Catbellar, "And, oh yes, the bright searing flame you see in the picture? It's the paint. It was basically thermite. Powdered metal. The company wanted pretty silver shiny skin. One electrical arc, and WHOOMP - hydrogen gets the blame."
Actually, the company wanted paint that would reflect rather than absorb sunlight so that the outer skin would not expand and contract. It was not based on esthetics.
"Second, moving to commodity hardware of x86 would turn Apple into just another software company. Apple very much is a hardware company and its the marriage of that hardware with exceptional software that makes their advocates voracious in their support."
Just another SW company, you mean like Microsoft?
Actually, it was Apple's obsession with using proprietary HW that caused them to lose the OS wars with MS. Had they adopted the commodity PC HW platform in the 80's and focused on selling their SW/OS they would have cleaned MS's clock. Complain all you want about Bill's tactics but his fundamental strategy of selling his low grade SW on top of commodity HW made him the winner. Businesses just loved cheap PC word processors.
"All this makes more sense than GWB's hydrogen economy, which needs electricity to make the hydrogen. As electricity generation is about 30% efficient, there's not much point in using biomass to produce hydrogen for fuel cells - you might as well stick biodiesel straight in the car."
Who can resist the opportunity to slam GWB and Big Oil? Look. Not all biomass is suitable for biodiesel production. The advantage of Hydrogen is that ANY electricity source can be used to produce it. Therefore, you can use nuclear power, peat bogs or wind power. If you go w/biodiesel then you are stuck with the subset of crops that can produce oil. Hydrogen and Oil are two competing storage mediums for energy. Having said that biodiesel may actually be the way to go, as always the market can and should decide this issue.
This is the best thing that SCO can do for Open Source community. Let's assume that IBM blatantly stole SCO's copy protected code. If the courts find that end users are only required to upgrade to Linux kernels that don't have the offending code but don't bear any other responsibility then this will be great day for Linux. On an open source project it is only a matter of time before someone does steal copy protected code. Once we get a legal precedent that clarifies how this impacts the end user it will remove part of the FUD that MS spreads about open source.
(Bear w/me here)
1. A court finds that IBM blatantly copied and violated SCO's copyright.
2. A court finds that IBM is liable but all the recipients of the tainted Linux kernel must install an updated kernel without the stolen SCO code (or install an older linux kernel).
3. A court finds that the recipients of the tainted kernel are in no way financially liable to SCO.
Look guys, w/open source development it is only a matter of time before SOMEONE puts stolen copy protected code into the kernel. Once it is established that the remedy is simply to remove the code without any other liability then MS will no longer be able to spread FUD about the dangers of Open Source to businesses.
"DNA is readily recovered from bodies that have been rotting in the ground for years. As I said, it is quite stable. And it might well be even more stable in a prebiotic soup, because it wouldn't have to deal with enzymes specifically designed to degrade DNA."
I thought that water was a problem for DNA, that it would tend to separate the sugar from its bases and that is why the cell tends to limit access to its DNA. The cases of DNA preservation that I am aware of involve a net drying out, am I wrong here? In fact you can have bacteria and virus' sitting around as powder. What kind solution is DNA friendly? Is that type of solution likely to make up pre-biotic oceans? In any case interesting stuff.
"Actually, this is not true. Many proteins perform useful functions all by themselves"
Ultimately proteins do everything but in modern cells the DNA adds the intelligence to determine what type of proteins and how many of them to produce for the current circumstances. Are you suggesting that we can have a prolonged period of time where proteins reproduce other proteins without DNA guiding this process? Do we see this today? Regarding the possibility of RNA being the first self-replicator I don't think that producing amino acids is a usefull precursor for that (I could be wrong, I'm going to re-read my Isaac Asimov book on genetics tonight), or at least the jump from amino acids to RNA would be much greater than the jump from amino acids to proteins.
Also not true. DNA is quite stable and has even been recovered from fossils
You are talking about DNA that was first housed in a living organism coated with protective proteins and then fossilized in amber. I meant that you wouldn't find the stuff floating around untended in the ocean or in a pre-biotic soup.
Fair enough, but this experiment is frequently sited as proof positive that life was formed naturally.
You have to admit that there are many more steps that would be necessary to form even the most primitive self-replicating cell. The amino acids would have to form proteins and proteins require DNA/RNA in order to perform usefull functions. DNA has a pretty delicate structure, it is unlikely to last very long by itself. I know that people have some speculations but we haven't come close to producing life from natural compounds.
