As already descibed in Robert Zubrin's "Entering Space". It is possible for many Earth bacteria to survive short trips in space. Therefore, even if all life was completely wiped out on Earth itself, it's perfectly possible that Earth bacteria survived a relatively short trip with some debris in space and then recolonized the planet.
Or the bacteria simply spored while the atmosphere was choked, and survived on Earth.
Or the first organisms on Earth weren't dependent on the Sun. Chemosynthesis of geothermally-synthesized chemicals is a perfectly reasonable basis for a biosphere, and some theorize that the majority of Earth organisms are actually part of an underground chemosynthetic ecology. (They even argue that petroleum may not be a fossil fuel, but a byproduct of this ecology, which explains several facts the fossil theory does not.)
Other theories may also be viable, of course, but I happen not to know what they may be...
Mozilla 0.6 has skins for one and only one reason -- to make porting easier. By rendering the widgets with the browser's page renderer, you don't have to write a whole new batch of front-end code for Windows, X, Mac, OS/2, Be, etc.
A side effect is that it makes it easy to replace thw widgets with a new set, since your widgets are in a browser-renderable format instead of your OS libraries. Thus, with a dozen lines of code to create an interface less clumsy than copying over interface files, you wind up able to easily skin Mozilla.
In short,"'skin'-ability" didn't cost developer time in Mozilla, it saved time to focus on security, speed, and actual functionality.
Netscape wanted Mail/News, since they had to duplicate the functionality of Communicator 4.7. The IRC client was written by volunteers who chose the project themselves and otherwise would not have been working on Mozilla. And the GUI stuff is 100% forgivable if you're running anything other than Windows, because otherwise you wouldn't have Mozilla for your platform yet.
Which "Mozilla people"? If somebody who isn't being paid by Netscape to work on the browser and who otherwise wouldn't be working on Mozilla at all decides to write an IRC client based on Mozilla, so what?
Actually, the Itanium will run x86 code (slowly); it has hardware emulation (which can't take full advantage of the Itanium's parallelism). You must have an OS compiled for the EPIC instruction set.
For Clawhammer/Sledgehammer, you can run legacy 16- and 32- bit software under a new 64-bit x86 OS, or you can contiune to run your 32-bit or 16-bit x86 OS on the chip.
Personally, I expect that the Itanium will wind replacing Alphas running Linux and NT, and inherit the current PA-RISC market. Intel will wind up creating server variants of its x86 chips to hold on to the current x86 server/workstation market, with marketing demanding those to stay confined to 32 bit instruction sets.
The Sledgehammer will thus have no real competition as it seizes the entire Linux-on-x86 server and workstation markets, with a 64-to-32 bit advantage. If Microsoft delivers an x86-64 NT, the NT-on-x86 market will certainly go Sledgehammer; otherwise, the high end will migrate to Itanium and the rest stay on Intel and AMD x86 chips running 32-bit NT.
If the marketers were to be shoved aside, Intel would crash-engineer and release its own 64-bit x86, and maintain unquestioned dominance. They won't be. Instead, Intel will enter a market where it will be one of four players (with Compaq, IBM, and Sun), and lose dominance of its current cash-cow market to a codominion with AMD.
Windows Me still has 16-bit system code necessary even if you run only 32-bit software. It's got less then 98 did, which had less than 95, which had less than WfWG 3.11 w/Win32s and 32-bit file access enabled did; but it's still around.
OS/2 5.0 also has a morass of 16-bit code in system areas, still left over from OS/2 1.3, and a lot more Windows for Workgroups 3.11 code and architecture is in Windows Me than OS/2 1.3 code and architecture is in OS/2 5.0
Er, you did notice that Pat Buchanan not only did much worse in the U.S. election than the National Front does in France, but Buchanan was running with a black woman on his ticket?
Thurmond? Given how long ago he expressed anything along these lines, why not point out Mitterrand's youthful connections to the French far-right and his working with the collaborationist Petain regime?
