I find it far more plausible that life evolved originally under Titan-like conditions and temperatures than on an anaerobic, wet earth.
How could it possibly? Carbon-based life on Earth is very finely tuned to an aqueous environment: every molecule in the cell requires either water or a lipid/water interface. Earth biochemistry simply won't work unless it's wet! There may be life on Titan (although I am very doubtful), but one thing is sure - its nothing at all like Earth life, and Earth life was never like Titan life! Despite what popular science articles like to say, Titan is nothing at all like the primitive Earth: it formed in a different region of the Solar system, and in totally different temperature and radiation regime. Titan has always been cold: The primitive Earth was hot.
Well, I think that depends on how you view the solar system, I suppose. To me, it makes a big difference to know what the original composition of the planets likely was.
We already have a very good idea! We have sampled meteorites, the Moon, Mars, and the atmosphere of Jupiter. We also have lots of samples of the Earth.
One thing has become very clear since the Voyager missions to the outer planets - the moons of these planets are extreme and atypical places. If you examined Io, for example you would assume that the Solar system was filled with Sulphur!
Because it may tell us a lot about how the solar system evolved and how most of the smaller planets started out as.
This is not the same as changing our whole view of the solar system, I think. I may be being pedantic though..
While enzymatic reactions that our metabolism relies on slow to a standstill at those temperatures, completely different chemistries become possible as the basis of life.
True, but remember that water and carbon are very, very special in terms of their behaviour and possibilities. A combination of carbon chemistry in ammonia might be a viable alternative, but Titan is too cold even for that.
As a loose analogy, many supercomputers are cooled way down: cold actually helps information processing.
I think this is a false analogy. The reason that supercomputers are cooled is to prevent the chips melting! (Even the Pentium 4 comes close to self-destruction, and has speed-controlling circuitry).
But anyway, this is about electronic processing: Chemical reactions are very, very, very much slower at the temperature of Titan.
I think this is exaggerated. It's only one moon! I don't see how exploring its surface is going to change our view of the solar system. As for finding life - Titan IS 'amazingly cool' - probably close to -200C! If there were some kind of life on the ice landscape or in any hydrocarbon seas we would probably not recognise it and it would be very, very slow!
Having said all this, I think its potentially the most exciting space exploration event for decades.
Seriously... this reminds me of people who push their favorite book on everyone as a "gift," and then constantly harass them if they haven't read it yet
Reminds me of a true story. A colleague went to a dinner party given by a very famous author. At the end the author gave out a generous gift to all: copies of his latest best-seller.
I disagree. SQL syntax is ugly by almost any standard there is. Its syntax "tree" is lot like COBOL in style. Compare the syntax of COBOL to say C, TCL, Lisp, etc. It is at least an order of a magnitude more complex. And, it lacks reference composability (at least in the standard), which contributes to its complexity because it has to make up for it in other ways.
I would not say that the syntax is an order of magnitude more complex, but I see what you are saying. My point is that SQL expresses a lot, and any replacement language would have to express just as much, even if it substituted the syntax of SQL for some other (more elegant) notation.
MySQL has taken a long time to acquire even standard SQL features, let alone obscure ones. (Version 4.1 is a huge improvement).
I would like to see a RDBMS that tries to use simple concepts, including perhaps a new simple relational language besides SQL[1]. It would get its power from custom add-ons and hooks, not by trying to be everything to everybody out of the box.
The concepts behind RDBMSes are simple - that is why they are so widely used. What is complex is the ways that these concepts can be combined and used. If you devised an SQL replacement it would soon look just as just as sophisticated. Adding custom extras is a quick way to make the replacement language even less portable (and so less useful) than SQL!
Sun has made no indication that this would be released under a real Free/Open source license. Sun's past history with this sort of thing has been, shall we say... dismal.
Quite the opposite. One of the main reasons for the acceptance of Linux on the desktop is Open Office. Who open sourced Open Office? Sun!
Oh, they'll let us see the source. Sure as shit. Probably a clause that makes you "dirty" if you compile it, and sure as all hell it won't allow you to redistribute it, or patches to it. (like Sun's other "child" -- Java)
As I understand it, Solaris has never been marketed as a general purpose desktop system. It's always been a Unix Workstation system for specialist use, or a server system.
