Just because the entire process is not successful, does not mean the entire process does not take place.
In one specific example, the pollen is still produced, and still fertilizes the female plant. The seed is "stillborn," though, and not capable of germinating.
What happens when Monsanto sends you a cease-and-desist for growing corn you never planted, or never wanted? What realistic recourse do you have when a multi-billion dollar company with close political connections clamps down on you for violating IP laws? See Napster for an example, all they did was tell us where to get the songs.
Would you mind explaining how the GM wheat will sterilize non-GM wheat? No problem. Say you have a GM field next to a natural field, and the GM crop has been modified so it cannot reproduce. In such modifications, the entire reproducing process is not hindered - usually a single step is broken. Because of this, the "sterile" plants will cross-pollinate with the normal plants, but the resulting seeds will be either sterile of pass on the GM genes.
Breaking part of the reproduction cycle does not necessarily prevent the whole thing from taking place.
I highly doubt that the Corn stalks were 'gettin it on' with the Soybean plants, spreading free love and pollen accross the species barrier. This would be like a pig mating with an elephant, and is thus merely the stuff of dreams and fantasies in a biologist's world.
You've obviously seen the South Park episode.
See, just get the corn and soy drunk and get Isaac Hayes to sing to them...you'de be amazed at the things GM corn will screw when it's good an' drunk.
Grass killer sprayed on soybeans will kill the corn plants that come up. True. So...a farmer should spend the extra money to kill corn that his neighbor (in effect) put in his field? I know I wouldn't want to use any more herbicide than necessary, not just from an economic standpoint, but from a health-wary one as well.
Also, corn grows about four feet taller than soybeans. Picking out the corn should be no problem. Which is, once again, more work. This isn't just a problem with GM grain, I know...but still an important point.
Really though, GM stuff should be grown in totally separate fields and the fields kept separate. No, really? That's what they fucked up, and that's what the article was about. Some corn got mixed with some soy; some farmer(s) botched it. Happens all the time. This is just more important because we have GM foods in with regular ol' soy.
What exactly is a "totally separate" field anyway? Across a road? In another county? In another state? That's the problem here...things spread over long distances, even if it's just cross-pollination with non-GM crops.
I'm not saying (or at least didn't intend to say) that the G4 is a perfect architecture, not that is has no room for improvement. I'm just suggesting that performance tweaks like those used in the P4 are a bit like worrying about the aerodynamics of your '57 Chevy. Sure, you can add a bit of fuel efficiency, but there are far greater gains to be had.
The solution today is to reduce the power usage. This can be done by shutting down parts of the clock trees in the CPUs, or by using Intel's PowerStep (i.e. two working speeds), or Transmetas's variable voltage and frequency technology, LongRun....or, by using an architecture that does not require as many useless (er...extra) transistors and is therefor more efficient to begin with. Witness the PowerPC, for example. In particular, the G3 is amazingly efficient in the desktop form.
Compare, for example, the G4 at 11.5 million transistors, (I am not sure about the current G4e) and the P4 at 42 million (once again, this is an old number - recent P4s may have a different count). Is it any mystery, then, why the G4 uses so little power in comparison?
I'm not discounting your ideas totally here - I'm just saying there is more to saving energy than throttling the CPU.
In response to your last line - "most of today's solutions (power saving) are just a cure for the symptoms (bad battery time), not for the cause (bad battery technology)" - I have to say that although batteries are a hindrance, they are not much of one at the moment. Portables currently dissipate quite a bit of heat. If you increase the power they use (and increase the power given to them) you increase heat output, which is bad. Current laptops are about like holding a lightbulb against your lap. Are you sure you want that to be increased?
The real limits with laptops these days have more to do with dissipating the heat they already produce than powering that mess. Upgrading batteries is not a solution to this, while more efficient processors are.
The problem is, unless there is a DAMN GOOD REASON, nobody will upgrade to a system that breaks all previous compatibility. People migrated to PPC because their old software would work. People moved to OS X when they could use their old software. Peopel upgrade to new versions of Windows because it usually doesn't break old software. It's not a problem for currently-developerd software, but I sure don't want to lose all the software I've built up over the years. A good portion of it has not been updated recently, and only works now because the last few (major) releases of my OS have not broken compatibility.
