I was once watching the 'La Femme Nikita' series several years ago (I had no life and there was nothing else on). Some mad villian had hacked into an airport's traffic control computer and was going to misroute the planes to fly into each other or something.
Anyway, after the requisite gun battle, our heroine reaches the dastardly computer and radios back to base for instructions on stopping it. The conversation went something like:
Computer Expert (CE): "Ok, type in ps space dash a u x and hit return."
Nikita: "Er, csh, kernel, fltsm..."
CE: "That last one, it shouldn't be there, what's the number to the right of that name?"
N: "572."
CE: "Ok, type in kill space dash nine space 572 and hit return."
N: "Nothing's happening! The program didn't stop!"
CE: "It takes a second to kill the process, hold on."
Yep, doctors, lawyers and police. That's most of the prime time dramas these days. I'm really looking forward to 'Cop Lawyer, M.D.' this fall, so I can cut my viewing time by a third.
In Kamp Krusty, as Kent Brockman tours the devastation, there's a brief shot in the background of a pig's head on a stick with flies buzzing around it.
I guarantee anyone ever forced to read Lord of the Flies lost it at that point.
The best reason I can think of for why Aragorn and Co. march all the way north to the Gates is an easy one - he's playing for time. It takes several days to make his way across the river, up Ithillian, round the dead lands and to the Black Gate. That's time for Frodo to hike across Mordor while Saruon is busy moving troops to the Black Gate.
As for why Sauron does not send a force from behind, his one goal here is the Ring, which he thinks Aragorn has. I think he believes Aragorn is drunk on the power of the Ring and seeks to challenge him openly at his gates, a sort of 'winner take all' ending.
Aragorn is in the open and exposed. If he attacks Minas Tirith again, Aragorn may retreat to the city leading to a long seige. If he attacks the army from the rear, it may scatter and he'd be forced to hunt Aragorn (a ranger and woodsman) up and down the Great River.
Saruon knows he has an overwhelming force, his spies can see the exact size of Aragorn's army. Sauron has the choice of terrain - Aragorn must attack his fortifications.
Remember your Sun Tsu - Choose your battleground and you need not fear the outcome of a hundred battles.
And as for why the attack should be at the Black Gates, rather than Minas Morgul, here's the best reason - time. Gandalf is playing for time. It takes quite a while to muster the army, march across Osgiliath, up to the crossroads, along Ithillian (sp?), around the Dead Lands and up to the Black Gate. That's a longer hike than Frodo has to make, with Sauron concentrating all his attention away from Mordor the entire time.
Assuming they get the resoultion up, this device may be a very good input mechanism for eastern languages, such as traditional Chinese, Japanese and others. Keyboarding in Chinese is no picnic and requires some specialized skill. This could replace such keyboards with a pen and paper, expanding the number of people that can enter data into a computer to anyone who can read and write their native language.
Big account, small account. It doesn't matter. Microsoft cannot have any country pass one of these laws and have it work. Fear of change is what keeps these governments coming back to Microsoft. Having a working example with real numbers on cost savings will devastate this argument.
Their fear is a good old 50's style domino effect. First Venezuela, then Costa Rica, then Mexico. Pretty soon, Peru ignore's Bill's gift horse and converts as well. Before you know it, all of Latin America will be running Linux. I don't think this will happen, but I bet Microsoft thinks it could.
Don't forget to tell them why!! Spell it out. Cite press releases. Explain your position rationally. Try not to sound like a zealot (no offense). Make sure they understand exactly which decision is costing them customers. And finally, sign your real name and put some weight of numbers behind it.
Ars Technica runs a monthly Buyer's Guide with there recommended homebrew systems. They break it out into three categories. The Budget Box is a sub $800 system. The Hot Rod is the best bang for the buck system, usually coming in at the sub $1400 price point. The God Box is the money-is-no-object system and represents the best PC that can be bought. It usually weighs in at over $5000.
All systems have been assembled and tested, so you can just buy the parts and put them together. Its a great quick reference on what your money can buy in a homebrew, plus some recommendations on what parts to get.