I'll admit, it's a cool experiment but let's not exaggerate what it means. True, he managed to synthesize some usefull proteins but he did not synthesize a life form, let alone a self-replicating life form.
Re:The article fails at validating evolution...
on
Digital Darwin
·
· Score: 1
Thanks granting access to these articles. I only read the 'executive overview' from the original slashdot post since the nature article required a paid subscription.
The article fails at validating evolution...
on
Digital Darwin
·
· Score: 1
The article's primary goal was to establish an example of how evolution can generate complex functionality that didn't exist before.
From the article... "biologists have concluded that such features [for the eye] must have arisen through lots of intermediates and, moreover, that these intermediate structures may once have served different functions from what we see today."
In other words a cell might have been part of the immune system but suddenly it was discovered to be usefull for vision. But then they devise a test where they start out with programs that already do a mathematical calculation then after a simulated millions of yr's of evolution they end up with... (drum roll please) programs that do the same math calculations a little bit faster. Note, they didn't end up doing different math calculations or anything other than the original functionality.
They started with human produced programs.
They only improved the speed of those programs they didn't produce any other type of output.
They didn't bother documenting how much they improved the calculation speed. Did it approach a limit where improvements stopped?
"So what really matters is not how fast you can stream in multiple words, but how fast you can read in one word"
No, it matters how fast you can stream. Most data i/o from the memory to the processor cache are instructions rather than user data. When your processor jumps to a new routine (or an ISR) and the cache is cold there will be a high level of latency for the first instruction but the rest of the routine will be streamed into cache fairly quickly. This is why high bandwidth is very important and why latency can be tolerated.
"But looking at how plants are grown, you find out that fertilizers and all those other chemicals needed for modern agriculture are PETRO-chemicals, meaning you still need oil to make them."
True but you are still reducing your overall need for oil. The energy to produce the crops is mostly coming from the sun, so this is really just a form of solar energy. The fertilizers are just a catalyst for harvesting solar energy. Who knows, in the future genetically modified crops might more efficiently harness sunlight and convert it to more plant oil per acre. I hope there is ongoing research in that direction.
"It's too bad most Linux developers aren't interested in doing something really forward-thinking. If there was a DB integrated into the OS, and apps encouraged to use it, with avenues of data management made easily available to the user, computing could be actually pushed ahead by Linux. But not today, and probably nor ever."
Actually, ReiserFS is pursuing this goal by pushing the DB storage layer into their file system implementation. The file system is a natural place to put this as it (unlike the rest of the kernel) provides persistent storage.
Re:Separating Content from Presentation a Good Thi
on
Office 2003 and XML
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, it is both bad and unnecessary to remove the formatting from a document.
It is bad because when I open a document that has been emailed to me I want to see the formatting without having to use the same style sheet, end of story.
It is unnecessary because XML already allows you to tag the formatting separately to easily differentiate it from the content. In this way you should at least be able to see the text even if your word processor doesn't understand the formatting structure.
Here, from the very the first sentence of the article, "Scientists mapping the bottom of the Hudson River with sonar say they have found nearly every single ship that ever foundered in the river over the last 400 years or more."
Excellent as it was, OS/2 was also hopelessly tied to the i386 architecture
So what??? If anything they should have more aggressively pursued the PC platform to keep costs down. Commoditize the HW to make money selling the OS like MS did.
IBM tried to push their own proprietary HW with their micro-channel technology to combat the fact that the PC that they originally built had become a commodity. I know, I know, OS/2 did run on standard PC's at least at some point but it was obvious that IBM was trying to make money on selling their own PC's rather than selling OS/2 on its own merits.
Here's a 'troll' for you. Apple failed to beat MS for the exact same reason. They were obsessed with non-386 architecture's, first the 68k and then the PowerPC
They should have more aggressively pursued the PC platform to keep costs down. Commoditize the HW to make money selling the OS like MS did.
IBM tried to push their own proprietary HW with their micro-channel technology to combat the fact that the PC that they originally built had become a commodity. I know, I know, OS/2 did run on standard PC's at least at some point but it was obvious that IBM was trying to make money on selling their own PC's rather than selling OS/2 on its own merits.
Here's a 'troll' for you. Apple failed to beat MS for the exact same reason. They were obsessed with non-386 architecture's, first the 68k and then the PowerPC.
