Mod the parent up: what his link shows is that Intel are not keeping it a secret that they offload to the processor; they have a published document saying that they do this for 3DMark as well as other software for the XP and Vista driver. I don't know whether they have yet published a similar document for Win7 driver, but Win7 is not yet on the shelves, so it's a bit hard to criticize them for not disclosing for that.
It's not really cheating is it, if you are open about what you are doing; I think the title and tone on the article is inappropriate.
IMO it's debatable whether this sensible for a benchmark or not - but it's not something that they've kept secret in a hope of gaming benchmarks - which is what a lot of other commenters seem to think.
I have no relationship to Intel apart from occasionally buying their products. I also buy other brand microprocessors and graphics hardware. I have mod points, but I think it's more important to point out why this comment is important than to mod it up myself.
I run Linux. I bought ATI because they support open source, but have been very disappointed with their drivers, and the open source drivers aren't great either.
I used the closed source driver because I can play 3d games. I can view more than 1 screen, although in windows both of my screens are rock solid, while in Linux there's flicker on one. I know I'd be able to fix it on Linux BUT.....the reason I am down on ATI is that I have probably spent FIVE days of my life dicking around, trying to get their drivers working with X, and I am not going to spend any more of my limited number of days on earth dealing with this sort of thing. Every time there is a new version of Ubuntu I have had to go through the same stupid waste of time, trying to get everything going satisfactorily again. I like open source, I write open source, I support businesses that support open source, but the next time I have a problem with my video card, I'm going to throw it away and buy a rival card.
Sadly ATI do not support open source enough for their support to be truly useful. Nor do they make great closed source Linux drivers.
It sounds like you are in a sticky situation but maybe all is not yet lost..
Firstly, as a technologist, you are focused on the technology, and it sounds like you've pretty much ignored everything else. For a tech-based business, the tech is necessary, but it's not sufficient. Most tech startups die because they don't pay attention the the things that are out of their sphere of experience, but which are critical to success. It's the WHOLE package that matters, not individual parts. It's impossible to stress this enough.
Start by buying a copy of the Beermat Entrepreneur: it's a quick read - it's not the only book of it's kind, but it hits all the important points I think you need. A key idea is that there are cornerstones to businesses. You only appear to have one cornerstone - a technology person. You need to find people to fill the other cornerstones. Go to all the local networking groups you can find. Go to conferences - look for things that are outside your comfort zone. For instance, you won't find people interested in sales at a tech meeting. Phone up all the people you've worked with, who you thought were great. Chat. Drink wine. It's not going to be quick. You need to persuade these people that if you can find funding that they'll quit their jobs and come to work with you. In return they get about 20% or the business. If you can't persuade the other cornerstones of your idea, it's a non-starter. Go find a job.
If you can persuade these people, then because you don't have any money, you and your team need to persuade either a company to buy your technology as a product/service, or persuade a business angel to fund you.
Wrt the former, you need to list all the strengths and weaknesses of your tech, and find a niche that only your tech can fulfill, where someone with lots of cash is desperate for a solution. It's the job of your marketing person to think about this. Sometimes it helps to have external consultancy because it's likely that it will not be in a niche you know exists. You'll need to validate by talking to people who are potential customers in the niche, to make sure you are targeting the right area. It's the job of your sales person to find companies that match the profile of your nice. Together you need to persuade them to buy early prototypes or a development project. Finally you will have some cash coming in. You need to use as much as you can possibly afford, to grow the business - find the next customer and deliver tech. Repeat until some time later, when you my be able to sell the company.
Or if you think funding is the best way forward, you need to build a portfolio of evidence as to why your technology is ten times better than the competing technology, and you need to show that people are desperate to buy your products, but that you need capital and the angel experience. Much of what I wrote in the previous para applies - you'll need to produce lots of convincing documentation backed by research. There's lots of advice out there about finding an angel. Don't just say yes to the first person to offer you cash: it's better to kill the idea than experience years of pain, andl then have to kill the business. Find someone you like and trust who has good experience that can be applied to your business. Again, this is unlikey to be a quick process.
Even if you don't have an angel, a mentor would be an invaluable asset, and although you probably won't have to produce documentation to the same degree, hunting for the right person is a similar process.
Given that you are out of money, unless you are able to produce an absolute kick-ass demo immediately, and can use this to persuade people, I would stop working on developing the technology, and either switch all my efforts to the other more critical tasks, or stop working on it altogether, and start looking for a job so that you can use the income from the job to fund finding the right people to have a future with.
Lastly, you are much more likely to die from lack of people knowing about your technology tha
When my child gets punished for bad behavior, she will sometimes get cross and in a fit of spite she will do things that she thinks will hurt us, her parents. Often she ends up hurting herself more through her actions.
Microsoft makes some fine software. They are a bunch of bright, creative people. But apparently they have the corporate personality of a 4 year old bully. They were caught being bad, again, and their response to being punished is petulance. Not to worry; they are harming themselves. The middle of a recession is not a good time to make your product more expensive and with a higher barrier to entry.
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I've seen a few people saying that it would be hard for them to give a choice of browsers, and that, in fact, just deciding which browsers would be too hard for some of the brightest people on the planet. I wouldn't compare my intellectual powers with those of Mr Ballmer, but I can imagine that they could: 1. Publish the specifications of the integration API that IE supports, so that it can be implemented in other browsers 2. Publish the source code to IE so that people can see what's missing from the API 3. Bundle Mozilla, Opera and Safari 4. Ask the user for a URL, then download a browser as part of the installation process 5. Ask the user to insert a CD containing the browser
None of these are exclusive of the others - they should be doing all five.
What I see is a case of corporate petulance and bad grace from a management team who think that they are above the law.
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Now some balance.
If I were in the position where I was genuinely surprised by the EU's decision (though I can't see how MS could possibly be surprised), and I was completely unprepared, rather than hold back the launch of the OS globally, I might choose to issue it in stages in the EU to give myself time to comply with the ruling. However, I would also be incredibly careful to communicate about this strategy so as not to upset my customers. But as far as I can make out, this is not what is happening here because I've seen no explanation as to how insisting on a clean install fits in with a two stage strategy or how it complies with the EU ruling.
My point is that this was major tech news. And hours after the news broke, it still hadn't appeared on the front page. It should have been there minutes after the announcement seeing as it's major news nerds. Even that gnat in the technology-news arena, Republica, managed to report it before it appeared here. Slashdot should be waaaaaaay ahead of the crowd in reporting interesting IT stories.
I'm not decrying the Phorm story: I'm also in the UK and have an interest in it, and I'm glad it was published, but to have it appear while news of a major development in the operating-system-wars is sitting in the queue shows that there's a problem in the editorial flow.