They very well may release it; if intel processors get far enough ahead, apple will most likely make a new mac based on an intel processor.
I suppose they could release x86 Macs, but they will NOT replace the PPC line. To do so would be suicide.
Think of it this way: Developers tagged along with Apple on the PPC transition somewhere around seven years ago. The same developers followed the OS X transition, but they took more time with that move - some bog houses don't have 'real' OS X ports out yet.
Now, both of these were rather simple transitions for developers to make. Somewhere on the order of a 5-15% code change for most apps, last I knew.
A move to x86 is a BIG move. A lot of software will have to be rewritten. AltiVec instructions have to be replaced with SSE (, MMX, SSE2, etc) blocks.
Even worse, there is no clean-cut way to interoperate with older PPC code. The PPC is relatively good for emulationg other architectures, but the x86 is rather poor at emulating anything modern - if for no ther reason than an astounding lack of general-purpose registers. Macs have a way of runnign even your old software in a satisfactory manner. I can run games from 1993 on an OS X PPC machine, and it still runs pretty well.
If Apple released the OS X x86 machine, it would run NONE of the old Mac software, nor would it run new OS X software that hadn't been expressly recompiled yet.
Apple got developers to transition from 68k to PPC, then they got developers to transition from OS 9 to OS X. There is no way the same developers would transition again a mere two years later.
On the other hand, their advice to use tcsh/bash as a sudo command is poorly thought out. How is that any better than su? Better to use sudo with a few simple commands and scripts that need root for 80% of cases, and use su for the rest.
Correction: Use sudo whenever possible; use 'sudo -s' when necessary. You never need to execute a shell manually through sudo.
Because you can have sudo log all commands. You can tell who screwed up and exactly what they did. You can make sudo a better drop in replacement for su.
You can't log commands doing it that way, though. As another poster said, you'll just get the initial 'sudo/bin/bash' command, not commands issued under that shell.
That's why we have the 'sudo -s' command. You get a shell, but sudo still knows what's going on.
Re:New? Not. even ,it's really old.
on
Airborne Mouse
·
· Score: 1
Just stupid OT-ness, replying to your.sig:
Live dangerously: turn "Display Link Domains" off!
Isn't that the first thing EVERYONE does? I mean, come on, what the hell is the status bar of EVERY FRIGGIN BROWSER MADE for, if not to show the destination of links you hover over?
If you can't take a tiny bit of extra time to look where you're going, you deserve to see some goatse action.
or will you be listening to sounds with a frequency out of the (44100/2) = 22050Hz that CD supports?
Damn if this isn't the last-understood facet fo sound ever. Sampling rates well over 44.1 kHz are useful.
Think for a moment about a sine wave with a frequency of 22,000 Hz. Now, try to represent that in a digital medium that is capable of describing 22,050 Hz accurately. For the first part of the encoded signal, as the sampling occurs at appoximately the crests and troughs, you will have a good approximation 0f the 22 kHz wave. As time goes on, however, the signal will drift out of phase with the encoder, and you will end up with a flat line until they drift into phase again.
Now, think of a 22,050 Hz signal that starts out of phase with the encoder. If both of them operate at exactly the same frequency, you could end up with your 44,100 samples per second filled with nothing, provided you are sampling at just the right (wrong?) part of the wave.
This is why 96 kHz sampling is a good idea. It allows a good representation of all audible waveforms no matter what the conditions. I really doubt the music industry would push for such advances, and use them in every modern studio, if it weren't worthwhile. Sure, consumers buy whatever number you put in front of them, but if they didn't need to increase the sampling rate you can bet the music industry would have a heyday selling you a disc with twice as much (time-based) capacity.
Re:So is it any better to have faster AGP?
on
Tackling AGP 8X
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
John Carmack has talked about the idea of generating texture maps dynamically.
I'm not sure if any of the Quake games so far (or maybe Doom 3) have used it, but the original Unreal had dynamic/procedural textures all over the place. Fire, fountains, and pseudo-particle effects were all handled by dynamic textures. Some of them were even fractals, IIRC...
Unreal worked fine on computers that more often than not did not have AGP, but then the areas with dynamic textures were small portions of the screen and rarely (if ever) larger than about 256x256 or so.
We stole countries with the cunning use of flags. You just sail around the world and stick a flag in. "I claim India for Britain!"