David Duke? Bringing up a failed small-state gubenatorial candidate who last ran a decade ago illustrates better than I could how weak your argument is.
Both Mozilla nightlies and Netscape 6 are not alternatives for me either, because they load and run incredibly slowly on my Pentium II 266 with 96 MB RAM.
Slow load I'll grant. Slow run is bullshit. (Posted from a Celeron 300 with 96 MB RAM)
In fact, I'll bet men tend to be "slightly" color-blind more often than women. If a man has a 99-01 red/green "red" gene and a 10-90 red/green "green" gene on his sole X will have less acute color vision than a woman with a 99-01/10-90 pair on her first X and a 98-02/03-97 pair on the other.
The fact that capitalism happens to work well in practice, while communism doesn't, is just the small issue of human nature
Not true. Socialists like to claim the problem is human immorality, but the real problem is in information theory. A race of angels could not get socialism to work, because the necessary information on where resources should be allocated is not generated by any known form of non-free-market economic system.
Now, if you have perfect information available, things change. Not only is socialism workable, it is far more efficient than the expensive feedback mechanism of the free market. Furthermore, with perfect information, you can bypass the "human nature" deficiencies by creating personal-incentive programs within the otherwise socialist system. Asimov described just such a situation in his short story "The Evitable Conflict", the last story in "I, Robot".
But we don't have perfect information. Nobody's even come up with an accounting mechanism for a socialist economy that produces enough information to make central planning as productive as a highly regulated mixed economy, much less a true free market. (And forget non-centralized socialism; the information deficit is enven worse.)
In short, in theory as well as practice, socialism doesn't work. The best that can be said for socialism is that most socialists have their heart in the right place.
Programs using SSE2 instructions will need those instructions available when they run, elsewise bad things happen. But what a gain! If ever you get the chance to talk to anyone from Intel, say that you'd like to see more of this.
Guess what? We already have. The 486 had instructions that were not available on the 386; programs that use them cannot be run on the 386.
In short, the definition of x86 you seem to be using doesn't, and never, existed. Never have you been able to use all the instructions on post-386 processsors on 386es, any more than you could do so with the 286 or 086. x86 compatibility has always run the other way, and it's still 100% the other way -- all the instructions for the 8086 are available on a P-IV.
It's not like there isn't a lack of non-x86 processors out there. If a non-x86 processor was going to kill x86, why wasn't it the Alpha/PowerPC/MIPS?
This is why I think Intel has just sunk billions into what will become Just Another Chip, the non-x86 Itanium. It will join the Alpha, MIPS, Power, Sparc, and others in a crowded server-chip market.
AMD, on the other hand, is going to make a fortune on the x86-64 platform, dominating the NT-or-Linux server market running a mix of x86-32 and x86-64 software. Intel will desperately adapt the Pentium V to handle AMD's 64-bit extensions, and probably run afoul of a judiciously-placed AMD patent. AMD will wind up getting royalties on every Pentium V, and eventually overthrow Intel as the #1 chipmaker.
Er, were you comparing Celerons and Durons clock-for-clock? Duron's got a 100 MHz FSB vs. 66 for Celerons, so the Duron gives better performance at lower chip speeds when using that more RAM you bought.
Gopher did have hyperlinks -- they were merely listed at the bottom instead of randomly through the text. Normally you'd go to one by pressing a corresponding number on the keyboard
Oh, please. I never denied America was more puritanical than France. I was just pointing out that French sensitivities on Naziism are significantly higher than American sensitivites about sex.
In fact, the French sensitivity pretty much illustrates the French level of political backwardness. Other demonstrations are the entire French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte, Louis Napoleon, the Paris Commune, the Vichy era, Nazi collaboration, the fall of the Fourth Republic, the '68 crisis, and the National Front.
So, I agree with the French restrictions on Nazi artifacts the same way I agree with keeping sex off daytime television; immature minds should be kept from temptation.