I would like to point out that the BBC, Boingboing, South Africa's Mail & Guardian, the UK's Daily Mirror, the bloody Katmandu, Nepal based Republica, and 632 news sources managed to report the announcement of Google Chrome OS before it was a glimmer in Slashdot's eye.
A very poor show for Slashdot, which is supposed to be news for nerds, stuff that matters.
You are quite right that there are only two comments, and that's because the Times are not publishing responses to their article: I submitted one as soon as I learned about their involvement, decrying their actions, and calling on others to do so too. It is yet to be published.
IMO, newspapers feel threatened by good bloggers because there's no space for the interpretation of opinions when you can read the primary source yourself. And this was a self-serving action to fight back against bloggers. It was not in the public interest. The result is that a source of citizen journalism that exposed what policemen thought has been shut down.
Erlang, from what I recall has had the ability to replace running programs in place since forever. A quick look on Amazon shows the first Erlang book dated at 1993. And I think that's probably where I remember reading about it. I thought what a clever technique they had at the time.
Quoting from the an Erlang white paper: "Hot code upgrade - Many systems cannot be stopped for software maintenance. Erlang allows program code to be changed in a running system. Old code can be phased out and replaced by new code. During the transition, both old code and new code can coexist. It is thus possible to install bug fixes and upgrades in a running system without disturbing its operation. "
(Whoever owns that one copy might want to up their price about now. And I think I may go see if I still have my copy to sell to the next highest bidder. Do I hear any Apple patent lawyers bidding? )
With just a little luck this will point help to point out to companies that asserting patent claims over prospective standards is a bad idea, sure to cost more money than it makes.
Measure the memory cost of your web application. Suppose that it's PHP and a session takes 35MB, then you need 35MB for the duration of servicing the request. With 1000 visitors a day, if they all visit during lunch hour, and they are each looking at 10 pages, you'll have about 2.7 requests per second on average.
This means that on average you'll need another (35MB + database overhead + Apache overhead) x 2.7 memory per second. If page generation lasts an astoundingly long 2 seconds, you'd have about 6 sessions stacked up before you recovered the memory used by the first session in the queue. Assuming that you need 10MB for Apache + database, you'd need all of 270MB + OS footprint to run your server.
I think we can safely say that 16GB is overkill under these circumstances.
Of course if it's lunch hour, your peak (which is the important thing) would be higher: maybe 50% people would hit in the first 15 minutes of the hour. You need to do capacity planning which is appropriate for the load and the technology you are using.
By contrast: one of my sites had 15 minutes of fame, and had 20,000 page views across about three hours. It was running as static content, from a Xen instance, with 1GB of memory, and about 25% of processor time on a dual processor 1GHz system. There wasn't even a hiccup in dealing with the load.
Lawyers are paid for their knowledge, judgement and advice. I'm not in the market at the moment, but as an occasional purchaser of legal services, the fact that Jones Day would pursue this claim in this way indicates a lack of sound judgement. If I were looking for a lawyer, I would be thinking - "If they are as clueless about the real world as the reporting on this case suggests, in acting for themselves, then how could they be trusted to give sensible advice to others?" Jones Day have thousands of lawyers, and of course this case is one of thousands that I expect that they are currently involved in, but how could their review team have let this carry on to its conclusion? Incorrect risk analysis on their part? No risk analysis? Could reporting on this be incorrect?
I understand that nobody enjoys information that they consider to be private to be put into the public domain, and that part of the problem is that the internet removes the half-way house that publication on paper provided - semi-public by way of obscurity - that they lacked tools to redact the information, but I'm not sure that this is a good reason for a trademark claim. Perhaps a spokesperson from Jones Day would like to give some background on their decision making and the way that they pursued their claim to provide balance to the commentary.
Your complaint is neatly self-contradictory, both complaining that there is NO EXCUSE while giving an excuse.
The person who should write this module is you - you have experience, you've clearly given it thought, you use Drupal and understand the update status module, it would benefit you and others - but you can't be arsed to. Good one.
I went to a talk given at Microsoft Research, here in Cambridge, UK, a year or two ago, the theme of which was the forthcoming changes we can expect to see in operating systems.
One of the issues that was discussed was the use of virtual memory/swapping - the technique was invented in Cambridge I think. The idea behind virtualising resources is to be able to share resources amongst competing programs. But in a world of 8GB RAM, the point was made that RAM is no longer a limited resource which needs sharing, and consequently, except for when you are running programs like simulations which need vaaaast amounts of RAM to run, virtual memory isn't needed.
The speaker said that Microsoft had done some experimentation with turning virtual memory off on computers with large amounts of memory, but that it hadn't gone well. One problem is that some programs are written with the assumption that virtual memory is present and will be needed, so they explicitly swap pages in and out. These programs die. Unfotunately at the moment Windows is one of these.
So, good idea in principle on a modern system running a set number of tasks, but not possible at the moment in practice.
Mark, since I'm sure you'll be reading these comments....
Roughly how much do each of the users of Ubuntu need to pay you to put Canonical cash positive?
Us business users are the most likely to pay you some money. If it's something small like $100/yr then that's probably inside discretionary spend limits for most businesses, and I'm pretty certain you have the goodwill for this to become a cash stream. Personally, I'd have no problem signing off on $100 a year, knowing that I wasn't going to get anything for it except an ongoing series of Ubuntus. Call the service something like 'Continuity option' which might be the ability to download the next version for free, or payment for managing the ongoing development.
(Yes everyone, we're aware that it's already downloadable for free, and I want to pay to keep it that way. Yes, we're aware of the provisions of the GPL too. Yes, we're also almost all aware of the Canonical promise to keep it free. And I'd like to make sure that it's financially viable to keep it going.)
And while you're here, thanks to you and everyone else who worked hard to put Intrepid and all the previous versions together. I shall be upgrading tomorrow evening.
He's right to the extent that you depend on features which are not represented in standard output formats.
For example, Gmail lets you use tags, and you can build a very useful filing system for your mail on top of tag functionality. There's no standard way of describing tags in files. Imap doesn't have a way to represent tags to mail, except perhaps through folders. So once you invest work in tags, while you can still extract the underlying data, you may well lose the metadata that adds value.
It's a general problem - true for just about any application that adds value to otherwise ordinary data; you invest your time and energy and in so doing you become tethered to the application provider.
IMO whether or not you worry about this depends on the extent to which the data is important to you; I don't see it as an ethical problem.
