Or is the metabolic process the heart of life? That is an almost philosophical questions. Because it is certain that Fox's structures possessed metabolic capabilities. Of course they didn't have any DNA or RNA structure encoding the replication process BUT there is no clear specimen to tell us WHAT that information processing loooked like. Thus the job of replicating it is guesswork.
This is just chemistry
That is a tenuous statement.. It is certainly not life but it seems to be quite a bit more than chemistry. There is self assembly and self replication involved. That's a little more involved than "pure chemistry".
As they continued to run these experiments, the goal of actual protein synthesis kept recedeing the assigned probabilities kept dropping, and it is still an illusive goal today.
What about the protenoid world of Sidney Fox? It's not exactly like modern day protein structures but it can definitely be dubbed "protein like" structures. Just because Fox made some whacky claims later on in his career, his early work on protein structures is peer reviewed and can't be dismissed.
There hasn't been an artificial bacteria in a lab tube because we have no genetic material (most likely RNA) from that time period. So we don't know what the genetic "program" was like 4 billion years ago. The modern DNA is far too complex to create in a lab. But it's not a hard stretch to imagine that genetic info was orders of magnitude simpler than the DNA of even the simplest microbes of today.
All necessary molecules for primitive life have been created through simple experiments in the labs. Those experiments were surprisingly simple yet yielded a lot of interesting molecules (see Miller et al). Granted, we don't know what type of reactions led to the exact forms of life that we observe today but we can builds something that is pretty close to the most primitive life forms. For example we can now create fully artificial viruses in a lab environment. In time we'll learn how to add self replication without a host cell. There's nothing "magical" about single cell organisms. Within the next couple of decades we'll likely have fully functioning single cell organisms capable of metabolism and self replication created purely from inorganic molecules.
Actually some fossils that old have been found to still contain fragments of the DNA. It's rare but it does happen. It mostly depends on the permeability of the surrounding rocks. Some are so insulatory that they managed to capture some cellular structures for hundreds of millions of years. I know it's hard to comprehend but it's true.
This is complete nonsense and fundie gobbledygook. Go read some work by Robert Hazen or other scientists' regarding origins of life research. Not your church minister.
While there is no consensus on how the chemical reactions leading to initial living organisms occured, we have a fairly complete picture of the steps involved. Recent research shows that the odds of life forming on earth 40 billion years ago are very plausible. Some gaps remain but nothing drastic enough to negate the current scientific knowledge of the field.
Darwin's evolution has been proven time and again. I'm not even going to bother backing it. Just use Google or better go to your library and read the relevant literature. The evidence for evolution is overwhelming, crushing and undisputable. And if that wasn't enough, recent research documented (using scientific method as opposed to religious mythology) that evolution still occurs within cohorts of fruit fly populations.
Just give it up. If you have a strong set of beliefs keep them that way. Don't try to attach some pseudoscientific labels to them. Instead of being an enlightened spiritualist you'll be viewed as a dumb fundamentalist. Is that what you want?
"People should actually research things before condemning them."
Actually, Benedikt XVI is a kickass philosopher, not many people know that. He's highly respected as a philosopher and a theologian. You might not agree with his findings on many issues (I don't) but the guy is smart as hell.
He approves of evolution because he studied enough to know better than Southern US fundies.
since I can't specify max mem (well as I learned today in one of the responses I can (at least in J5, link of documentation reffers to J5, but my Java testing ended 2-3 months before J5 was out)
My goodness! You actually claim to have tried Java and did not find out about -Xmx switch? Honestly man, you cannot claim that you gave Java a fair try. If you had typed java -help followed by java -X you would have known. This switch has been available since at leat Java 1.2.
When you have some free time, try Java again, this time without prejudices and really put some heart into it. Otherwise you really can't claim to have given it a fair try.
I think you're a bit behind the curve. Managed languages can analyze runtime profile and perform optimizations that can't be performed on native code. High level concepts like escape analysis and lock elision come to mind.
But hey, never let the facts get in the way of your argument.
I regret my question wasn't picked but I'm really curious why the Dinosaurs project got abandoned. From the initial description it sounded like a terrific idea. Was the technology immature, was it too complex for an average gamer? I guess we'll never know the complete story behind that story.