Sean only talked about the military he did not talk about deficits, 'Catbeller' talked about deficit spending and the military.
The Military:
It is only 15% of our annual budget. I am amazed that anyone would seriousy argue that we should wait for a crisis and then play catch up. I can give many examples of how superior technology has won wars. The Spanish conquistadors vs the Aztecs. The Italians vs. the Ethiopians (193x). The U.S. vs Iraq (circa 1990).
The Deficit:
It is too large but that is because of too much federal spending. The only reason we had a surplus in the 1990's was that the increased revenue collection was unexpected. Remember? Both Clinton and CBO were predicting deficits all through the 90's. If the politicians knew a surplus was coming they would have been spent it.
The global birthrate is actually declining and most of our population growth is due to the fact of increasing longevity all over the world. Even the 'Club of Rome' acknowledges the global inrease in life spans. The U.N. estimates that our population will level off at 16 billion which is well short of running out of living space by many orders of magnitude. Please read Julian Simon's ultimate resource 2, he's an economist that studied population & economic growth's affect on the environment.
I'm sorry to hear that Asimov was depressed since EVERY doomsday prediction made in the 70's (most infamously by Paul Erhlch) did not come true. In fact the end of the 20th century there was more food per capita and longer life spans globally as compared to the 19th and 18th centuries. These are facts, even the population doomsayers say yeah but the apocalypse is just around the corner.
Regarding hydroponics, it is already used commercially for specialty food items. It is not just used for growing 'pot' as someone else said. The reason it is not more widely used is that it is currently cheaper to use land to grow food. However, a decreasing the cost of energy could change that. Low cost energy would make fresh water and food even more available than it is today.
Sean, it sounds like you are advocating the following:
1. Have a tiny military that is barely on a par with the rest of the world.
2. Wait for a crisis and then react.
That's insane. We were unprepared for WW2 and we paid dearly for it in blood. We developed technology on the fly and many of our people died as a result. We flew bombers over Germany before we could give them fighter escort. The only thing that saved our bacon in the Pacific was our aircraft carriers, and guess what, they were built before the war. Look at Iraq in 1991. From our perspective that was almost a bloodless operation because we had a technically superior force.
Actually there is no shortage of living space on Earth. Standing shoulder to shoulder the entire population of the Earth can fit in a medium sized city. If you divide the entire population into groups of 4 on lots 100ft by 200ft we could all fit in Texas. It's not living space but activities like farming which use comparatively more space but even that can be solved more efficiently on Earth.
For instance if we developed really cheap energy source then we could build a 100 story building and grow food indoors. It's called hydroponics. All you need is energy to power the lamps and to provide the fresh water. The largest cost with desalinating sea water is energy. Note, cheap energy = prosperity on Earth.
Ahhhh... hitting all the classics, 'tax breaks for the rich' and our bloated military.
Our military budget only accounts for 15% of the U.S. budget. Ironically, it is one of the only spending items explicitly authorized in the constitution, not prescription drugs, not art,etc. Secondly, our military works. Only our military could have crushed the Taliban like it did in Afghanistan. Can you say Russia in 1980's? Lastly, we can't wait for a crisis and then start to build a military. When we need one it has to be ready.
Slashdot Mirror
Catbellar, "And, oh yes, the bright searing flame you see in the picture? It's the paint. It was basically thermite. Powdered metal. The company wanted pretty silver shiny skin. One electrical arc, and WHOOMP - hydrogen gets the blame."
Actually, the company wanted paint that would reflect rather than absorb sunlight so that the outer skin would not expand and contract. It was not based on esthetics.
"Second, moving to commodity hardware of x86 would turn Apple into just another software company. Apple very much is a hardware company and its the marriage of that hardware with exceptional software that makes their advocates voracious in their support."
Just another SW company, you mean like Microsoft?
Actually, it was Apple's obsession with using proprietary HW that caused them to lose the OS wars with MS. Had they adopted the commodity PC HW platform in the 80's and focused on selling their SW/OS they would have cleaned MS's clock. Complain all you want about Bill's tactics but his fundamental strategy of selling his low grade SW on top of commodity HW made him the winner. Businesses just loved cheap PC word processors.
"All this makes more sense than GWB's hydrogen economy, which needs electricity to make the hydrogen. As electricity generation is about 30% efficient, there's not much point in using biomass to produce hydrogen for fuel cells - you might as well stick biodiesel straight in the car."