Here's a story about an A-10 that took a SAM hit during Desert Storm:
A few days later on 6 February 1991, Johnson demonstrated his skills again when another aircraft he was flying was hit by enemy fire. Johnson; flying A-10A - S/N 78-0664, was attacking a Surface to Air Missile (SAM) site when his aircraft was hit by portable shoulder-mounted SAM. The explosion left a gaping hole in the right wing of the A-10, disabled one of the aircraft's two hydraulic systems, and crippled the right engine. He managed to fly the badly damaged "Warthog" back to Saudi airspace, where he air refueled as he recovered at King Fahd AB. Johnson feared that when the right gear was lowered, he might lose the outer wing, but fortunately he got "three in the green." Having bought the aircraft home "on a wing and a prayer," he flew a no-flap approach to a smooth landing, despite a blown tire which shredded on touchdown!
Now that's a survivable aircraft! The JSF, as good as it is, was not engineered to survive this much punishment. Again, apples to oranges.
I got nailed for this back when I was in college. I had been in the physics department at Arizona for a couple years and decided to pick up a minor in CS. During my first CS course, I collaborated on a homework assignment (no coding - hand analysis of some data structures) with another student.
A week later, the instructor called me in. She asked if I had collaborated with anyone on the assignment. I said I had and we were planning to meet again tomorrow to discuss the latest assignment. She went ballistic, accusing me of academic dishonesty and threatening to throw me out of the department. I protested my innocence, that we had merely collaborated, not copied. She said that even collaboration was forbidden, that what I had done was wrong and not condoned by any department at the university.
Furious, I produced no less than three sylabii (sp?) for my 400 level physics courses. Each one went into great depth about the need to find other students to study with and collaborate on the homework. If a student cound not find a study partner, he or she could go to the physics study room any time between 7am and 7pm to discuss problems with the resident graduate student and find other students to work with.
The instructor backed down somewhat. She stated that any collaboration in this department was forbidden and I would take a failing grade on that homework assignment. She also said I could appeal this to the department head, but if I did, she would make every effort to get me thrown out of the CS department, and possibly the University.
I really should have fought her. This situation is absurd. I have been a professional programmer for over six years now (fininshed both physics and CS with bachelor's degrees). I have yet to work on a project where I was not to collaborate with anyone.
In the physics department, peer review and collaboration were seen as necessary to the instruction of students. Tests and cirricula were designed with the idea that some students would exploit this system and not do their own work. These students were always shown up on exam day and seldom passed classes.
CS, by comparison, buried its head in the sand, trying to legislate a problem away, rather than rethink their appoach and build cooperation into the system. I think this is a strategy that ultimately will not work. CS departments need to apporach classes with the idea that the students will and should communicate ideas with each other. Assignments and cirricula should adapt to that situation. This, I believe, will lead to better prepared students able to work effectively in groups.
What I wouldn't give for some new hires like that.
I wonder if anyone has ever built tiny file system on this concept. In theory, its not too hard. It would look very similar to a modern block-oriented file system, but with very tiny, variable sized blocks organized as inodes.
The chief objection is that the data may go missing if it is defragged or modified. The solution may be a simple as looking at last modification dates. Many of the system files on both Unix and Windows machines (/usr/bin, c:\Windows\System32) are quite small and are very rarely modified. There could be enough space spread among these files to stitch together into space for several dozen KB of compressed information. Plus, good compression should yield data blocks that look quite a bit like noise.
The other problem is hiding the program to run the file system. But that itself could be hidden in the file system if a small enough bootstrap could be written. Alternately, it could live on a floppy, providing a key, of sorts.
IIRC, while writing Contact, Asamov passed along a draft to noted physicist Kip Thorne (the guy that Stephen Hawkings makes those bets with) for a sanity check. Originally, Asimov had his explorers being whisked away by a machine generating a rotating black hole. Kip hated the idea and argued that nothing could withstand the tidal forces. Instead, he proposed the machine create a wormhole. A fairly novel idea at the time.