If you are in marketing, and have a dog of a product to sell, a good tactic is to focus attention on the jam that you'll be selling tomorrow. Of course you don't actually have the jam yet, and you're still selling borg-daschund, so you can't just come out and say 'hey we have this radical NEW NEW softwares so much much better than the old tired limp one you are using to wash your spreadsheets'. So you behave like a hose. A drip here. A leak there. And before you know it all the people are clustered around the tiny tiny pastures of green in a desert of grey, saying 'wowser, check that colour scheme out'. Such a pity that they can't click to discover that the buttons don't do anything, but that's someone elses job and Bob is on an extended five year coffee break.
Don't get too excited people. Remember that Microsoft is incapable of shifting an OS in the timescales that we've seen casually prognosticated. By the beginning of 2010 Vista will have hit its sweet spot in terms of hardware, and the drivers will be mature. That would be the worst time of all to introduce Vista2. Look to about 2012 for the next version, once Vista has peaked.
Microsoft are in a monopolists market, there's no need for them to improve Vista in the short term despite the screams of pain from users. And anyway, the way to maintain dominance when you are the market leader is to force changes, so that your competition looks like followers; there's no way back for them.
Executive summary: don't wait, at best this is a distraction. Go make some software. You be the leaders now.
I think you will find: - Drupal uses UTF8 by default - Drupal has a robust multilanguage approach. - Drupal includes a COD module and doesn't assume a particular payment flow. - The Drupal developers are international. In fact this can be a downside since a good portion of the ec subsystem was developed in Australia (thank you Gordon), and at times it needs to be massaged. I'm thinking of tax issues.
IMO, having implemented Drupal-based ecommerce systems a few times now, I'd say that it's just short of ready for prime-time, and that this book is premature: a case of a publisher trying to climb on a band wagon. (I have no comment on the content of the book - I haven't read it.) I find that Drupal ecommerce is not yet slick enough that I don't worry about details that I shouldn't have to worry about, on the other hand I trust it enough to have implemented it for people who are not technical, and it does contain some really useful specialist product types.
The rate at which Drupal and subsystems such as the ecommerce subsystem improve means that the shortcomings will be fixed inside 18 months.
I'd say that the most important shortcomings are:
Drupal ecommerce does not yet have multi-currency options: it assumes pricing is in a single currency. There are modules which tell you pricing in alternative currencies, but the final bill is in the admin chosen basis currency. If you are in the US, buying from Japan, expect to see a bill in Yen on your credit card statement.
Drupal wants people to be logged in. Anonymous purchasing is a second-class citizen. IMO forcing users through a registration process before they can give you money is bad for business.
There is no nice standard for international addressing, and Drupal suffers from this. EC address management is not integrated with other address-orientated modules.
But...
It Drupal and EC are remarkably flexible. Anything can be a product. It's open source and you can add new stuff: I've built a number of modules including a specialist shipping module for Royal Mail shipping. I haven't found it to be a problem.
Someone complained about the lack of an API. In fact Drupal has a well-developed well-structured API. It's one of the reasons that it has coped well with growth. Try http://api.drupal.org/. The api is largely stable despite the established Drupal policy that backward compatibility is a nice-to-have rather than a given: I've used modules built for later versions which transferred to earlier versions without problems. Your mileage may vary, and of course things change as the system grows. But the changes between versions are well documented. I do think that the established callback injection points could be better documented. But I'd say the complaint about API was uninformed.
Trying to say it's got something to do with gender is a meaningless generalization unless the author shows us the proof. Pointless and offensive at the same time. Try these substitutions for size: "Pandas comment better than Gnomes at coding". (I guess it's cos pandas take time to think. Gnomes are just to fast for their own good.) "Short people code better on average than tall people" (Presumably because their heads are closer to the computer?) "Hispanics code differently to black people." (I have no idea what I can say about this comparison that won't sound racist, and the point of this comment is to show how STUPID any general comparisons like this are.)
On the other hand, maybe these would be valid comparisons: "Managers write worse code than developers". Yep, it might come as a shock that on average people who practice are better. "Good developers comment more than bad developers." Shock! Horror! There's a surprise!
And while I'm at it. The picture that the WSJ used to illustrate their article shows a dramatic lack of imagination. Next time let's have a pictures of a naked coders instead of a half-assed, inappropriate, royalty-free attempt to use a bit of beauty into an otherwise daft article.
Annoyed to find anything I've written marked as Troll. Grrr.
I call bullshit on the parent that suggests that Noooxml is a virus page. That should never have been modded up: it's an attempt to stop people finding out about what has been happening, and I'm prepared to waste karma pointing that out.
Evidence against noooxml: Some random person says that it's a virus but doesn't provide any proof.
Evidence for nooxml being valid: - It's linked from the front page of Groklaw - www.grokla.net. Currently item 2 in the right hand column. "Belgium also stuffed with Microsoft business partners?" - It's linked to from Bob Sutors blog 6 times. Bob is IBM VP for Open Source and Standards, and isn't positive about OOXML. - It's been supported by the FFII and the Shuttleworth foundation (i.e. Mr Ubuntu) amongst others. - It has a proper contacts page and gives telephone numbers. "NoOOXML.org was started by Benjamin Henrion in January 2007 to campaign against Microsoft's push for ISO standardization of their captive document formats. This campaign was part of a global project by the FFII's open standards workgroup that reached standards campaigners in over eighty countries. We thank all those who signed the petition. We gratefully acknowledge the contributions of many, many people including the FFII open standards workgroup, which has worked on the issue of open document formats for many years, coordinators in many countries who helped communicate the issue to national boards and local standards experts, and standards groups and activists globally, who helped build NoOOXML.org into a global success. We thanks those who helped us eat and pay the rent while we did this campaign. NoOOXML.org was mainly funded by ESOMA, with support from the FFII, Shuttleworth Foundation, the Open Society Institute, OpenForum Europe, FTISA, and iMatix Corporation. We thank Microsoft too, who gave us such amusement with their capers that we were obliged to give them the FFII Kayak Award. But open standards are serious business, and the NoOOXML.org campaign has proven that the Community takes this business very seriously.
* Benjamin Henrion +32-484-566109 (French/English)
* Andre Rebentisch +49 4421 301122 (German)
* Pieter Hintjens +32 475 235 984 (English/Dutch/French)
* Alberto Barrionuevo (Spanish)"
Now, moderators, do you seriously think that it's a virus page, and that this is a troll? Or do you think that the parent one-liner without any proof is crap? Mod the original link up. Mod the troll who is trying to stop people finding out about the behaviour of Microsoft down. And mod my original up.
What evidence do you have for that? A search on Google didn't reveal a warning. Looking at the pages, there's a LOT of work there, with seemingly good content.