Who can resist the opportunity to slam GWB and Big Oil? Look. Not all biomass is suitable for biodiesel production. The advantage of Hydrogen is that ANY electricity source can be used to produce it. Therefore, you can use nuclear power, peat bogs or wind power. If you go w/biodiesel then you are stuck with the subset of crops that can produce oil. Hydrogen and Oil are two competing storage mediums for energy. Having said that biodiesel may actually be the way to go, as always the market can and should decide this issue.
This is the best thing that SCO can do for Open Source community. Let's assume that IBM blatantly stole SCO's copy protected code. If the courts find that end users are only required to upgrade to Linux kernels that don't have the offending code but don't bear any other responsibility then this will be great day for Linux. On an open source project it is only a matter of time before someone does steal copy protected code. Once we get a legal precedent that clarifies how this impacts the end user it will remove part of the FUD that MS spreads about open source.
(Bear w/me here)
1. A court finds that IBM blatantly copied and violated SCO's copyright.
2. A court finds that IBM is liable but all the recipients of the tainted Linux kernel must install an updated kernel without the stolen SCO code (or install an older linux kernel).
3. A court finds that the recipients of the tainted kernel are in no way financially liable to SCO.
Look guys, w/open source development it is only a matter of time before SOMEONE puts stolen copy protected code into the kernel. Once it is established that the remedy is simply to remove the code without any other liability then MS will no longer be able to spread FUD about the dangers of Open Source to businesses.
"I think they are talking about drivers. With the current windows design any driver that crash have a good change of taking the os down with it."
It's fun to sandbag MS Windows but Linux drivers also run in kernel mode. Therefore, a buggy Linux driver is just as likely to crash a Linux system.
"DNA is readily recovered from bodies that have been rotting in the ground for years. As I said, it is quite stable. And it might well be even more stable in a prebiotic soup, because it wouldn't have to deal with enzymes specifically designed to degrade DNA."
I thought that water was a problem for DNA, that it would tend to separate the sugar from its bases and that is why the cell tends to limit access to its DNA. The cases of DNA preservation that I am aware of involve a net drying out, am I wrong here? In fact you can have bacteria and virus' sitting around as powder. What kind solution is DNA friendly? Is that type of solution likely to make up pre-biotic oceans? In any case interesting stuff.
"Actually, this is not true. Many proteins perform useful functions all by themselves"
Ultimately proteins do everything but in modern cells the DNA adds the intelligence to determine what type of proteins and how many of them to produce for the current circumstances. Are you suggesting that we can have a prolonged period of time where proteins reproduce other proteins without DNA guiding this process? Do we see this today? Regarding the possibility of RNA being the first self-replicator I don't think that producing amino acids is a usefull precursor for that (I could be wrong, I'm going to re-read my Isaac Asimov book on genetics tonight), or at least the jump from amino acids to RNA would be much greater than the jump from amino acids to proteins.
Also not true. DNA is quite stable and has even been recovered from fossils
You are talking about DNA that was first housed in a living organism coated with protective proteins and then fossilized in amber. I meant that you wouldn't find the stuff floating around untended in the ocean or in a pre-biotic soup.
Fair enough, but this experiment is frequently sited as proof positive that life was formed naturally.
You have to admit that there are many more steps that would be necessary to form even the most primitive self-replicating cell. The amino acids would have to form proteins and proteins require DNA/RNA in order to perform usefull functions. DNA has a pretty delicate structure, it is unlikely to last very long by itself. I know that people have some speculations but we haven't come close to producing life from natural compounds.
I'll admit, it's a cool experiment but let's not exaggerate what it means. True, he managed to synthesize some usefull proteins but he did not synthesize a life form, let alone a self-replicating life form.
Thanks granting access to these articles. I only read the 'executive overview' from the original slashdot post since the nature article required a paid subscription.
The article's primary goal was to establish an example of how evolution can generate complex functionality that didn't exist before.
... "biologists have concluded that such features [for the eye] must have arisen through lots of intermediates and, moreover, that these intermediate structures may once have served different functions from what we see today."
... (drum roll please) programs that do the same math calculations a little bit faster. Note, they didn't end up doing different math calculations or anything other than the original functionality.
From the article
In other words a cell might have been part of the immune system but suddenly it was discovered to be usefull for vision. But then they devise a test where they start out with programs that already do a mathematical calculation then after a simulated millions of yr's of evolution they end up with
They started with human produced programs.