Kip became so intrigued with the idea of a wormhole that he began working out the mathematics of how to open and traverse a wormhole. Eventually, he discovered mathematics describing how to build a time machine out of a wormhole. When he published these findings, it touched off a round of scientific investigation on the possibility of creating a wormhole and the mechanics of a real time machine.
Re:More eclectic, less practical...
on
Apocalypse 3
·
· Score: 1
Yes, you can get a very perceptible difference in performance with well-coded Perl. And yes, Perl is used for quite a few large scale applications where such efficiency is needed (Slashcode itself comes to mind). Run time efficiency is quite important and you should not dismiss a tool out-of-hand for a minor drawback such as its compilation system.
Re:More eclectic, less practical...
on
Apocalypse 3
·
· Score: 1
Yes, I know you can use for as an abbreviation of foreach, but I was not referring such syntactic sugar. I was referring to the difference between the statement for(;;) and the foreach scalar, array.
For example:
for (my $j = 0; $j != @ary2; $j++) {
#do something with $ary2[$j]
}
It's [foreach] cleaner, safer, and faster. It's cleaner because it's less noisy. It's safer because if code gets added between the inner and outer loops later on, the new code won't be accidentally executed. The next explicitly iterates the other loop rather than merely terminating the inner one. And it's faster because Perl executes a foreach statement more rapidly than it would the equivalent for loop.
The example has merit and is quite pertinent to the discussion. The foreach construction allows Perl to better understand your intention. It takes advantage of that knowledge to increase its efficiency. Hence my original point.
Re:More eclectic, less practical...
on
Apocalypse 3
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Why, then, does Perl include a 'foreach' operator when a 'for' loop will do just fine? Efficiency. By giving the language a hint as to what you are going to do, it can iterate through the list faster and with fewer resources. I expect that when the implementation arrives, we will find the hyper operators offer a not-insignificant efficiency gain over a simple for loop.
The point of Perl is not necessarily to provide more than one way to do things, but to make certain types of programming much easier than with other languages. There are things I do in Perl in an hour that would be a week undertaking in C or C++. If enough users are calling for these seemingly esoteric features, add them. The more expressive the language, the more useful.
This is the perfect example of the sort of corporate altruism I think we can expect to see over the next few years. As some people have pointed out, SuSE is one of the most popular European Linux distributions. It is in IBM and Intel's best interest to ensure that there is are a few solid European based distributions around for them to build their business on. It avoids vendor lock to a particular distro (Red Hat anyone?). It maintains a company doing the tricky task of localizing the bulk of Linux. Plus, that shop may later be used to help localize IBM software at a later date.
All and all, it is in IBM and Intel's best interest to have a thriving SuSE (and Mandrake, for that matter), regardless of whether the company is actually profitable. This sort of enlightened self-interest could lead to a sort of patronage system for some of the major Linux distributors.
As I understand it, the nature of a sword is dictated by the armor it is expected to defeat. Here is an excelent interview with an expert in the history and development of European swords.
Anyone notice how he shifted part of the blame on the reader for not seeing the joke in the name? He still isn't completely accepting responsibility for his actions. It is still partially the reader's fault for not seeing through his deception. It is still the reader's fault for being offended by the content of his posts.
He is trying to blow this off as a misunderstanding between a well-intentioned editor trying to liven up the site and a few stodgy killjoys who didn't get the joke immediantly. He seems to think this is like some practical joke that went awry and that a smirking apology will fix the situation.
He still does not understand that deception has no place in responsible journalism.
Most of these questions are excellent. As a professional programmer and occasional interviewer (and interviewee), this is also helpful on preparing programming interviews. However, one area has been missed.
As a programmer, my goal is to hire someone at at least as competent as myself. As an expert, its easy for me to spot such a person. However, most organizations I have worked in have had only one or two sysadmins. You may not have an expert sysadmin around to evaluate if a candidate's response to a tcpdump question is valid.
So, my quesion: How can a non-sysadmin interview a potential sysadmin? How does a startup find a good sysadmin, or a good lead programmer if no one there is an expert in the field.
