly position.
I believe that this miracle you are bragging about doesn't lie on the "mac brand" part of the story but on the "OS well configured for its video card, for which there were good drivers". Windows will work just as well, if you buy a quality machine from a brand with good support.
The key is "certified and tested software, on certified and tested hardware".
A Linux dist that you download on an ISO attempts to work on pretty much any graphic card. There lies the difference.
Having to write these hardware detectors that will work on any brand of card, as well as in any copycat card of any "name brand" is not easy.
I could just as well say: some mac fans disagree that being UNable to install my OS on (almost ;-)) **ANY** combination of hardware parts is ridiculous.
There is a point that it is easier (but not cheap) to buy a well-certified desktop from Apple than something with Linux. But the fact is that MS keeps the OEMs from doing that.
FWIW The trick to use dash as /bin/sh was well known by loads of Debian users back in the day when it was still called "ash". It did wonders to the boot time of my old ole PentiumII.
FWIW 2 The first people to actually make the choice of setting dash as /bin/sh, were the Nokia folks that released the N770 internet tablet that runs a Debian based system.
The use of it in N770 lead to loads of scripts being made clean of bashisms. But now with the popularity of Ubuntu, many, many people are forcing "#!/bin/bash" down everyones throats even in cases when it is not necessary.
As fas as I can tell, the reason for it is the good & old NIH complex from which so many GNU fans seem to suffer from. But I could be in wrong on that (but not that much :-P).
In any case, currently "grep bin/bash /etc/init.d/* | wc -l" gives me a count of 5. Why? I mean why on the scripts I use to boot? Five stupid unnecessary reasons for my computer to boot slower, and to force me to have bash installed no matter what. I mean, what harm can it cause to add (truly) unnecessary bloat to a critical part of the system?
Perhaps I am being picky. But IMHO that goes so deeply against what *I* would call "good software engineering" that it really annoys me.
If it was Kubuntu, please keep in mind that both Ubuntu and Kubuntu have been suffering from desktop responsiveness: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/131094
At least the big companies I have direct contact with, have a police in place to require IE.
Honestly I don't think many companies would switch to more secure, and less capable browser. If they would, there would be many more companies with policies requiring Firefox, and I at least don't see that (stated my personal limited experience, but its the only one I have ;-)).
Besides, if there is a problem with IE specific code that won't render in *Firefox*, I don't even want to think about the trouble using a much simpler browser.
On the top of that, their web publishing people have already bought expensive Web publishing frameworks to develop upon, which most likely won't work on a simpler browser. Most of these web published will fight to death to keep their "special effects" pages.
There is no such thing as "the Muslims", but many Muslims clearly are.
Many Muslims clearly are. Just as many Christians, and Jews, and Hindus as well. But somehow people only remember the Muslims when having these discussions. Please Google for Christian/Jew/Hindu groups doing terrorism, before thinking about saying that Muslims are special because of "their" terrorist inclinations. Really? I thought that it was the dutch ***christian*** prime minister, and the other ***christian*** party (sorry don't remember the name) who were just some weeks ago trying to maintain legal restrictions to "blasphemy".
You are quite right that it is an embarrassment that European nations nominally still have "Christian" parties and blasphemy laws. However, these are relics of little practical significance, which is why people are trying to get rid of them. Little significance? I am not so sure.
People are trying to get rid of this law, and these Christian parties in The Netherlands, are working against it. Note that I mentioned that the prime minister belongs to one of these parties. The CDA (Christian Democrats) is the biggest party in the country. So the biggest party in the country is trying to maintain the blasphemy laws.
Please note as well, that living in the Netherlands, ****starting next year**** I won't be able to make my groceries on a Sunday. You know why? Because they are going to stop supermarkets and commerce in general to open on Sundays.
The reason **stated** for it is that, well, Christian parties got big, and the Bible says that people should rest on a Sunday.
This is clearly not Saudi Arabia, but if anything, these religious motivated laws are actually gaining (not losing) momentum (in The Netherlands at least).
My proposal is not to just put lots out of the office, and simply trust the new people; but to (try to) accomplish real separation of powers between the three traditional government branches. So that these, highly funded, highly empowered branches, assigned to serve the public interest can restrict each other.
Note that having all these branches in place will lead to nowhere if there is no public interest in what & how they are doing.
A published protocol? What gives? What forces them to respect the protocol? Would you trust them to respect this published protocol forcing two-way surveillance? (not a rhetorical question dude!).
Aren't all those laws in the line of "don't listen to my phone calls without a judicial order. If you do (without order), you get jail time." a very honest and serious attempt of an "two-way surveillance" protocol? Executive & judiciary controlling each other?
Having all the cryptography in the planet won't help you, if they can make arbitrary laws, making a criminal out of you, and then send trained armed people to your house, and send you to Gitmo.
The power unbalance is just too large.
There are way too many people who wouldn't consider buying it without XP, so they have good reasons to sell it with XP. However unless MS is willing to subsidise it, IF they get sold at the same price point, as the article suggests, (even with more memory on the Linux machine) I would expect Asus to have a higher margin selling EEE with Linux loaded.
The point is that Asus has started a price war for sub-notebooks. There are loads of vendors joining, anyone of these offering Linux will be able to either sell for less, or have a higher margin for selling it with Linux.
But I suppose you wear a tinfoil mask to guard against those face recognition systems tied to cameras because your face data is yours and only yours. You are confusing the ethics, legality and technology behind biometrics in a bad way.
I am confusing so much? Really? Please tell where is the police state where you live. Since your biometrics are not private (as you say it yourself), I assume your government has the right to request your DNA sample (or iris scan) in order to allow you to enjoy public services. Or not?
Get a grip dude:
My blood type is (still) legally private.
My iris scan is (still) legally private.
My DNA is (still) legally private.
I am still allowed to walk down the street anonymously, with a cap, and dark glasses own, and a police officer still needs probable cause to ask me to remove those. A police officer also needs cause to request a fully, well made iris scan.
But if I need to: travel abroad, or while living in another EU country, get any paperwork done. (Both rights I have, mind you). I need a passport.
To have a passport I need to surrender my fingerprints. My fingerprints are no longer private, the government has the right to request them. I fully understand that, and I do oppose it.
Not only that, the government also made my fingerprints much, much less private. Now people don't need special permits or access to a (well kept?) database to have a copy of a very good scan of my fingerprints. Because now for every service I need to present a passport, I'll need to handle over these (high quality) files (kept in the passport) for copy if so desired.
Before, if a hotel clerk wanted my fingerprints it would be manual job, it would be time costing, expensive, and the quality would be poor. Now he buys a reader, asks to take a look at my passport, and voila! High quality copies made in a second, to extra costs, no extraordinary effort. My government after all, took good care and spend good money for it to be easy.
So now, not only my central government has access to these (high quality) scans, but also a bunch of other people as well. Which is, lets face it, a much worse problem.
I reckon you hint at the point that people confuse anonymity with privacy. But trust me, I am pretty aware of the difference.
The point being that my biometric data is mine. It is private. It is not the government's business to have my blood samples, or DNA, or finger print. I am not a criminal, and therefore I expect to be entitled to some privacy from the BigBrother.
Once some retarded government bureaucrat decides to leave a laptop inside a taxi or something, my private data is lost, and I can never get a new fingerprint, or iris scan. I can get a new social security number, I can get a new passport, a new bank account number, but I **cannot** get a new DNA.