I'm worried that this is more FUD-mongering, so I'd like to know the details behind your assertion: at the moment it seems like your comment only serves to stop people from clicking through and finding out more about the problems in OOXML.
There's not much point in just comparing APIs or the maps available, although those are important.
Remember Google and Microsoft have very different aims.
Microsoft make their money from Office and Windows. That means that at some stage their mapping is going to be tilted towards Office and Windows. It might be that it will only work on Windows, or that it will require IE9 to work best of all, or that if your user has Office they'll be able to use the SuperZoom functionality, or whatever. It's inevitable, as night follows day that apps that come out of MS are used to tie users into Office and Windows. If this is acceptable to you then there's no barrier to using MS.
Google aims to make money through dissemination of information. The more information that they can disseminate, the better. (So that's why it's free if you are making the information freely available and not if you keep the info closed.) If Google they can tie information into their dissemination platform, then they may be able to make valuable links between corpuses of information. So, Google won't do things that limit your information, but they may in the future, make additions that users may find valuable. These alterations may not necessarily be to your liking - e.g. ads embedded in the maps.
So, the tech factors, the maps, and the slickness of presentation are only part of the story. Also bear in mind the behind-the-scenes reasons why the the mapping facility exists, and the forces on the developers of the API, which will dictate the ways that the API and facilities evolve.
BUT. You should provide benefits for registration and you should let people know clearly that they are using unregistered software, and that you know.
Why is the right amount none? I don't believe that we were unique when (in a past life) on removing copy protection on our software, our sales grew by about 20%.
I think people want to test software before they pay for it, and copy protection stops them from using a try-before-you-buy approach. I think that most people who can afford the software and who think it's good value will pay for it whether or not there's copy protection. The others won't, but they may be an advert. I think it's more likely that companies will pay than private individuals, particularly if they are worried about sanctions posing a risk to their business.
So, include no active copy protection, but do include measures that let people know the status of the software very clearly. A nice bright - 'Unregistered software' on startup + a similar notice on screen + a similar notice on print outs + these notices should change so that they don't become background that is filtered out of consciousness + a help link to your registration page + a note in the help about why they should register the software [make a point of saying that it's not just their company that is breaking the deal, but them personally] + a record of the IP address on screen + a note to say that the software phones home to say it's being used, with a note of what it tells + a note about benefits of registration - e.g. registered software gets automatic update notices + whatever extra benefits you can think of that are only available to people who have registered. The point is to embarass people into paying if they are on the borderline, but not to annoy those who will pay.
If you are being clever, track the number of times a particular copy is used, and let the user know. And let them know that you know.
Also make provision for unregistered, old versions of the software to become free - i.e tone down the notes when they are 2 versions old, but replace with a sign that says 'Version 1 is now free for use provided it's not used with projects of more than 100 steps. Version 3 includes many useful features and is only $150.' Old versions become adverts: after all, you aren't selling them anymore, and if someone hasn't paid after 2 years, they aren't likely to start now.
You also have to make it ridiculously easy for people to register, and even more importantly, for people who have previously registered, who change their machine, or who lose their hard drive (or whatever) you have to make it incredibly easy for them to retrieve their registration.
Put *NO* barriers in front of people who want to pay you, or who have paid you. These are the people who need your love because a major portion of profit on commercial software comes from upgrades.
Let's use it then... so you put a deadman-kill-switch on your motormower, in case you forget it's running.
Yes! If I don't have my hands on the push bar, I want the blade to stop spinning.
But in the world of plants, pollen, bees, wind, this translates so that your motormower switch magically reappears in your... wife's hair dryer, your kid's power-assisted-brakes quad-bike, your popcorn machine, your oil-heating regulator, your iPod, your... get the picture ?
Yes exactly! I want to be able to turn off the disasterous combination of lawnmower and hair-dryer. Remember that this shows up in the children. I definitely, definitely want to be able to completely kill any hybrids because I don't want the genes to escape into the environment until I'm sure of the consequences.
there's plenty of fucking food for everyone already, just no simple way to get it to everyone cheap enough.
There is now. The population is on an exponential-type growth curve. Do you think that there will be in 20 years time? 40 years time? Plus we've got a problem of global warming which may very well lead to crop reductions. I want tools to tackle this. The likely reality is that if we don't find ways to increase food production in the future, tens or hundreds of millions of people will starve to death. But the technology to do this needs work right now, not in 20 years time because there's a 20 to 40 year lead in from the invention of a technology through to the widespread use.
I absolutely agree with you that we desperately need to be able to move food to where it's needed most. One of the ways of doing this would be to grow it in the places that it's needed. It would be brilliant if we could grow food in arid regions, if we could introduce salt-dependence into these plants, and if we could make plants that required huge temperature variations to thrive. Then we'd have plants that could only live in semi-desert areas. (Wouldn't it be terrific if these plants could also fix carbon as graphite? You'd have pencil trees! Then you'd have to deal with the excess oxygen, because we don't want to raise the percentage of oxygen that's in the atmosphere. Maybe you'd be able to catch stray hydrogen atoms and turn it into water, which is exactly what you want in a desert. But I digress...)
GM is used PRIMARLY to permit widespread use of toxic weedkillers without killing the cash crop, thus pouring millions of liters of toxic waste into our closed-loop environment for the financial benefit of the irresponsible shareholders of a handful of corporations. Thanks, but no thanks, we don't need corporate shills to fuck us and all future generations over for a few quick bucks.
Not surprisingly perhaps, companies use tools that they have to increase profits. This does not mean that these tools are not available for other uses. We are right at the very beginning of this technology curve, and I think that when you're at the beginning, you focus on the first applications, in just the same way that the mill workers in England focused on the way that mechanisation was taking away their jobs. But, I think your view is right, I think it's amazingly stupid to insert genes for resistance to weedkillers into plants. However companies are doing this, and as sure as day follows night, these genes will escape into other species.
It seems entirely sensible to me to insert fail-safe control mechanisms into genetically engineered products: we want a way to limit the damage they can cause in the event that something bad happens. We do NOT want the uncontrolled spread of something that turns out to have been an environmental disaster. For for trains, the equivalent is the dead-man's-switch.
If this means that farmers can't grow plants from seeds then I for one am happy with this. And actually, I'd like multiple off switches so that we can be as certain as we can that we will be able to contain the inevitable failures.
Farmers do not have to use the genetic engineered varietals, they do so in the belief that they'll be getting a better return on investment than with a normal plant.
I say all this as a GM believer. I don't see any way through to feeding the world, except through the use of GM, so I'm pro GM.