Actually it's pretty clear that the Lord is a hacker albeit not a very good one. The DNA junk (pieces of the genome used for nothing) indicates the great Designer is not being big on refactoring. Maybe he's into design more than into implementation...
Cancer seems to suggest some fundamental problems with understanding recursion and actually the whole damn thing is riddled with bugs and inconsistencies though the replication code is pretty effective which points to Almighties beginnings as a script kiddie.
Not true. Only class diagrams can generate usable class skeletons. Every other diagram in RUP is not automatically convertible to code making RUP an excellent choice for consultants as it removes any traces of accountability for the final product. And that is the ultimate goal of RUP. Make the RUP consultants stock up on billable hours while absolving them of any responsibility for the actual working product.
Rubbish. All the RUP "consultants" I talked to, when I challenged the unusually high failure rate of their proce$$, claimed that the problems lie in people not adhering to RUP in its entirety and only adopting pieces of it. I've yet to meet a RUP "expert" who recommends something lightweight or tailored to the development team's specifics. No, it's always the other way round, it's the lowly engineers and the only marginally less lowly architects who are supposed to obey The Process. And don't they ever dare question or ignore any piece of paper, no matter how spurious, if it's mandated by The Process.
I have no clue what sort of organization would benefit from RUP. It's a top heavy, brittle process with very little room for customers' "changing their mind" which of course is notorious in most software development scenarios, making RUP the most stifling, overweight, expensive way to develop software I can think of.
It does require an army of "Architects" in various "Roles" so obviously Accenture con$ultants love it to no end.
I'm willing to bet any money that RUP sunk more development projects than it saved.
Have you tried turning on the incremental garbage collector? It offers much "smoother" performance at a slight throughput penalty (ie never "stops the world" when doing GC). I think the option is -Xincgc or something like that.
Have you tried turning incremental garbage collector? It offers improved "smootheness" at a slight performance penalty (ie never "stops the world" when performing GC).
And what if every filling station allowed you to replace your battery with a recharged one (at a cost of course)?
You'd have the best of both worlds. it's only a matter of standardizing the battery packs and a simple balanced hoist at the filling station. If there's a will it will get done.
Re:Its a matter of perspective
on
Pay vs. Happiness
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
OK. Time to challenge your assumptions. Do you really think your family will be happier because daddy is killing himself over so they can keep up the repayments on the plazma TV, or the second car? Do you think that when you draw your last breath you're going to exclaim "My dear God, I wish I had spent more time at the office!"?
You can give your family soooo much more than a McMansion and two shiny cars in the driveway. Take them for a walk, teach your kids to throw the ball, play tennis, whatever... In time they'll come to appreciate it much more than sterilized existence in a suburban McHouse.
I promise you, I guarantee you they'll appreciate the time with you much more than having marble countertops in the bathroom.
The American society is driven by greed to the point of obsession. The change has to come from within. Be a part of the solution, not a part of the problem.
Good luck there. The Netherlands is a beautiful place. It's one of the best places in Europe. A little crowded for sure, but the cultuer, the atmosphere of the place is unmatched. Gorgeous gothic architecture, booming culture and a tolerant society. What's not to like? Oh, and they're pretty sharp on high tech too.
I live in Canada now, but miss Europe dearly. I miss livable, fun cities where people want to hang out instead of retreating into their gated "communities".
Europe is so much human friendly than North America... don't get me wrong, I love Canada and Canadians but Europe is just hard to beat when it comes to coolness.
Sure. I have about $30,000 to splurge on a new car. I want it to use no petroleum whatsover. Can I buy one of these NOW? Thought so...
In a similar vein the Electrum Spyder is also "almost ready"... and yet I've been looking for an alternative fuel vehicle for three years and seems to have a solution. Milk cart-like 30mph things don't count as I commute to work on a highway.
Java innovates but in a different area. There is a lot of emphasis on extending Java with Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP). There is an incredible extension to Java called AspectJ. You owe yourself to download AspectJ and its Eclipse plugin. You'll see the future of java programming when you try it.
Applets are sort of wrong tool for the job. The Java VM is quite heavyweight. Java is great for server apps though or large desktop apps (check out the Eclipse IDE).
Applets are annyoing I agree, and not sure why Sun keeps pimping them.