One possible solution is to have the last person to hold that position involved in the interview process. But if you are getting rid of a poor sysadmin, you are likely to get another poor sysadmin.
For those wanting something in between the hardcore Nature article and the mostly fluff CNN and MSNBC articles, here's a layman's version prepared by Nature itself. Check out Nature Science Update.
There seems to be a lot of confusion in this discussion about what constitutes a theory, and how that relates to evolution and the theory of evolution. Never one to refrain from lodging my foot in my mouth, I'll try and clarify.
First, let's start with what a theory is. A theory is a group of hypotheses that attempt to explain an observed phenomenon. A hypothesis is a falsifiable statement describing some mechanism involved in the phenomenon. The key word, for this discussion, is falsifiable. All aspects of a theory must be able to be proven incorrect for it to be a theory. This allows us to construct experiments seeking to support or disprove the hypotheses, and thus the theory.
Theorys explaining a phenomenon can come and go. Gravity is one. We're currently working on our third Theory of Gravity, having tried Newton's and Einstein's. Please note that Einstein's Theory of Gravity did not disprove Newton's. It merely restricted the domain of problems for which it is applicable. NASA still uses Newton's Theory of Gravity to land space probes on asteroids and play billards with the planets. Its a fine theory as long as you aren't going too fast or talking about something too massive. For that, you need Einstein's Theory. His works fine, as long as you aren't talking about things that are too small and moving very fast. We don't know what to use there, but we're working hard on it (M-Theory, Quantum Gravity, etc.). Please note that to replace a theory, the new theory must explain everything the old theory did as well explain where the old theory will fail and how it will fail. That's a tall order.
Evolution is a phenomenon. This is not in dispute. Evolution is defined as the change in allele frequency in a given population over time. More loosely, it is that the physical characterists of a group of creatures change through the years. This is an observed fact. Fossil evidence provides morphological change from the past to the present. Laboratory experiments confirm the shift in the distribution of traits in populations of fast breeding creatures (like fruit flys). Bacteria, to our horror, acquire new resistances.
A Theory of Evolution is a series of hypotheses describing how Evolution may occur. The classical Theory of Evolution states that Evolution occurs through mutation, gene flow, genetic drift and natural selection. This theory has largely been born out by evidence. It is currently challenged by the Punctuated Equilibrium Theory of Evolution, which is a modification of the classical theory that takes population density into account.
Does the information in the article confirm one or the other Theories of Evolution? Not sure, will take some thought. It is, however, another property of the phenominom of Evolution. That is indisputable. Allele frequencies have shifted over time. Here's the raw alleles, shifted around for all to see.
ps - I'm not a biologist, nor do I play one on TV. I did, however, marry one.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. What an Operating System provides is just that, an operating system. Its purpose is to manage the hardware and serve as an abstraction of that hardware to the applications.
I think the author missed the distincton between the OS and the UI for the OS, the shell (and filesystem). His complaints are better leveled against shells and WIMP interfaces than at operating systems.
Slashdot Mirror
I was once watching the 'La Femme Nikita' series several years ago (I had no life and there was nothing else on). Some mad villian had hacked into an airport's traffic control computer and was going to misroute the planes to fly into each other or something.
..."
Anyway, after the requisite gun battle, our heroine reaches the dastardly computer and radios back to base for instructions on stopping it. The conversation went something like:
Computer Expert (CE): "Ok, type in ps space dash a u x and hit return."
Nikita: "Er, csh, kernel, fltsm
CE: "That last one, it shouldn't be there, what's the number to the right of that name?"
N: "572."
CE: "Ok, type in kill space dash nine space 572 and hit return."
N: "Nothing's happening! The program didn't stop!"
CE: "It takes a second to kill the process, hold on."
N: "It worked!"
Needless to say, my jaw was on the floor.
Yep, doctors, lawyers and police. That's most of the prime time dramas these days. I'm really looking forward to 'Cop Lawyer, M.D.' this fall, so I can cut my viewing time by a third.