Because Sun hates Linux nearly as much as Microsoft.
Not at all. Sun is not competing with Linux. They are competing with commercial Linux vendors selling support e.g. RedHat. Sun sells Linux, and provides commercial and free products that run on Linux (e.g. Java) - that's a strange kind of hate.
Java is "open source." Has been "since day one" (I guess). If it's so free why isn't it included with so many linux distributions? Because it ISN'T FREE. It's "open" - that ain't free
You have it the wrong way round. Java is certainly free (you don't have to pay money to obtain it), but its not (according to some licenses) 'open'.
Sun's Java is not supplied with some Linux distributions because these distributions have very specific licenses. These distributions often ship with other Java implementations (such as SableVM).
Well, I hate to admit this, but it was... Windows 2/386 was pretty good at preemptive multi-tasking (I remember being amazed at watching my DOS Fortran code run in several dos shell windows at the same time).
OK, so it wasn't UNIX, and it looked ugly, but this was neat.
Also, for someone who had been dealing with a variety of awful print driver systems and graphics libraries, Windows 2 provided just one awful print driver and graphics library - this was actually a time-saver.
I thought it was pretty well-established that the dinosaurs were already in decline by the end of the Cretaceous period, about 65 million years ago.
This is no longer thought to be the case. Recent fossil finds suggest the dinosaurs were thriving right up to the end.
Based on the fact that many many smaller animals (rodents, birds, reptiles, amphibians) survived the event, I don't understand why it's confusing that insects (even tropical insects) survived as well. Can someone explain this, please?
I can't - I don't find it confusing. Recent evidence suggests that the real killer was the heat shock from the impact, which only lasted a few hours. Basically, small things that could find shelter in water or burrows survived. The impact did not kill off the dinosaurs - the smaller ones are still with us. We call them 'birds'!
Any self-respecting language will produce a binary that does what the source code says it should do, in exact detail.
A great comment, but I have to disagree with this bit. With multi-threaded code running on pipelined, multi-core processors I would argue that its very hard to say in exact detail what the source code does, and the resulting binary could be very hard to understand.
I understand your point. What I disagree with is your suggestion that these animals and features are 'good'. Taking the computer example (which is a useful one!) its like someone offering you a desktop machine which isn't that fast, and has some awkward wiring in for historical reasons. You buy it because its better than the competition, but when you open the lid you still gasp at the mess.
There is a long history of thought that believes that evolution produces optimal designs for each situation, but a more detailed understanding of genetics has revealed that its far more complicated than that. When you look at a feature of an organism, you have to consider what benefit the feature confers, and, this is the key thing - who benefits from the feature. There are good examples where a feature in one animal is of benefit to a separate organism, often a parasite that has influenced the animal's growth or behaviour.
People are used to Windows because it's popular. Why do they want Windows? Because they are used to it.
I'd say its because they think they are used to it. Windows has changed almost beyond recognition in the past 10 years in terms of user interface.
I have personal experience of migrating desktops to Linux. There is often a perceived need for retraining that in practice is often way in excess of the real need. There may be some end-user irritation at the changes in interface, but I rarely find that the user is any less productive under Linux, and there huge savings resulting from cuts in support and software costs.
Well, first, I don't think I would fit properly into the "intelligent design" camp.
Actually, I didn't think you did, but your comments gave the opportunity to make a general point.
I mean, I think animals are exceptionally "well-designed", in a loose way of speaking, but I think that's by virtue of the nature of life and the process of evolution, and not because we were plopped down well-designed by a grey-haired man.
I see your point, but I guess I just believe differently. As I see it, there are some really clear examples of bad design when there is not much evolutionary pressure. One of my favourites is the tree kangaroo. I mean, its a kangaroo with the long legs, and it lives in trees. Its hopeless! If there was any serious competition up in the trees, it would die out pretty quickly, but there isn't, so it does fine.
The trouble is, you can't have it both ways. You can't look at the results of evolution and say they require an intelligent designer, but then start to question how we judge what is 'good'. If we don't allow ourselves to judge good and bad design in these matters, we should not also allow ourselves to judge what is 'intelligent' design.