Our "highly effective native american extermination policy" has resulted in their being a larger population of native Americans in the U.S. today than when the Jamestown was founded.
And we are not going after French websites that make it possible for Americans to view auctions of pornographic items. We are not going after any websites that make it possible for Americans to view auctions of pornographic items. We are not going after any websites that distribute pornography. We are not (with localized exceptions) going after video rental places, bookstores, and newsstands that deliver pornography. We are not (with localized exceptions) going after clubs with nude entertainment.
When French "irrationality" about the Nazis is low enough that one can buy a book named "Nazis" full of pictures of Nazi memorabilia in a mainstream bookstore, your "irrationality" will be of the same minor quirk level as American "puritanism". In the meantime, I'll enjoy Madonna's "Sex".
However, you cannot make something designed to be detected simultaneously undetectable. It's simple logic; a and not-a cannot be simultaneously true of the same property of the same object.
And anything in a digital format that can be detected can be altered, in extremis by using a hex editor to change specific values.
So a digital watermark, since it must be detectable under certain conditions, must be removable.
So, what you are saying is that for a fair comparison, we should run software optimized for the P4 on both the P4 and Athlon, instead of software optimized for neither.
It's only a level playing field if it's pre-titled in Intel's favor?
The question isn't over the.cn domain, but over Chinese characters in.com,.net, and.org domain names. And Chinese is an international language -- it is used in Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, among others. And Chinese characters are used in Japanese and Korean.
So the People's Republic of China is trying to require half a billion people who are not PRC residents but who use Chinese characters to go through PRC-approved registrars to get Chinese-character domains ending in.com,.net, and.org.
Slashdot Mirror
As already descibed in Robert Zubrin's "Entering Space". It is possible for many Earth bacteria to survive short trips in space. Therefore, even if all life was completely wiped out on Earth itself, it's perfectly possible that Earth bacteria survived a relatively short trip with some debris in space and then recolonized the planet.
Or the bacteria simply spored while the atmosphere was choked, and survived on Earth.
Or the first organisms on Earth weren't dependent on the Sun. Chemosynthesis of geothermally-synthesized chemicals is a perfectly reasonable basis for a biosphere, and some theorize that the majority of Earth organisms are actually part of an underground chemosynthetic ecology. (They even argue that petroleum may not be a fossil fuel, but a byproduct of this ecology, which explains several facts the fossil theory does not.)
Other theories may also be viable, of course, but I happen not to know what they may be...
Mozilla 0.6 has skins for one and only one reason -- to make porting easier. By rendering the widgets with the browser's page renderer, you don't have to write a whole new batch of front-end code for Windows, X, Mac, OS/2, Be, etc.
A side effect is that it makes it easy to replace thw widgets with a new set, since your widgets are in a browser-renderable format instead of your OS libraries. Thus, with a dozen lines of code to create an interface less clumsy than copying over interface files, you wind up able to easily skin Mozilla.
In short,"'skin'-ability" didn't cost developer time in Mozilla, it saved time to focus on security, speed, and actual functionality.
Netscape wanted Mail/News, since they had to duplicate the functionality of Communicator 4.7. The IRC client was written by volunteers who chose the project themselves and otherwise would not have been working on Mozilla. And the GUI stuff is 100% forgivable if you're running anything other than Windows, because otherwise you wouldn't have Mozilla for your platform yet.
Which "Mozilla people"? If somebody who isn't being paid by Netscape to work on the browser and who otherwise wouldn't be working on Mozilla at all decides to write an IRC client based on Mozilla, so what?
Actually, the Itanium will run x86 code (slowly); it has hardware emulation (which can't take full advantage of the Itanium's parallelism). You must have an OS compiled for the EPIC instruction set.
For Clawhammer/Sledgehammer, you can run legacy 16- and 32- bit software under a new 64-bit x86 OS, or you can contiune to run your 32-bit or 16-bit x86 OS on the chip.