And they're going, "you can't claim us, we live here! Five-hundred million of us!"
"Do you have a flag?"
"We don't need a bloody flag, it's our country, you bastards."
"No flag, no country. You can't have one. That's the rules that...I've...just made up, and I'm backing up with this gun that was lent from...the National Rifle Association."
And that was it. You know?
And Queen Victoria became empress of India. She never even fuckin' went there.
- - - -
Izzard goes on, of course, about the dangers of breeding within the family and the perils of World War II.
We already have iChat, Address Book, Mail and iSync built into our beloved UNIX operating system. So a lot of Mozilla's functionality is not needed
Windows users have no need for Mozilla, either. After all, they have Outlook[Express], MSN Messenger, and all the other MS tools built-in. Hell, they have Explorer integrated, even! Therefore, no portion of the Mozilla project is even remotely useful to the Windows crowd.
I'm sure you can admit there are definite reasons for alternatives, even when the already-available software is best-of-breed.
Well, it was only under certain circumstances, and it's really ancient history in the computer world - back around System 6 (and rarely under System 7.)
Still, the point is, we were rather ineffective suicider bombers in those days. When we figured out that those techniques did absolutely nothing to the opposition (those infidels!) we resorted to more peaceful measures...
I could be wrong, but I think the volume of Appel chatter on/. has gone up in the last year or two. Before, we'd get posts for major hardware upgrades and all that, but not the little stories like this. Now, it seems if Steve lays an especially large turd we'd all be the first (okay, this is/. so thousandth is more likely) to know.
My guess is that it's directly related to the release of OS X, and the subseuent appeal of Apple machines to the/. crowd.
The reason I thought of it is I just got it, and I'm enjoying the book rather a lot so far. Buy.com has it cheaper than Amazon (that appears to be their "thing" recently) and the book is a decent-quality hardcover. I feel like it was a darn good deal.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry I'm so late in replying. Anyhow...
Just because the entire process is not successful, does not mean the entire process does not take place.
In one specific example, the pollen is still produced, and still fertilizes the female plant. The seed is "stillborn," though, and not capable of germinating.
What happens when Monsanto sends you a cease-and-desist for growing corn you never planted, or never wanted? What realistic recourse do you have when a multi-billion dollar company with close political connections clamps down on you for violating IP laws? See Napster for an example, all they did was tell us where to get the songs.
Or just see what happens when Monsanto sends you a cease-and-desist for growing corn you never planted.
Would you mind explaining how the GM wheat will sterilize non-GM wheat?
No problem. Say you have a GM field next to a natural field, and the GM crop has been modified so it cannot reproduce. In such modifications, the entire reproducing process is not hindered - usually a single step is broken. Because of this, the "sterile" plants will cross-pollinate with the normal plants, but the resulting seeds will be either sterile of pass on the GM genes.
Breaking part of the reproduction cycle does not necessarily prevent the whole thing from taking place.
I highly doubt that the Corn stalks were 'gettin it on' with the Soybean plants, spreading free love and pollen accross the species barrier. This would be like a pig mating with an elephant, and is thus merely the stuff of dreams and fantasies in a biologist's world.
You've obviously seen the South Park episode.
See, just get the corn and soy drunk and get Isaac Hayes to sing to them...you'de be amazed at the things GM corn will screw when it's good an' drunk.
Grass killer sprayed on soybeans will kill the corn plants that come up.
True. So...a farmer should spend the extra money to kill corn that his neighbor (in effect) put in his field? I know I wouldn't want to use any more herbicide than necessary, not just from an economic standpoint, but from a health-wary one as well.
Also, corn grows about four feet taller than soybeans. Picking out the corn should be no problem.
Which is, once again, more work. This isn't just a problem with GM grain, I know...but still an important point.
Really though, GM stuff should be grown in totally separate fields and the fields kept separate.
No, really? That's what they fucked up, and that's what the article was about. Some corn got mixed with some soy; some farmer(s) botched it. Happens all the time. This is just more important because we have GM foods in with regular ol' soy.
What exactly is a "totally separate" field anyway? Across a road? In another county? In another state? That's the problem here...things spread over long distances, even if it's just cross-pollination with non-GM crops.
Not if root isn't enabled yet ;)
/. crowd)...but your way isn't as universal.