I'm gay, and I disagree. There is only one thing that distinguishes homosexuals - sexual preference. Its like saying redheads or short people have their own culture....
technologies like Active Directory and Exchange have been pushed right into the heart of the enterprise. If it wasn't for Free Software Windows would clean up and UNIX would be dead.
Actually no: Linux/UNIX is a rapid growth area, and I would hardly call a directory service and single-platform e-mail 'the heart of the enterprise'.
The truth is that there is a solid core of IT people who have years of experience of Windows and don't trust it anywhere near critical or large-scale services. We have seen the disasters that can result when others try this.
I do not buy this for one second, based on your posts.
You don't have to buy this. Fortunately, the awarders of my B.Sc, M.Sc and Ph.D. and the students I taught at degree level did.
I would be curious to know exactly what I said that led you to believe that I was not an expert in this area? Perhaps you have a strange ability to assess 25 years of a career from a few words in Slashdot?
The problem is, how can one decide what an intelligent design is, in simple and objective terms?
Its very simple. If the human eye was designed better we would see better (no blind spot) and the brain would have to do less work (extrapolating what we would see in the blind spot). This would measurably better in the engineering sense.
Ok. Since you're a biologist, would you care to share your knowledge with us, explaining why the design of the octopus' eyes is better and what makes the design of the mammalian eye inferior???
It's the path the nerves take. In the mammalian eye the axons of the nerves pass in front of the retina. This means that light has to pass through the nerves before it reaches the light-sensitive pigments, and also that there has to be an exit point which is not light-sensitive (the blind spot). In the squid and octopus eye the axons pass behind the retina, so no light-blocking and no blind spot.
Slashdot Mirror
I find it far more plausible that life evolved originally under Titan-like conditions and temperatures than on an anaerobic, wet earth.
How could it possibly? Carbon-based life on Earth is very finely tuned to an aqueous environment: every molecule in the cell requires either water or a lipid/water interface. Earth biochemistry simply won't work unless it's wet! There may be life on Titan (although I am very doubtful), but one thing is sure - its nothing at all like Earth life, and Earth life was never like Titan life! Despite what popular science articles like to say, Titan is nothing at all like the primitive Earth: it formed in a different region of the Solar system, and in totally different temperature and radiation regime. Titan has always been cold: The primitive Earth was hot.
Well, I think that depends on how you view the solar system, I suppose. To me, it makes a big difference to know what the original composition of the planets likely was.
We already have a very good idea! We have sampled meteorites, the Moon, Mars, and the atmosphere of Jupiter. We also have lots of samples of the Earth.
One thing has become very clear since the Voyager missions to the outer planets - the moons of these planets are extreme and atypical places. If you examined Io, for example you would assume that the Solar system was filled with Sulphur!
Because it may tell us a lot about how the solar system evolved and how most of the smaller planets started out as.
This is not the same as changing our whole view of the solar system, I think. I may be being pedantic though..
While enzymatic reactions that our metabolism relies on slow to a standstill at those temperatures, completely different chemistries become possible as the basis of life.
True, but remember that water and carbon are very, very special in terms of their behaviour and possibilities. A combination of carbon chemistry in ammonia might be a viable alternative, but Titan is too cold even for that.
As a loose analogy, many supercomputers are cooled way down: cold actually helps information processing.
I think this is a false analogy. The reason that supercomputers are cooled is to prevent the chips melting! (Even the Pentium 4 comes close to self-destruction, and has speed-controlling circuitry).
But anyway, this is about electronic processing: Chemical reactions are very, very, very much slower at the temperature of Titan.
I think this is exaggerated. It's only one moon! I don't see how exploring its surface is going to change our view of the solar system. As for finding life - Titan IS 'amazingly cool' - probably close to -200C! If there were some kind of life on the ice landscape or in any hydrocarbon seas we would probably not recognise it and it would be very, very slow!
Having said all this, I think its potentially the most exciting space exploration event for decades.
Seriously ... this reminds me of people who push their favorite book on everyone as a "gift," and then constantly harass them if they haven't read it yet
Reminds me of a true story. A colleague went to a dinner party given by a very famous author. At the end the author gave out a generous gift to all: copies of his latest best-seller.