Personally, I expect that the Itanium will wind replacing Alphas running Linux and NT, and inherit the current PA-RISC market. Intel will wind up creating server variants of its x86 chips to hold on to the current x86 server/workstation market, with marketing demanding those to stay confined to 32 bit instruction sets.
The Sledgehammer will thus have no real competition as it seizes the entire Linux-on-x86 server and workstation markets, with a 64-to-32 bit advantage. If Microsoft delivers an x86-64 NT, the NT-on-x86 market will certainly go Sledgehammer; otherwise, the high end will migrate to Itanium and the rest stay on Intel and AMD x86 chips running 32-bit NT.
If the marketers were to be shoved aside, Intel would crash-engineer and release its own 64-bit x86, and maintain unquestioned dominance. They won't be. Instead, Intel will enter a market where it will be one of four players (with Compaq, IBM, and Sun), and lose dominance of its current cash-cow market to a codominion with AMD.
pitiful 486SX chip, a crippled CPU that probably had no right to exist
Well, the 486SX wasn't supposed to exist. SXs were merely DXs whose FPUs failed in testing, and were shipped with the FPU disabled.
Windows Me still has 16-bit system code necessary even if you run only 32-bit software. It's got less then 98 did, which had less than 95, which had less than WfWG 3.11 w/Win32s and 32-bit file access enabled did; but it's still around.
OS/2 5.0 also has a morass of 16-bit code in system areas, still left over from OS/2 1.3, and a lot more Windows for Workgroups 3.11 code and architecture is in Windows Me than OS/2 1.3 code and architecture is in OS/2 5.0
Er, you did notice that Pat Buchanan not only did much worse in the U.S. election than the National Front does in France, but Buchanan was running with a black woman on his ticket?
Thurmond? Given how long ago he expressed anything along these lines, why not point out Mitterrand's youthful connections to the French far-right and his working with the collaborationist Petain regime?
David Duke? Bringing up a failed small-state gubenatorial candidate who last ran a decade ago illustrates better than I could how weak your argument is.
Both Mozilla nightlies and Netscape 6 are not alternatives for me either, because they load and run incredibly slowly on my Pentium II 266 with 96 MB RAM.
Slow load I'll grant. Slow run is bullshit. (Posted from a Celeron 300 with 96 MB RAM)
In fact, I'll bet men tend to be "slightly" color-blind more often than women. If a man has a 99-01 red/green "red" gene and a 10-90 red/green "green" gene on his sole X will have less acute color vision than a woman with a 99-01/10-90 pair on her first X and a 98-02/03-97 pair on the other.
The fact that capitalism happens to work well in practice, while communism doesn't, is just the small issue of human nature
Not true. Socialists like to claim the problem is human immorality, but the real problem is in information theory. A race of angels could not get socialism to work, because the necessary information on where resources should be allocated is not generated by any known form of non-free-market economic system.
Now, if you have perfect information available, things change. Not only is socialism workable, it is far more efficient than the expensive feedback mechanism of the free market. Furthermore, with perfect information, you can bypass the "human nature" deficiencies by creating personal-incentive programs within the otherwise socialist system. Asimov described just such a situation in his short story "The Evitable Conflict", the last story in "I, Robot".
But we don't have perfect information. Nobody's even come up with an accounting mechanism for a socialist economy that produces enough information to make central planning as productive as a highly regulated mixed economy, much less a true free market. (And forget non-centralized socialism; the information deficit is enven worse.)
In short, in theory as well as practice, socialism doesn't work. The best that can be said for socialism is that most socialists have their heart in the right place.
In principle, anything capable of calculation is a "circumvention device" for any form of encryption, because decryption is a mathematical exercise.
Programs using SSE2 instructions will need those instructions available when they run, elsewise bad things happen. But what a gain! If ever you get the chance to talk to anyone from Intel, say that you'd like to see more of this.
Guess what? We already have. The 486 had instructions that were not available on the 386; programs that use them cannot be run on the 386.