Not that that's an issue for many of us (the
I'm not saying (or at least didn't intend to say) that the G4 is a perfect architecture, not that is has no room for improvement. I'm just suggesting that performance tweaks like those used in the P4 are a bit like worrying about the aerodynamics of your '57 Chevy. Sure, you can add a bit of fuel efficiency, but there are far greater gains to be had.
Hey! How about:
%sudo softwareupdate 3404
You know...the right way. =)
The solution today is to reduce the power usage. This can be done by shutting down parts of the clock trees in the CPUs, or by using Intel's PowerStep (i.e. two working speeds), or Transmetas's variable voltage and frequency technology, LongRun. ...or, by using an architecture that does not require as many useless (er...extra) transistors and is therefor more efficient to begin with. Witness the PowerPC, for example. In particular, the G3 is amazingly efficient in the desktop form.
Compare, for example, the G4 at 11.5 million transistors, (I am not sure about the current G4e) and the P4 at 42 million (once again, this is an old number - recent P4s may have a different count). Is it any mystery, then, why the G4 uses so little power in comparison?
I'm not discounting your ideas totally here - I'm just saying there is more to saving energy than throttling the CPU.
In response to your last line - "most of today's solutions (power saving) are just a cure for the symptoms (bad battery time), not for the cause (bad battery technology)" - I have to say that although batteries are a hindrance, they are not much of one at the moment. Portables currently dissipate quite a bit of heat. If you increase the power they use (and increase the power given to them) you increase heat output, which is bad. Current laptops are about like holding a lightbulb against your lap. Are you sure you want that to be increased?
The real limits with laptops these days have more to do with dissipating the heat they already produce than powering that mess. Upgrading batteries is not a solution to this, while more efficient processors are.
The problem is, unless there is a DAMN GOOD REASON, nobody will upgrade to a system that breaks all previous compatibility. People migrated to PPC because their old software would work. People moved to OS X when they could use their old software. Peopel upgrade to new versions of Windows because it usually doesn't break old software. It's not a problem for currently-developerd software, but I sure don't want to lose all the software I've built up over the years. A good portion of it has not been updated recently, and only works now because the last few (major) releases of my OS have not broken compatibility.
They very well may release it; if intel processors get far enough ahead, apple will most likely make a new mac based on an intel processor.
I suppose they could release x86 Macs, but they will NOT replace the PPC line. To do so would be suicide.
Think of it this way: Developers tagged along with Apple on the PPC transition somewhere around seven years ago. The same developers followed the OS X transition, but they took more time with that move - some bog houses don't have 'real' OS X ports out yet.
Now, both of these were rather simple transitions for developers to make. Somewhere on the order of a 5-15% code change for most apps, last I knew.
A move to x86 is a BIG move. A lot of software will have to be rewritten. AltiVec instructions have to be replaced with SSE (, MMX, SSE2, etc) blocks.
Even worse, there is no clean-cut way to interoperate with older PPC code. The PPC is relatively good for emulationg other architectures, but the x86 is rather poor at emulating anything modern - if for no ther reason than an astounding lack of general-purpose registers. Macs have a way of runnign even your old software in a satisfactory manner. I can run games from 1993 on an OS X PPC machine, and it still runs pretty well.
If Apple released the OS X x86 machine, it would run NONE of the old Mac software, nor would it run new OS X software that hadn't been expressly recompiled yet.
Apple got developers to transition from 68k to PPC, then they got developers to transition from OS 9 to OS X. There is no way the same developers would transition again a mere two years later.
Well drat.
/bin/bash' =)
It's still...uh...easier than 'sudo
On the other hand, their advice to use tcsh/bash as a sudo command is poorly thought out. How is that any better than su? Better to use sudo with a few simple commands and scripts that need root for 80% of cases, and use su for the rest.
Correction: Use sudo whenever possible; use 'sudo -s' when necessary. You never need to execute a shell manually through sudo.
Because you can have sudo log all commands. You can tell who screwed up and exactly what they did. You can make sudo a better drop in replacement for su.
/bin/bash' command, not commands issued under that shell.
You can't log commands doing it that way, though. As another poster said, you'll just get the initial 'sudo
That's why we have the 'sudo -s' command. You get a shell, but sudo still knows what's going on.