Sidenote: Ooh, I feel a software patent coming on! I started with an analogy to using Break/Ctrl+Alt+Delete/Ctrl+C to stop run-away programs, but these take a positive action to stop the program, whereas failsafe mechanisms require an action to continue. In multithreaded or multiprocess software designed for multi-core processors, if some program goes awry, you want the parts of the program to stop: they should be designed so that without positive input from the controlling process they cease funtioning. For instance one embodiment of the present invention is a computing device programmed such that if the child computation of a parent computation fails to receive a heartbeat signal from the parent computation, or any computation acting in its stead, then said computation should end. Remember you read it here first, and prepare yourself to pay me billionz!!! Oops, forgot to file it, and now it's in the public domain.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod the parent up: what his link shows is that Intel are not keeping it a secret that they offload to the processor; they have a published document saying that they do this for 3DMark as well as other software for the XP and Vista driver. I don't know whether they have yet published a similar document for Win7 driver, but Win7 is not yet on the shelves, so it's a bit hard to criticize them for not disclosing for that.
It's not really cheating is it, if you are open about what you are doing; I think the title and tone on the article is inappropriate.
IMO it's debatable whether this sensible for a benchmark or not - but it's not something that they've kept secret in a hope of gaming benchmarks - which is what a lot of other commenters seem to think.
I have no relationship to Intel apart from occasionally buying their products. I also buy other brand microprocessors and graphics hardware. I have mod points, but I think it's more important to point out why this comment is important than to mod it up myself.
I run Linux. I bought ATI because they support open source, but have been very disappointed with their drivers, and the open source drivers aren't great either.
I used the closed source driver because I can play 3d games. I can view more than 1 screen, although in windows both of my screens are rock solid, while in Linux there's flicker on one. I know I'd be able to fix it on Linux BUT... ..the reason I am down on ATI is that I have probably spent FIVE days of my life dicking around, trying to get their drivers working with X, and I am not going to spend any more of my limited number of days on earth dealing with this sort of thing. Every time there is a new version of Ubuntu I have had to go through the same stupid waste of time, trying to get everything going satisfactorily again. I like open source, I write open source, I support businesses that support open source, but the next time I have a problem with my video card, I'm going to throw it away and buy a rival card.
Sadly ATI do not support open source enough for their support to be truly useful. Nor do they make great closed source Linux drivers.
It sounds like you are in a sticky situation but maybe all is not yet lost..
Firstly, as a technologist, you are focused on the technology, and it sounds like you've pretty much ignored everything else. For a tech-based business, the tech is necessary, but it's not sufficient. Most tech startups die because they don't pay attention the the things that are out of their sphere of experience, but which are critical to success. It's the WHOLE package that matters, not individual parts. It's impossible to stress this enough.
Start by buying a copy of the Beermat Entrepreneur: it's a quick read - it's not the only book of it's kind, but it hits all the important points I think you need. A key idea is that there are cornerstones to businesses. You only appear to have one cornerstone - a technology person. You need to find people to fill the other cornerstones. Go to all the local networking groups you can find. Go to conferences - look for things that are outside your comfort zone. For instance, you won't find people interested in sales at a tech meeting. Phone up all the people you've worked with, who you thought were great. Chat. Drink wine. It's not going to be quick. You need to persuade these people that if you can find funding that they'll quit their jobs and come to work with you. In return they get about 20% or the business. If you can't persuade the other cornerstones of your idea, it's a non-starter. Go find a job.
If you can persuade these people, then because you don't have any money, you and your team need to persuade either a company to buy your technology as a product/service, or persuade a business angel to fund you.
Wrt the former, you need to list all the strengths and weaknesses of your tech, and find a niche that only your tech can fulfill, where someone with lots of cash is desperate for a solution. It's the job of your marketing person to think about this. Sometimes it helps to have external consultancy because it's likely that it will not be in a niche you know exists. You'll need to validate by talking to people who are potential customers in the niche, to make sure you are targeting the right area. It's the job of your sales person to find companies that match the profile of your nice. Together you need to persuade them to buy early prototypes or a development project. Finally you will have some cash coming in. You need to use as much as you can possibly afford, to grow the business - find the next customer and deliver tech. Repeat until some time later, when you my be able to sell the company.
Or if you think funding is the best way forward, you need to build a portfolio of evidence as to why your technology is ten times better than the competing technology, and you need to show that people are desperate to buy your products, but that you need capital and the angel experience. Much of what I wrote in the previous para applies - you'll need to produce lots of convincing documentation backed by research. There's lots of advice out there about finding an angel. Don't just say yes to the first person to offer you cash: it's better to kill the idea than experience years of pain, andl then have to kill the business. Find someone you like and trust who has good experience that can be applied to your business. Again, this is unlikey to be a quick process.
Even if you don't have an angel, a mentor would be an invaluable asset, and although you probably won't have to produce documentation to the same degree, hunting for the right person is a similar process.
Given that you are out of money, unless you are able to produce an absolute kick-ass demo immediately, and can use this to persuade people, I would stop working on developing the technology, and either switch all my efforts to the other more critical tasks, or stop working on it altogether, and start looking for a job so that you can use the income from the job to fund finding the right people to have a future with.
Lastly, you are much more likely to die from lack of people knowing about your technology tha
When my child gets punished for bad behavior, she will sometimes get cross and in a fit of spite she will do things that she thinks will hurt us, her parents. Often she ends up hurting herself more through her actions.
Microsoft makes some fine software. They are a bunch of bright, creative people. But apparently they have the corporate personality of a 4 year old bully. They were caught being bad, again, and their response to being punished is petulance. Not to worry; they are harming themselves. The middle of a recession is not a good time to make your product more expensive and with a higher barrier to entry.
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I've seen a few people saying that it would be hard for them to give a choice of browsers, and that, in fact, just deciding which browsers would be too hard for some of the brightest people on the planet. I wouldn't compare my intellectual powers with those of Mr Ballmer, but I can imagine that they could:
1. Publish the specifications of the integration API that IE supports, so that it can be implemented in other browsers
2. Publish the source code to IE so that people can see what's missing from the API
3. Bundle Mozilla, Opera and Safari
4. Ask the user for a URL, then download a browser as part of the installation process
5. Ask the user to insert a CD containing the browser
None of these are exclusive of the others - they should be doing all five.
What I see is a case of corporate petulance and bad grace from a management team who think that they are above the law.
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Now some balance.
If I were in the position where I was genuinely surprised by the EU's decision (though I can't see how MS could possibly be surprised), and I was completely unprepared, rather than hold back the launch of the OS globally, I might choose to issue it in stages in the EU to give myself time to comply with the ruling. However, I would also be incredibly careful to communicate about this strategy so as not to upset my customers. But as far as I can make out, this is not what is happening here because I've seen no explanation as to how insisting on a clean install fits in with a two stage strategy or how it complies with the EU ruling.