What an Ego.
I disagree. SQL syntax is ugly by almost any standard there is. Its syntax "tree" is lot like COBOL in style. Compare the syntax of COBOL to say C, TCL, Lisp, etc. It is at least an order of a magnitude more complex. And, it lacks reference composability (at least in the standard), which contributes to its complexity because it has to make up for it in other ways.
I would not say that the syntax is an order of magnitude more complex, but I see what you are saying. My point is that SQL expresses a lot, and any replacement language would have to express just as much, even if it substituted the syntax of SQL for some other (more elegant) notation.
RDBMS seem to be adding obscure features
MySQL has taken a long time to acquire even standard SQL features, let alone obscure ones. (Version 4.1 is a huge improvement).
I would like to see a RDBMS that tries to use simple concepts, including perhaps a new simple relational language besides SQL[1]. It would get its power from custom add-ons and hooks, not by trying to be everything to everybody out of the box.
The concepts behind RDBMSes are simple - that is why they are so widely used. What is complex is the ways that these concepts can be combined and used. If you devised an SQL replacement it would soon look just as just as sophisticated. Adding custom extras is a quick way to make the replacement language even less portable (and so less useful) than SQL!
Sun has made no indication that this would be released under a real Free/Open source license. Sun's past history with this sort of thing has been, shall we say... dismal.
Quite the opposite. One of the main reasons for the acceptance of Linux on the desktop is Open Office. Who open sourced Open Office? Sun!
Oh, they'll let us see the source. Sure as shit. Probably a clause that makes you "dirty" if you compile it, and sure as all hell it won't allow you to redistribute it, or patches to it. (like Sun's other "child" -- Java)
See above.
Summary: Solaris is not ready for the desktop.
As I understand it, Solaris has never been marketed as a general purpose desktop system. It's always been a Unix Workstation system for specialist use, or a server system.
Because Sun hates Linux nearly as much as Microsoft.
Not at all. Sun is not competing with Linux. They are competing with commercial Linux vendors selling support e.g. RedHat. Sun sells Linux, and provides commercial and free products that run on Linux (e.g. Java) - that's a strange kind of hate.
That's interesting, since the Win16 kernel has always been a cooperative multitasking kernel (even under Win95).
Premptive multi-tasking was (if I remember right) for DOS apps, and only on the 386 version of Windows 2.0
Java is "open source." Has been "since day one" (I guess). If it's so free why isn't it included with so many linux distributions? Because it ISN'T FREE. It's "open" - that ain't free
You have it the wrong way round. Java is certainly free (you don't have to pay money to obtain it), but its not (according to some licenses) 'open'.
Sun's Java is not supplied with some Linux distributions because these distributions have very specific licenses. These distributions often ship with other Java implementations (such as SableVM).
Yeah, Windows 2 was AWESOME !!
Well, I hate to admit this, but it was... Windows 2/386 was pretty good at preemptive multi-tasking (I remember being amazed at watching my DOS Fortran code run in several dos shell windows at the same time).
OK, so it wasn't UNIX, and it looked ugly, but this was neat.
Also, for someone who had been dealing with a variety of awful print driver systems and graphics libraries, Windows 2 provided just one awful print driver and graphics library - this was actually a time-saver.
I thought it was pretty well-established that the dinosaurs were already in decline by the end of the Cretaceous period, about 65 million years ago.
This is no longer thought to be the case. Recent fossil finds suggest the dinosaurs were thriving right up to the end.
Based on the fact that many many smaller animals (rodents, birds, reptiles, amphibians) survived the event, I don't understand why it's confusing that insects (even tropical insects) survived as well. Can someone explain this, please?
I can't - I don't find it confusing. Recent evidence suggests that the real killer was the heat shock from the impact, which only lasted a few hours. Basically, small things that could find shelter in water or burrows survived. The impact did not kill off the dinosaurs - the smaller ones are still with us. We call them 'birds'!
Any self-respecting language will produce a binary that does what the source code says it should do, in exact detail.
A great comment, but I have to disagree with this bit. With multi-threaded code running on pipelined, multi-core processors I would argue that its very hard to say in exact detail what the source code does, and the resulting binary could be very hard to understand.