In short, the definition of x86 you seem to be using doesn't, and never, existed. Never have you been able to use all the instructions on post-386 processsors on 386es, any more than you could do so with the 286 or 086. x86 compatibility has always run the other way, and it's still 100% the other way -- all the instructions for the 8086 are available on a P-IV.
It's not like there isn't a lack of non-x86 processors out there. If a non-x86 processor was going to kill x86, why wasn't it the Alpha/PowerPC/MIPS?
This is why I think Intel has just sunk billions into what will become Just Another Chip, the non-x86 Itanium. It will join the Alpha, MIPS, Power, Sparc, and others in a crowded server-chip market.
AMD, on the other hand, is going to make a fortune on the x86-64 platform, dominating the NT-or-Linux server market running a mix of x86-32 and x86-64 software. Intel will desperately adapt the Pentium V to handle AMD's 64-bit extensions, and probably run afoul of a judiciously-placed AMD patent. AMD will wind up getting royalties on every Pentium V, and eventually overthrow Intel as the #1 chipmaker.
Er, were you comparing Celerons and Durons clock-for-clock? Duron's got a 100 MHz FSB vs. 66 for Celerons, so the Duron gives better performance at lower chip speeds when using that more RAM you bought.
Gopher did have hyperlinks -- they were merely listed at the bottom instead of randomly through the text. Normally you'd go to one by pressing a corresponding number on the keyboard
Oh, please. I never denied America was more puritanical than France. I was just pointing out that French sensitivities on Naziism are significantly higher than American sensitivites about sex.
In fact, the French sensitivity pretty much illustrates the French level of political backwardness. Other demonstrations are the entire French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte, Louis Napoleon, the Paris Commune, the Vichy era, Nazi collaboration, the fall of the Fourth Republic, the '68 crisis, and the National Front.
So, I agree with the French restrictions on Nazi artifacts the same way I agree with keeping sex off daytime television; immature minds should be kept from temptation.
I can only vaguely remember the Pentium Pro launch, but I think it was faster than an standard Pentium from the beginning.
If you were running 32-bit apps. In a mixed 32-and-16 environment (like Windows 95 and the apps available when it was released), the PPro was slower.
Our "highly effective native american extermination policy" has resulted in their being a larger population of native Americans in the U.S. today than when the Jamestown was founded.
We're not broadcasting Nazi icons on French TV.
And we are not going after French websites that make it possible for Americans to view auctions of pornographic items. We are not going after any websites that make it possible for Americans to view auctions of pornographic items. We are not going after any websites that distribute pornography. We are not (with localized exceptions) going after video rental places, bookstores, and newsstands that deliver pornography. We are not (with localized exceptions) going after clubs with nude entertainment.
When French "irrationality" about the Nazis is low enough that one can buy a book named "Nazis" full of pictures of Nazi memorabilia in a mainstream bookstore, your "irrationality" will be of the same minor quirk level as American "puritanism". In the meantime, I'll enjoy Madonna's "Sex".
Sure you can. Mathematics is full of such proofs.
However, you cannot make something designed to be detected simultaneously undetectable. It's simple logic; a and not-a cannot be simultaneously true of the same property of the same object.
And anything in a digital format that can be detected can be altered, in extremis by using a hex editor to change specific values.
So a digital watermark, since it must be detectable under certain conditions, must be removable.
How about transplanting FreeBSD into the Macintosh?
So, what you are saying is that for a fair comparison, we should run software optimized for the P4 on both the P4 and Athlon, instead of software optimized for neither.
It's only a level playing field if it's pre-titled in Intel's favor?
Although Win95 couldn't do color depth changes unless you grabbed the Toys...
The question isn't over the .cn domain, but over Chinese characters in .com, .net, and .org domain names. And Chinese is an international language -- it is used in Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, among others. And Chinese characters are used in Japanese and Korean.
.com, .net, and .org.
So the People's Republic of China is trying to require half a billion people who are not PRC residents but who use Chinese characters to go through PRC-approved registrars to get Chinese-character domains ending in