I'm the parent poster.
My point is that this was major tech news. And hours after the news broke, it still hadn't appeared on the front page. It should have been there minutes after the announcement seeing as it's major news nerds. Even that gnat in the technology-news arena, Republica, managed to report it before it appeared here. Slashdot should be waaaaaaay ahead of the crowd in reporting interesting IT stories.
I'm not decrying the Phorm story: I'm also in the UK and have an interest in it, and I'm glad it was published, but to have it appear while news of a major development in the operating-system-wars is sitting in the queue shows that there's a problem in the editorial flow.
I would like to point out that the BBC, Boingboing, South Africa's Mail & Guardian, the UK's Daily Mirror, the bloody Katmandu, Nepal based Republica, and 632 news sources managed to report the announcement of Google Chrome OS before it was a glimmer in Slashdot's eye.
A very poor show for Slashdot, which is supposed to be news for nerds, stuff that matters.
You are quite right that there are only two comments, and that's because the Times are not publishing responses to their article: I submitted one as soon as I learned about their involvement, decrying their actions, and calling on others to do so too. It is yet to be published.
IMO, newspapers feel threatened by good bloggers because there's no space for the interpretation of opinions when you can read the primary source yourself. And this was a self-serving action to fight back against bloggers. It was not in the public interest. The result is that a source of citizen journalism that exposed what policemen thought has been shut down.
I am appalled by the Times' actions.
Erlang, from what I recall has had the ability to replace running programs in place since forever. A quick look on Amazon shows the first Erlang book dated at 1993. And I think that's probably where I remember reading about it. I thought what a clever technique they had at the time.
Quoting from the an Erlang white paper:
"Hot code upgrade - Many systems cannot be stopped for software maintenance. Erlang allows program code to be changed in a running system. Old code can be phased out and replaced by new code. During the transition, both old code and new code can coexist. It is thus possible to install bug fixes and upgrades in a running system without disturbing its operation. "
(Whoever owns that one copy might want to up their price about now. And I think I may go see if I still have my copy to sell to the next highest bidder. Do I hear any Apple patent lawyers bidding? )
With just a little luck this will point help to point out to companies that asserting patent claims over prospective standards is a bad idea, sure to cost more money than it makes.
Measure the memory cost of your web application. Suppose that it's PHP and a session takes 35MB, then you need 35MB for the duration of servicing the request. With 1000 visitors a day, if they all visit during lunch hour, and they are each looking at 10 pages, you'll have about 2.7 requests per second on average.
This means that on average you'll need another (35MB + database overhead + Apache overhead) x 2.7 memory per second. If page generation lasts an astoundingly long 2 seconds, you'd have about 6 sessions stacked up before you recovered the memory used by the first session in the queue. Assuming that you need 10MB for Apache + database, you'd need all of 270MB + OS footprint to run your server.
I think we can safely say that 16GB is overkill under these circumstances.
Of course if it's lunch hour, your peak (which is the important thing) would be higher: maybe 50% people would hit in the first 15 minutes of the hour. You need to do capacity planning which is appropriate for the load and the technology you are using.
By contrast: one of my sites had 15 minutes of fame, and had 20,000 page views across about three hours. It was running as static content, from a Xen instance, with 1GB of memory, and about 25% of processor time on a dual processor 1GHz system. There wasn't even a hiccup in dealing with the load.
Lawyers are paid for their knowledge, judgement and advice. I'm not in the market at the moment, but as an occasional purchaser of legal services, the fact that Jones Day would pursue this claim in this way indicates a lack of sound judgement. If I were looking for a lawyer, I would be thinking - "If they are as clueless about the real world as the reporting on this case suggests, in acting for themselves, then how could they be trusted to give sensible advice to others?" Jones Day have thousands of lawyers, and of course this case is one of thousands that I expect that they are currently involved in, but how could their review team have let this carry on to its conclusion? Incorrect risk analysis on their part? No risk analysis? Could reporting on this be incorrect?
I understand that nobody enjoys information that they consider to be private to be put into the public domain, and that part of the problem is that the internet removes the half-way house that publication on paper provided - semi-public by way of obscurity - that they lacked tools to redact the information, but I'm not sure that this is a good reason for a trademark claim. Perhaps a spokesperson from Jones Day would like to give some background on their decision making and the way that they pursued their claim to provide balance to the commentary.
Whereas, of course, others would argue that the litigants provided a windfall of billions to Microsoft by purchasing Vista on a Vista Capable machine.
Your complaint is neatly self-contradictory, both complaining that there is NO EXCUSE while giving an excuse.
The person who should write this module is you - you have experience, you've clearly given it thought, you use Drupal and understand the update status module, it would benefit you and others - but you can't be arsed to. Good one.
I went to a talk given at Microsoft Research, here in Cambridge, UK, a year or two ago, the theme of which was the forthcoming changes we can expect to see in operating systems.
One of the issues that was discussed was the use of virtual memory/swapping - the technique was invented in Cambridge I think. The idea behind virtualising resources is to be able to share resources amongst competing programs. But in a world of 8GB RAM, the point was made that RAM is no longer a limited resource which needs sharing, and consequently, except for when you are running programs like simulations which need vaaaast amounts of RAM to run, virtual memory isn't needed.
The speaker said that Microsoft had done some experimentation with turning virtual memory off on computers with large amounts of memory, but that it hadn't gone well. One problem is that some programs are written with the assumption that virtual memory is present and will be needed, so they explicitly swap pages in and out. These programs die. Unfotunately at the moment Windows is one of these.
So, good idea in principle on a modern system running a set number of tasks, but not possible at the moment in practice.
Jeff
Mark, since I'm sure you'll be reading these comments....
Roughly how much do each of the users of Ubuntu need to pay you to put Canonical cash positive?
Us business users are the most likely to pay you some money. If it's something small like $100/yr then that's probably inside discretionary spend limits for most businesses, and I'm pretty certain you have the goodwill for this to become a cash stream. Personally, I'd have no problem signing off on $100 a year, knowing that I wasn't going to get anything for it except an ongoing series of Ubuntus. Call the service something like 'Continuity option' which might be the ability to download the next version for free, or payment for managing the ongoing development.
(Yes everyone, we're aware that it's already downloadable for free, and I want to pay to keep it that way. Yes, we're aware of the provisions of the GPL too. Yes, we're also almost all aware of the Canonical promise to keep it free. And I'd like to make sure that it's financially viable to keep it going.)
And while you're here, thanks to you and everyone else who worked hard to put Intrepid and all the previous versions together. I shall be upgrading tomorrow evening.