But then don't claim that you're unit testing. You're simply creating automated acceptance tests. The idea of unit testing as described by the authors of JUnit is to test individual methods in isolation so that their behaviour is completely predictable, understood and exhaustively tested for all possible paths. Integration testing or acceptance testing comes later in the development cycle and confusing it with unit testing is a no-no in the XP/agile world.
Take your database example. In my experience using a real prepopulated DB tests a very small subset of data inputs and you lose the advantage of testing exhaustively all possible code paths, and your test tends to be more indicative of whether you can successfully connect to a database than whether the logic of your method is verifiably predictable and correct.
Building a dataset where you have thousands of different database dumps to test all corner cases is daunting and unrealistic as such unit testing would take hours to run between prepopulating the rdbms, connecting to it, running a test, tearing down the database, repopulating with a different data set, running the next test and so on.
I know where you're coming from. I've been there and I know you're getting some value out of your testing, but I suspect that like me, your tests are nowhere near exhaustive enough and tend to verify system connection points more than they verify code logic.
For proper unit testing (it's in the name) your methods MUST run in this artificially mocked constellation of peer objects in order to exercise a huge amount of different inputs, including the ones that are very improbable.
Slashdot Mirror
Or is the metabolic process the heart of life? That is an almost philosophical questions. Because it is certain that Fox's structures possessed metabolic capabilities. Of course they didn't have any DNA or RNA structure encoding the replication process BUT there is no clear specimen to tell us WHAT that information processing loooked like. Thus the job of replicating it is guesswork.
This is just chemistry
That is a tenuous statement.. It is certainly not life but it seems to be quite a bit more than chemistry. There is self assembly and self replication involved. That's a little more involved than "pure chemistry".
What about the protenoid world of Sidney Fox? It's not exactly like modern day protein structures but it can definitely be dubbed "protein like" structures. Just because Fox made some whacky claims later on in his career, his early work on protein structures is peer reviewed and can't be dismissed.
All necessary molecules for primitive life have been created through simple experiments in the labs. Those experiments were surprisingly simple yet yielded a lot of interesting molecules (see Miller et al). Granted, we don't know what type of reactions led to the exact forms of life that we observe today but we can builds something that is pretty close to the most primitive life forms. For example we can now create fully artificial viruses in a lab environment. In time we'll learn how to add self replication without a host cell. There's nothing "magical" about single cell organisms. Within the next couple of decades we'll likely have fully functioning single cell organisms capable of metabolism and self replication created purely from inorganic molecules.
Actually some fossils that old have been found to still contain fragments of the DNA. It's rare but it does happen. It mostly depends on the permeability of the surrounding rocks. Some are so insulatory that they managed to capture some cellular structures for hundreds of millions of years. I know it's hard to comprehend but it's true.
oops. Typo alert! I meant 4 billion years ago, not 40, of course.
While there is no consensus on how the chemical reactions leading to initial living organisms occured, we have a fairly complete picture of the steps involved. Recent research shows that the odds of life forming on earth 40 billion years ago are very plausible. Some gaps remain but nothing drastic enough to negate the current scientific knowledge of the field.
Darwin's evolution has been proven time and again. I'm not even going to bother backing it. Just use Google or better go to your library and read the relevant literature. The evidence for evolution is overwhelming, crushing and undisputable. And if that wasn't enough, recent research documented (using scientific method as opposed to religious mythology) that evolution still occurs within cohorts of fruit fly populations.
Just give it up. If you have a strong set of beliefs keep them that way. Don't try to attach some pseudoscientific labels to them. Instead of being an enlightened spiritualist you'll be viewed as a dumb fundamentalist. Is that what you want?
"People should actually research things before condemning them."
Precisely.
Actually, Benedikt XVI is a kickass philosopher, not many people know that. He's highly respected as a philosopher and a theologian. You might not agree with his findings on many issues (I don't) but the guy is smart as hell. He approves of evolution because he studied enough to know better than Southern US fundies.
My goodness! You actually claim to have tried Java and did not find out about -Xmx switch? Honestly man, you cannot claim that you gave Java a fair try. If you had typed java -help followed by java -X you would have known. This switch has been available since at leat Java 1.2.
When you have some free time, try Java again, this time without prejudices and really put some heart into it. Otherwise you really can't claim to have given it a fair try.