Does that make my point more clear?
I understand your point. What I disagree with is your suggestion that these animals and features are 'good'. Taking the computer example (which is a useful one!) its like someone offering you a desktop machine which isn't that fast, and has some awkward wiring in for historical reasons. You buy it because its better than the competition, but when you open the lid you still gasp at the mess.
There is a long history of thought that believes that evolution produces optimal designs for each situation, but a more detailed understanding of genetics has revealed that its far more complicated than that. When you look at a feature of an organism, you have to consider what benefit the feature confers, and, this is the key thing - who benefits from the feature. There are good examples where a feature in one animal is of benefit to a separate organism, often a parasite that has influenced the animal's growth or behaviour.
People are used to Windows because it's popular. Why do they want Windows? Because they are used to it.
I'd say its because they think they are used to it. Windows has changed almost beyond recognition in the past 10 years in terms of user interface.
I have personal experience of migrating desktops to Linux. There is often a perceived need for retraining that in practice is often way in excess of the real need. There may be some end-user irritation at the changes in interface, but I rarely find that the user is any less productive under Linux, and there huge savings resulting from cuts in support and software costs.
Well, first, I don't think I would fit properly into the "intelligent design" camp.
Actually, I didn't think you did, but your comments gave the opportunity to make a general point.
I mean, I think animals are exceptionally "well-designed", in a loose way of speaking, but I think that's by virtue of the nature of life and the process of evolution, and not because we were plopped down well-designed by a grey-haired man.
I see your point, but I guess I just believe differently. As I see it, there are some really clear examples of bad design when there is not much evolutionary pressure. One of my favourites is the tree kangaroo. I mean, its a kangaroo with the long legs, and it lives in trees. Its hopeless! If there was any serious competition up in the trees, it would die out pretty quickly, but there isn't, so it does fine.
The trouble is, you can't have it both ways. You can't look at the results of evolution and say they require an intelligent designer, but then start to question how we judge what is 'good'. If we don't allow ourselves to judge good and bad design in these matters, we should not also allow ourselves to judge what is 'intelligent' design.
and they have their own culture.
I'm gay, and I disagree. There is only one thing that distinguishes homosexuals - sexual preference. Its like saying redheads or short people have their own culture....
technologies like Active Directory and Exchange have been pushed right into the heart of the enterprise. If it wasn't for Free Software Windows would clean up and UNIX would be dead.
Actually no: Linux/UNIX is a rapid growth area, and I would hardly call a directory service and single-platform e-mail 'the heart of the enterprise'.
The truth is that there is a solid core of IT people who have years of experience of Windows and don't trust it anywhere near critical or large-scale services. We have seen the disasters that can result when others try this.
I do not buy this for one second, based on your posts.
You don't have to buy this. Fortunately, the awarders of my B.Sc, M.Sc and Ph.D. and the students I taught at degree level did.
I would be curious to know exactly what I said that led you to believe that I was not an expert in this area? Perhaps you have a strange ability to assess 25 years of a career from a few words in Slashdot?
Your mistaking suboptimal design for wrong design.. Just because something is suboptimal, it doesn't mean it's bad.
There are many things in evolution that are not just sub-optimal - they are really dumb. An intelligent designer would not have been that dumb.
The problem is, how can one decide what an intelligent design is, in simple and objective terms?
Its very simple. If the human eye was designed better we would see better (no blind spot) and the brain would have to do less work (extrapolating what we would see in the blind spot). This would measurably better in the engineering sense.
Ok. Since you're a biologist, would you care to share your knowledge with us, explaining why the design of the octopus' eyes is better and what makes the design of the mammalian eye inferior???
It's the path the nerves take. In the mammalian eye the axons of the nerves pass in front of the retina. This means that light has to pass through the nerves before it reaches the light-sensitive pigments, and also that there has to be an exit point which is not light-sensitive (the blind spot). In the squid and octopus eye the axons pass behind the retina, so no light-blocking and no blind spot.
You don't know what binocular vision means, do you, idiot?
It means using both eyes to judge distance. You see, squid have overlap of the visual fields of their eyes, so can estimate depth.
What do you think it means?