Thanks for your note: it's always great to see a reply from people directly involved which explains more.
He's right to the extent that you depend on features which are not represented in standard output formats.
For example, Gmail lets you use tags, and you can build a very useful filing system for your mail on top of tag functionality. There's no standard way of describing tags in files. Imap doesn't have a way to represent tags to mail, except perhaps through folders. So once you invest work in tags, while you can still extract the underlying data, you may well lose the metadata that adds value.
It's a general problem - true for just about any application that adds value to otherwise ordinary data; you invest your time and energy and in so doing you become tethered to the application provider.
IMO whether or not you worry about this depends on the extent to which the data is important to you; I don't see it as an ethical problem.
If you are in marketing, and have a dog of a product to sell, a good tactic is to focus attention on the jam that you'll be selling tomorrow. Of course you don't actually have the jam yet, and you're still selling borg-daschund, so you can't just come out and say 'hey we have this radical NEW NEW softwares so much much better than the old tired limp one you are using to wash your spreadsheets'. So you behave like a hose. A drip here. A leak there. And before you know it all the people are clustered around the tiny tiny pastures of green in a desert of grey, saying 'wowser, check that colour scheme out'. Such a pity that they can't click to discover that the buttons don't do anything, but that's someone elses job and Bob is on an extended five year coffee break.
Don't get too excited people. Remember that Microsoft is incapable of shifting an OS in the timescales that we've seen casually prognosticated. By the beginning of 2010 Vista will have hit its sweet spot in terms of hardware, and the drivers will be mature. That would be the worst time of all to introduce Vista2. Look to about 2012 for the next version, once Vista has peaked.
Microsoft are in a monopolists market, there's no need for them to improve Vista in the short term despite the screams of pain from users. And anyway, the way to maintain dominance when you are the market leader is to force changes, so that your competition looks like followers; there's no way back for them.
Executive summary: don't wait, at best this is a distraction. Go make some software. You be the leaders now.
I think you will find:
- Drupal uses UTF8 by default
- Drupal has a robust multilanguage approach.
- Drupal includes a COD module and doesn't assume a particular payment flow.
- The Drupal developers are international. In fact this can be a downside since a good portion of the ec subsystem was developed in Australia (thank you Gordon), and at times it needs to be massaged. I'm thinking of tax issues.
IMO, having implemented Drupal-based ecommerce systems a few times now, I'd say that it's just short of ready for prime-time, and that this book is premature: a case of a publisher trying to climb on a band wagon. (I have no comment on the content of the book - I haven't read it.) I find that Drupal ecommerce is not yet slick enough that I don't worry about details that I shouldn't have to worry about, on the other hand I trust it enough to have implemented it for people who are not technical, and it does contain some really useful specialist product types.
The rate at which Drupal and subsystems such as the ecommerce subsystem improve means that the shortcomings will be fixed inside 18 months.
I'd say that the most important shortcomings are:
Drupal ecommerce does not yet have multi-currency options: it assumes pricing is in a single currency. There are modules which tell you pricing in alternative currencies, but the final bill is in the admin chosen basis currency. If you are in the US, buying from Japan, expect to see a bill in Yen on your credit card statement.
Drupal wants people to be logged in. Anonymous purchasing is a second-class citizen. IMO forcing users through a registration process before they can give you money is bad for business.
There is no nice standard for international addressing, and Drupal suffers from this. EC address management is not integrated with other address-orientated modules.
But...
It Drupal and EC are remarkably flexible. Anything can be a product. It's open source and you can add new stuff: I've built a number of modules including a specialist shipping module for Royal Mail shipping. I haven't found it to be a problem.
Someone complained about the lack of an API. In fact Drupal has a well-developed well-structured API. It's one of the reasons that it has coped well with growth. Try http://api.drupal.org/. The api is largely stable despite the established Drupal policy that backward compatibility is a nice-to-have rather than a given: I've used modules built for later versions which transferred to earlier versions without problems. Your mileage may vary, and of course things change as the system grows. But the changes between versions are well documented. I do think that the established callback injection points could be better documented. But I'd say the complaint about API was uninformed.
Trying to say it's got something to do with gender is a meaningless generalization unless the author shows us the proof. Pointless and offensive at the same time. Try these substitutions for size:
"Pandas comment better than Gnomes at coding". (I guess it's cos pandas take time to think. Gnomes are just to fast for their own good.)
"Short people code better on average than tall people" (Presumably because their heads are closer to the computer?)
"Hispanics code differently to black people." (I have no idea what I can say about this comparison that won't sound racist, and the point of this comment is to show how STUPID any general comparisons like this are.)
On the other hand, maybe these would be valid comparisons:
"Managers write worse code than developers". Yep, it might come as a shock that on average people who practice are better.
"Good developers comment more than bad developers." Shock! Horror! There's a surprise!
And while I'm at it. The picture that the WSJ used to illustrate their article shows a dramatic lack of imagination. Next time let's have a pictures of a naked coders instead of a half-assed, inappropriate, royalty-free attempt to use a bit of beauty into an otherwise daft article.
Annoyed to find anything I've written marked as Troll. Grrr.
I call bullshit on the parent that suggests that Noooxml is a virus page. That should never have been modded up: it's an attempt to stop people finding out about what has been happening, and I'm prepared to waste karma pointing that out.
Evidence against noooxml:
Some random person says that it's a virus but doesn't provide any proof.
Evidence for nooxml being valid:
- It's linked from the front page of Groklaw - www.grokla.net. Currently item 2 in the right hand column. "Belgium also stuffed with Microsoft business partners?"
- It's linked to from Bob Sutors blog 6 times. Bob is IBM VP for Open Source and Standards, and isn't positive about OOXML.
- It's been supported by the FFII and the Shuttleworth foundation (i.e. Mr Ubuntu) amongst others.
- It has a proper contacts page and gives telephone numbers.
"NoOOXML.org was started by Benjamin Henrion in January 2007 to campaign against Microsoft's push for ISO standardization of their captive document formats. This campaign was part of a global project by the FFII's open standards workgroup that reached standards campaigners in over eighty countries. We thank all those who signed the petition. We gratefully acknowledge the contributions of many, many people including the FFII open standards workgroup, which has worked on the issue of open document formats for many years, coordinators in many countries who helped communicate the issue to national boards and local standards experts, and standards groups and activists globally, who helped build NoOOXML.org into a global success. We thanks those who helped us eat and pay the rent while we did this campaign. NoOOXML.org was mainly funded by ESOMA, with support from the FFII, Shuttleworth Foundation, the Open Society Institute, OpenForum Europe, FTISA, and iMatix Corporation. We thank Microsoft too, who gave us such amusement with their capers that we were obliged to give them the FFII Kayak Award. But open standards are serious business, and the NoOOXML.org campaign has proven that the Community takes this business very seriously.