Favorite Throw-Away Sight Gag
In Kamp Krusty, as Kent Brockman tours the devastation, there's a brief shot in the background of a pig's head on a stick with flies buzzing around it.
I guarantee anyone ever forced to read Lord of the Flies lost it at that point.
The best reason I can think of for why Aragorn and Co. march all the way north to the Gates is an easy one - he's playing for time. It takes several days to make his way across the river, up Ithillian, round the dead lands and to the Black Gate. That's time for Frodo to hike across Mordor while Saruon is busy moving troops to the Black Gate.
As for why Sauron does not send a force from behind, his one goal here is the Ring, which he thinks Aragorn has. I think he believes Aragorn is drunk on the power of the Ring and seeks to challenge him openly at his gates, a sort of 'winner take all' ending.
Aragorn is in the open and exposed. If he attacks Minas Tirith again, Aragorn may retreat to the city leading to a long seige. If he attacks the army from the rear, it may scatter and he'd be forced to hunt Aragorn (a ranger and woodsman) up and down the Great River.
Saruon knows he has an overwhelming force, his spies can see the exact size of Aragorn's army. Sauron has the choice of terrain - Aragorn must attack his fortifications.
Remember your Sun Tsu - Choose your battleground and you need not fear the outcome of a hundred battles.
And as for why the attack should be at the Black Gates, rather than Minas Morgul, here's the best reason - time. Gandalf is playing for time. It takes quite a while to muster the army, march across Osgiliath, up to the crossroads, along Ithillian (sp?), around the Dead Lands and up to the Black Gate. That's a longer hike than Frodo has to make, with Sauron concentrating all his attention away from Mordor the entire time.
Assuming they get the resoultion up, this device may be a very good input mechanism for eastern languages, such as traditional Chinese, Japanese and others. Keyboarding in Chinese is no picnic and requires some specialized skill. This could replace such keyboards with a pen and paper, expanding the number of people that can enter data into a computer to anyone who can read and write their native language.
Big account, small account. It doesn't matter. Microsoft cannot have any country pass one of these laws and have it work. Fear of change is what keeps these governments coming back to Microsoft. Having a working example with real numbers on cost savings will devastate this argument.
Their fear is a good old 50's style domino effect. First Venezuela, then Costa Rica, then Mexico. Pretty soon, Peru ignore's Bill's gift horse and converts as well. Before you know it, all of Latin America will be running Linux. I don't think this will happen, but I bet Microsoft thinks it could.
Don't forget to tell them why!! Spell it out. Cite press releases. Explain your position rationally. Try not to sound like a zealot (no offense). Make sure they understand exactly which decision is costing them customers. And finally, sign your real name and put some weight of numbers behind it.
---------------
This space for rent.
Here's a story about an A-10 that took a SAM hit during Desert Storm:
A few days later on 6 February 1991, Johnson demonstrated his skills again when another aircraft he was flying was hit by enemy fire. Johnson; flying A-10A - S/N 78-0664, was attacking a Surface to Air Missile (SAM) site when his aircraft was hit by portable shoulder-mounted SAM. The explosion left a gaping hole in the right wing of the A-10, disabled one of the aircraft's two hydraulic systems, and crippled the right engine. He managed to fly the badly damaged "Warthog" back to Saudi airspace, where he air refueled as he recovered at King Fahd AB. Johnson feared that when the right gear was lowered, he might lose the outer wing, but fortunately he got "three in the green." Having bought the aircraft home "on a wing and a prayer," he flew a no-flap approach to a smooth landing, despite a blown tire which shredded on touchdown!
Now that's a survivable aircraft! The JSF, as good as it is, was not engineered to survive this much punishment. Again, apples to oranges.
I got nailed for this back when I was in college. I had been in the physics department at Arizona for a couple years and decided to pick up a minor in CS. During my first CS course, I collaborated on a homework assignment (no coding - hand analysis of some data structures) with another student.