But hey, never let the facts get in the way of your argument.
I regret my question wasn't picked but I'm really curious why the Dinosaurs project got abandoned. From the initial description it sounded like a terrific idea. Was the technology immature, was it too complex for an average gamer? I guess we'll never know the complete story behind that story.
Cancer seems to suggest some fundamental problems with understanding recursion and actually the whole damn thing is riddled with bugs and inconsistencies though the replication code is pretty effective which points to Almighties beginnings as a script kiddie.
There are more. I'm too lazy to type.
Not true. Only class diagrams can generate usable class skeletons. Every other diagram in RUP is not automatically convertible to code making RUP an excellent choice for consultants as it removes any traces of accountability for the final product. And that is the ultimate goal of RUP. Make the RUP consultants stock up on billable hours while absolving them of any responsibility for the actual working product.
Rubbish. All the RUP "consultants" I talked to, when I challenged the unusually high failure rate of their proce$$, claimed that the problems lie in people not adhering to RUP in its entirety and only adopting pieces of it. I've yet to meet a RUP "expert" who recommends something lightweight or tailored to the development team's specifics. No, it's always the other way round, it's the lowly engineers and the only marginally less lowly architects who are supposed to obey The Process. And don't they ever dare question or ignore any piece of paper, no matter how spurious, if it's mandated by The Process.
It does require an army of "Architects" in various "Roles" so obviously Accenture con$ultants love it to no end.
I'm willing to bet any money that RUP sunk more development projects than it saved.
Have you tried turning on the incremental garbage collector? It offers much "smoother" performance at a slight throughput penalty (ie never "stops the world" when doing GC). I think the option is -Xincgc or something like that.
Have you tried turning incremental garbage collector? It offers improved "smootheness" at a slight performance penalty (ie never "stops the world" when performing GC).
And what if every filling station allowed you to replace your battery with a recharged one (at a cost of course)? You'd have the best of both worlds. it's only a matter of standardizing the battery packs and a simple balanced hoist at the filling station. If there's a will it will get done.
You can give your family soooo much more than a McMansion and two shiny cars in the driveway. Take them for a walk, teach your kids to throw the ball, play tennis, whatever... In time they'll come to appreciate it much more than sterilized existence in a suburban McHouse. I promise you, I guarantee you they'll appreciate the time with you much more than having marble countertops in the bathroom.
The American society is driven by greed to the point of obsession. The change has to come from within. Be a part of the solution, not a part of the problem.
I live in Canada now, but miss Europe dearly. I miss livable, fun cities where people want to hang out instead of retreating into their gated "communities".
Europe is so much human friendly than North America... don't get me wrong, I love Canada and Canadians but Europe is just hard to beat when it comes to coolness.
Are dinosaurs really dead and buried? No chance of a resurection?
In a similar vein the Electrum Spyder is also "almost ready"... and yet I've been looking for an alternative fuel vehicle for three years and seems to have a solution. Milk cart-like 30mph things don't count as I commute to work on a highway.
Java innovates but in a different area. There is a lot of emphasis on extending Java with Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP). There is an incredible extension to Java called AspectJ. You owe yourself to download AspectJ and its Eclipse plugin. You'll see the future of java programming when you try it.
Applets are sort of wrong tool for the job. The Java VM is quite heavyweight. Java is great for server apps though or large desktop apps (check out the Eclipse IDE). Applets are annyoing I agree, and not sure why Sun keeps pimping them.
Take your database example. In my experience using a real prepopulated DB tests a very small subset of data inputs and you lose the advantage of testing exhaustively all possible code paths, and your test tends to be more indicative of whether you can successfully connect to a database than whether the logic of your method is verifiably predictable and correct.
Building a dataset where you have thousands of different database dumps to test all corner cases is daunting and unrealistic as such unit testing would take hours to run between prepopulating the rdbms, connecting to it, running a test, tearing down the database, repopulating with a different data set, running the next test and so on.
I know where you're coming from. I've been there and I know you're getting some value out of your testing, but I suspect that like me, your tests are nowhere near exhaustive enough and tend to verify system connection points more than they verify code logic.
For proper unit testing (it's in the name) your methods MUST run in this artificially mocked constellation of peer objects in order to exercise a huge amount of different inputs, including the ones that are very improbable.