Just stupid OT-ness, replying to your .sig:
Live dangerously: turn "Display Link Domains" off!
Isn't that the first thing EVERYONE does? I mean, come on, what the hell is the status bar of EVERY FRIGGIN BROWSER MADE for, if not to show the destination of links you hover over?
If you can't take a tiny bit of extra time to look where you're going, you deserve to see some goatse action.
or will you be listening to sounds with a frequency out of the (44100/2) = 22050Hz that CD supports?
Damn if this isn't the last-understood facet fo sound ever. Sampling rates well over 44.1 kHz are useful.
Think for a moment about a sine wave with a frequency of 22,000 Hz. Now, try to represent that in a digital medium that is capable of describing 22,050 Hz accurately. For the first part of the encoded signal, as the sampling occurs at appoximately the crests and troughs, you will have a good approximation 0f the 22 kHz wave. As time goes on, however, the signal will drift out of phase with the encoder, and you will end up with a flat line until they drift into phase again.
Now, think of a 22,050 Hz signal that starts out of phase with the encoder. If both of them operate at exactly the same frequency, you could end up with your 44,100 samples per second filled with nothing, provided you are sampling at just the right (wrong?) part of the wave.
This is why 96 kHz sampling is a good idea. It allows a good representation of all audible waveforms no matter what the conditions. I really doubt the music industry would push for such advances, and use them in every modern studio, if it weren't worthwhile. Sure, consumers buy whatever number you put in front of them, but if they didn't need to increase the sampling rate you can bet the music industry would have a heyday selling you a disc with twice as much (time-based) capacity.
John Carmack has talked about the idea of generating texture maps dynamically.
I'm not sure if any of the Quake games so far (or maybe Doom 3) have used it, but the original Unreal had dynamic/procedural textures all over the place. Fire, fountains, and pseudo-particle effects were all handled by dynamic textures. Some of them were even fractals, IIRC...
Unreal worked fine on computers that more often than not did not have AGP, but then the areas with dynamic textures were small portions of the screen and rarely (if ever) larger than about 256x256 or so.
Uh...what?
We stole countries with the cunning use of flags. You just sail around the world and stick a flag in. "I claim India for Britain!"
And they're going, "you can't claim us, we live here! Five-hundred million of us!"
"Do you have a flag?"
"We don't need a bloody flag, it's our country, you bastards."
"No flag, no country. You can't have one. That's the rules that...I've...just made up, and I'm backing up with this gun that was lent from...the National Rifle Association."
And that was it. You know?
And Queen Victoria became empress of India. She never even fuckin' went there.
- - - -
Izzard goes on, of course, about the dangers of breeding within the family and the perils of World War II.
Ah, good times. Good times.
We already have iChat, Address Book, Mail and iSync built into our beloved UNIX operating system. So a lot of Mozilla's functionality is not needed
Windows users have no need for Mozilla, either. After all, they have Outlook[Express], MSN Messenger, and all the other MS tools built-in. Hell, they have Explorer integrated, even! Therefore, no portion of the Mozilla project is even remotely useful to the Windows crowd.
I'm sure you can admit there are definite reasons for alternatives, even when the already-available software is best-of-breed.
Well, it was only under certain circumstances, and it's really ancient history in the computer world - back around System 6 (and rarely under System 7.)
Still, the point is, we were rather ineffective suicider bombers in those days. When we figured out that those techniques did absolutely nothing to the opposition (those infidels!) we resorted to more peaceful measures...
I could be wrong, but I think the volume of Appel chatter on /. has gone up in the last year or two. Before, we'd get posts for major hardware upgrades and all that, but not the little stories like this. Now, it seems if Steve lays an especially large turd we'd all be the first (okay, this is /. so thousandth is more likely) to know.
/. crowd.
My guess is that it's directly related to the release of OS X, and the subseuent appeal of Apple machines to the
...compared to certain radical Muslim factions, we're rather peaceful.
/will/ laugh, though, when Windows bombs itself.
For example, we don't bomb things.
We
The reason I thought of it is I just got it, and I'm enjoying the book rather a lot so far. Buy.com has it cheaper than Amazon (that appears to be their "thing" recently) and the book is a decent-quality hardcover. I feel like it was a darn good deal.
What geek doesn't like the math, science, logic, and illogic in Alice?