A week later, the instructor called me in. She asked if I had collaborated with anyone on the assignment. I said I had and we were planning to meet again tomorrow to discuss the latest assignment. She went ballistic, accusing me of academic dishonesty and threatening to throw me out of the department. I protested my innocence, that we had merely collaborated, not copied. She said that even collaboration was forbidden, that what I had done was wrong and not condoned by any department at the university.
Furious, I produced no less than three sylabii (sp?) for my 400 level physics courses. Each one went into great depth about the need to find other students to study with and collaborate on the homework. If a student cound not find a study partner, he or she could go to the physics study room any time between 7am and 7pm to discuss problems with the resident graduate student and find other students to work with.
The instructor backed down somewhat. She stated that any collaboration in this department was forbidden and I would take a failing grade on that homework assignment. She also said I could appeal this to the department head, but if I did, she would make every effort to get me thrown out of the CS department, and possibly the University.
I really should have fought her. This situation is absurd. I have been a professional programmer for over six years now (fininshed both physics and CS with bachelor's degrees). I have yet to work on a project where I was not to collaborate with anyone.
In the physics department, peer review and collaboration were seen as necessary to the instruction of students. Tests and cirricula were designed with the idea that some students would exploit this system and not do their own work. These students were always shown up on exam day and seldom passed classes.
CS, by comparison, buried its head in the sand, trying to legislate a problem away, rather than rethink their appoach and build cooperation into the system. I think this is a strategy that ultimately will not work. CS departments need to apporach classes with the idea that the students will and should communicate ideas with each other. Assignments and cirricula should adapt to that situation. This, I believe, will lead to better prepared students able to work effectively in groups.
What I wouldn't give for some new hires like that.
Interesting timing on the articles, isn't it?
I wonder if anyone has ever built tiny file system on this concept. In theory, its not too hard. It would look very similar to a modern block-oriented file system, but with very tiny, variable sized blocks organized as inodes.
The chief objection is that the data may go missing if it is defragged or modified. The solution may be a simple as looking at last modification dates. Many of the system files on both Unix and Windows machines (/usr/bin, c:\Windows\System32) are quite small and are very rarely modified. There could be enough space spread among these files to stitch together into space for several dozen KB of compressed information. Plus, good compression should yield data blocks that look quite a bit like noise.
The other problem is hiding the program to run the file system. But that itself could be hidden in the file system if a small enough bootstrap could be written. Alternately, it could live on a floppy, providing a key, of sorts.
Just don't name it "Skynet".
Doh! Sorry about that. Still recovering from the long weekend, I guess.
Kip became so intrigued with the idea of a wormhole that he began working out the mathematics of how to open and traverse a wormhole. Eventually, he discovered mathematics describing how to build a time machine out of a wormhole. When he published these findings, it touched off a round of scientific investigation on the possibility of creating a wormhole and the mechanics of a real time machine.
The entire story is written up at the end of Thorne's book Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy.
Yes, you can get a very perceptible difference in performance with well-coded Perl. And yes, Perl is used for quite a few large scale applications where such efficiency is needed (Slashcode itself comes to mind). Run time efficiency is quite important and you should not dismiss a tool out-of-hand for a minor drawback such as its compilation system.
For example:
and a foreach loop:
The Perl Manual has this to say on the matter.
It's [foreach] cleaner, safer, and faster. It's cleaner because it's less noisy. It's safer because if code gets added between the inner and outer loops later on, the new code won't be accidentally executed. The next explicitly iterates the other loop rather than merely terminating the inner one. And it's faster because Perl executes a foreach statement more rapidly than it would the equivalent for loop.
The example has merit and is quite pertinent to the discussion. The foreach construction allows Perl to better understand your intention. It takes advantage of that knowledge to increase its efficiency. Hence my original point.
The point of Perl is not necessarily to provide more than one way to do things, but to make certain types of programming much easier than with other languages. There are things I do in Perl in an hour that would be a week undertaking in C or C++. If enough users are calling for these seemingly esoteric features, add them. The more expressive the language, the more useful.