* Benjamin Henrion +32-484-566109 (French/English)
* Andre Rebentisch +49 4421 301122 (German)
* Pieter Hintjens +32 475 235 984 (English/Dutch/French)
* Alberto Barrionuevo (Spanish)"
Now, moderators, do you seriously think that it's a virus page, and that this is a troll? Or do you think that the parent one-liner without any proof is crap? Mod the original link up. Mod the troll who is trying to stop people finding out about the behaviour of Microsoft down. And mod my original up.
What evidence do you have for that? A search on Google didn't reveal a warning. Looking at the pages, there's a LOT of work there, with seemingly good content.
I'm worried that this is more FUD-mongering, so I'd like to know the details behind your assertion: at the moment it seems like your comment only serves to stop people from clicking through and finding out more about the problems in OOXML.
There's not much point in just comparing APIs or the maps available, although those are important.
Remember Google and Microsoft have very different aims.
Microsoft make their money from Office and Windows. That means that at some stage their mapping is going to be tilted towards Office and Windows. It might be that it will only work on Windows, or that it will require IE9 to work best of all, or that if your user has Office they'll be able to use the SuperZoom functionality, or whatever. It's inevitable, as night follows day that apps that come out of MS are used to tie users into Office and Windows. If this is acceptable to you then there's no barrier to using MS.
Google aims to make money through dissemination of information. The more information that they can disseminate, the better. (So that's why it's free if you are making the information freely available and not if you keep the info closed.) If Google they can tie information into their dissemination platform, then they may be able to make valuable links between corpuses of information. So, Google won't do things that limit your information, but they may in the future, make additions that users may find valuable. These alterations may not necessarily be to your liking - e.g. ads embedded in the maps.
So, the tech factors, the maps, and the slickness of presentation are only part of the story. Also bear in mind the behind-the-scenes reasons why the the mapping facility exists, and the forces on the developers of the API, which will dictate the ways that the API and facilities evolve.
BUT. You should provide benefits for registration and you should let people know clearly that they are using unregistered software, and that you know.
Why is the right amount none? I don't believe that we were unique when (in a past life) on removing copy protection on our software, our sales grew by about 20%.
I think people want to test software before they pay for it, and copy protection stops them from using a try-before-you-buy approach. I think that most people who can afford the software and who think it's good value will pay for it whether or not there's copy protection. The others won't, but they may be an advert. I think it's more likely that companies will pay than private individuals, particularly if they are worried about sanctions posing a risk to their business.
So, include no active copy protection, but do include measures that let people know the status of the software very clearly. A nice bright - 'Unregistered software' on startup + a similar notice on screen + a similar notice on print outs + these notices should change so that they don't become background that is filtered out of consciousness + a help link to your registration page + a note in the help about why they should register the software [make a point of saying that it's not just their company that is breaking the deal, but them personally] + a record of the IP address on screen + a note to say that the software phones home to say it's being used, with a note of what it tells + a note about benefits of registration - e.g. registered software gets automatic update notices + whatever extra benefits you can think of that are only available to people who have registered. The point is to embarass people into paying if they are on the borderline, but not to annoy those who will pay.
If you are being clever, track the number of times a particular copy is used, and let the user know. And let them know that you know.
Also make provision for unregistered, old versions of the software to become free - i.e tone down the notes when they are 2 versions old, but replace with a sign that says 'Version 1 is now free for use provided it's not used with projects of more than 100 steps. Version 3 includes many useful features and is only $150.' Old versions become adverts: after all, you aren't selling them anymore, and if someone hasn't paid after 2 years, they aren't likely to start now.
You also have to make it ridiculously easy for people to register, and even more importantly, for people who have previously registered, who change their machine, or who lose their hard drive (or whatever) you have to make it incredibly easy for them to retrieve their registration.
Put *NO* barriers in front of people who want to pay you, or who have paid you. These are the people who need your love because a major portion of profit on commercial software comes from upgrades.
Hope that's useful.
Jeff
I absolutely agree with you that we desperately need to be able to move food to where it's needed most. One of the ways of doing this would be to grow it in the places that it's needed. It would be brilliant if we could grow food in arid regions, if we could introduce salt-dependence into these plants, and if we could make plants that required huge temperature variations to thrive. Then we'd have plants that could only live in semi-desert areas. (Wouldn't it be terrific if these plants could also fix carbon as graphite? You'd have pencil trees! Then you'd have to deal with the excess oxygen, because we don't want to raise the percentage of oxygen that's in the atmosphere. Maybe you'd be able to catch stray hydrogen atoms and turn it into water, which is exactly what you want in a desert. But I digress...)Not surprisingly perhaps, companies use tools that they have to increase profits. This does not mean that these tools are not available for other uses. We are right at the very beginning of this technology curve, and I think that when you're at the beginning, you focus on the first applications, in just the same way that the mill workers in England focused on the way that mechanisation was taking away their jobs. But, I think your view is right, I think it's amazingly stupid to insert genes for resistance to weedkillers into plants. However companies are doing this, and as sure as day follows night, these genes will escape into other species.
And that's exactly why we need off switches!
It seems entirely sensible to me to insert fail-safe control mechanisms into genetically engineered products: we want a way to limit the damage they can cause in the event that something bad happens. We do NOT want the uncontrolled spread of something that turns out to have been an environmental disaster. For for trains, the equivalent is the dead-man's-switch.
If this means that farmers can't grow plants from seeds then I for one am happy with this. And actually, I'd like multiple off switches so that we can be as certain as we can that we will be able to contain the inevitable failures.
Farmers do not have to use the genetic engineered varietals, they do so in the belief that they'll be getting a better return on investment than with a normal plant.
I say all this as a GM believer. I don't see any way through to feeding the world, except through the use of GM, so I'm pro GM.
Sidenote: Ooh, I feel a software patent coming on! I started with an analogy to using Break/Ctrl+Alt+Delete/Ctrl+C to stop run-away programs, but these take a positive action to stop the program, whereas failsafe mechanisms require an action to continue. In multithreaded or multiprocess software designed for multi-core processors, if some program goes awry, you want the parts of the program to stop: they should be designed so that without positive input from the controlling process they cease funtioning. For instance one embodiment of the present invention is a computing device programmed such that if the child computation of a parent computation fails to receive a heartbeat signal from the parent computation, or any computation acting in its stead, then said computation should end. Remember you read it here first, and prepare yourself to pay me billionz!!! Oops, forgot to file it, and now it's in the public domain.