This is the perfect example of the sort of corporate altruism I think we can expect to see over the next few years. As some people have pointed out, SuSE is one of the most popular European Linux distributions. It is in IBM and Intel's best interest to ensure that there is are a few solid European based distributions around for them to build their business on. It avoids vendor lock to a particular distro (Red Hat anyone?). It maintains a company doing the tricky task of localizing the bulk of Linux. Plus, that shop may later be used to help localize IBM software at a later date.
All and all, it is in IBM and Intel's best interest to have a thriving SuSE (and Mandrake, for that matter), regardless of whether the company is actually profitable. This sort of enlightened self-interest could lead to a sort of patronage system for some of the major Linux distributors.
As I understand it, the nature of a sword is dictated by the armor it is expected to defeat. Here is an excelent interview with an expert in the history and development of European swords.
He is trying to blow this off as a misunderstanding between a well-intentioned editor trying to liven up the site and a few stodgy killjoys who didn't get the joke immediantly. He seems to think this is like some practical joke that went awry and that a smirking apology will fix the situation.
He still does not understand that deception has no place in responsible journalism.
As a programmer, my goal is to hire someone at at least as competent as myself. As an expert, its easy for me to spot such a person. However, most organizations I have worked in have had only one or two sysadmins. You may not have an expert sysadmin around to evaluate if a candidate's response to a tcpdump question is valid.
So, my quesion: How can a non-sysadmin interview a potential sysadmin? How does a startup find a good sysadmin, or a good lead programmer if no one there is an expert in the field.
One possible solution is to have the last person to hold that position involved in the interview process. But if you are getting rid of a poor sysadmin, you are likely to get another poor sysadmin.
For those wanting something in between the hardcore Nature article and the mostly fluff CNN and MSNBC articles, here's a layman's version prepared by Nature itself. Check out Nature Science Update.
First, let's start with what a theory is. A theory is a group of hypotheses that attempt to explain an observed phenomenon. A hypothesis is a falsifiable statement describing some mechanism involved in the phenomenon. The key word, for this discussion, is falsifiable. All aspects of a theory must be able to be proven incorrect for it to be a theory. This allows us to construct experiments seeking to support or disprove the hypotheses, and thus the theory.
Theorys explaining a phenomenon can come and go. Gravity is one. We're currently working on our third Theory of Gravity, having tried Newton's and Einstein's. Please note that Einstein's Theory of Gravity did not disprove Newton's. It merely restricted the domain of problems for which it is applicable. NASA still uses Newton's Theory of Gravity to land space probes on asteroids and play billards with the planets. Its a fine theory as long as you aren't going too fast or talking about something too massive. For that, you need Einstein's Theory. His works fine, as long as you aren't talking about things that are too small and moving very fast. We don't know what to use there, but we're working hard on it (M-Theory, Quantum Gravity, etc.). Please note that to replace a theory, the new theory must explain everything the old theory did as well explain where the old theory will fail and how it will fail. That's a tall order.
Evolution is a phenomenon. This is not in dispute. Evolution is defined as the change in allele frequency in a given population over time. More loosely, it is that the physical characterists of a group of creatures change through the years. This is an observed fact. Fossil evidence provides morphological change from the past to the present. Laboratory experiments confirm the shift in the distribution of traits in populations of fast breeding creatures (like fruit flys). Bacteria, to our horror, acquire new resistances.
A Theory of Evolution is a series of hypotheses describing how Evolution may occur. The classical Theory of Evolution states that Evolution occurs through mutation, gene flow, genetic drift and natural selection. This theory has largely been born out by evidence. It is currently challenged by the Punctuated Equilibrium Theory of Evolution, which is a modification of the classical theory that takes population density into account.
Does the information in the article confirm one or the other Theories of Evolution? Not sure, will take some thought. It is, however, another property of the phenominom of Evolution. That is indisputable. Allele frequencies have shifted over time. Here's the raw alleles, shifted around for all to see.
ps - I'm not a biologist, nor do I play one on TV. I did, however, marry one.
I think the author missed the distincton between the OS and the UI for the OS, the shell (and filesystem). His complaints are better leveled against shells and WIMP interfaces than at operating systems.