They only improved the speed of those programs they didn't produce any other type of output.
They didn't bother documenting how much they improved the calculation speed. Did it approach a limit where improvements stopped?
"So what really matters is not how fast you can stream in multiple words, but how fast you can read in one word"
No, it matters how fast you can stream. Most data i/o from the memory to the processor cache are instructions rather than user data. When your processor jumps to a new routine (or an ISR) and the cache is cold there will be a high level of latency for the first instruction but the rest of the routine will be streamed into cache fairly quickly. This is why high bandwidth is very important and why latency can be tolerated.
"the .net "innovations" seems to have a lot in common with the stuff Novell was doing several years ago"
Actually, the C#/.NET platform is a ripoff of JAVA rather than Novell. MS Active directory is more of a ripoff of LDAP.
"But looking at how plants are grown, you find out that fertilizers and all those other chemicals needed for modern agriculture are PETRO-chemicals, meaning you still need oil to make them."
True but you are still reducing your overall need for oil. The energy to produce the crops is mostly coming from the sun, so this is really just a form of solar energy. The fertilizers are just a catalyst for harvesting solar energy. Who knows, in the future genetically modified crops might more efficiently harness sunlight and convert it to more plant oil per acre. I hope there is ongoing research in that direction.
"It's too bad most Linux developers aren't interested in doing something really forward-thinking. If there was a DB integrated into the OS, and apps encouraged to use it, with avenues of data management made easily available to the user, computing could be actually pushed ahead by Linux. But not today, and probably nor ever."
Actually, ReiserFS is pursuing this goal by pushing the DB storage layer into their file system implementation. The file system is a natural place to put this as it (unlike the rest of the kernel) provides persistent storage.
Yeah, it is both bad and unnecessary to remove the formatting from a document.
It is bad because when I open a document that has been emailed to me I want to see the formatting without having to use the same style sheet, end of story.
It is unnecessary because XML already allows you to tag the formatting separately to easily differentiate it from the content. In this way you should at least be able to see the text even if your word processor doesn't understand the formatting structure.
Here, from the very the first sentence of the article, "Scientists mapping the bottom of the Hudson River with sonar say they have found nearly every single ship that ever foundered in the river over the last 400 years or more."
So I'd say from 400 yrs or so.
Excellent as it was, OS/2 was also hopelessly tied to the i386 architecture
So what??? If anything they should have more aggressively pursued the PC platform to keep costs down. Commoditize the HW to make money selling the OS like MS did.
IBM tried to push their own proprietary HW with their micro-channel technology to combat the fact that the PC that they originally built had become a commodity. I know, I know, OS/2 did run on standard PC's at least at some point but it was obvious that IBM was trying to make money on selling their own PC's rather than selling OS/2 on its own merits.
Here's a 'troll' for you. Apple failed to beat MS for the exact same reason. They were obsessed with non-386 architecture's, first the 68k and then the PowerPC
They should have more aggressively pursued the PC platform to keep costs down. Commoditize the HW to make money selling the OS like MS did.
IBM tried to push their own proprietary HW with their micro-channel technology to combat the fact that the PC that they originally built had become a commodity. I know, I know, OS/2 did run on standard PC's at least at some point but it was obvious that IBM was trying to make money on selling their own PC's rather than selling OS/2 on its own merits.
Here's a 'troll' for you. Apple failed to beat MS for the exact same reason. They were obsessed with non-386 architecture's, first the 68k and then the PowerPC.
Sean only talked about the military he did not talk about deficits, 'Catbeller' talked about deficit spending and the military.
The Military:
It is only 15% of our annual budget. I am amazed that anyone would seriousy argue that we should wait for a crisis and then play catch up. I can give many examples of how superior technology has won wars. The Spanish conquistadors vs the Aztecs. The Italians vs. the Ethiopians (193x). The U.S. vs Iraq (circa 1990).
The Deficit:
It is too large but that is because of too much federal spending. The only reason we had a surplus in the 1990's was that the increased revenue collection was unexpected. Remember? Both Clinton and CBO were predicting deficits all through the 90's. If the politicians knew a surplus was coming they would have been spent it.
The global birthrate is actually declining and most of our population growth is due to the fact of increasing longevity all over the world. Even the 'Club of Rome' acknowledges the global inrease in life spans. The U.N. estimates that our population will level off at 16 billion which is well short of running out of living space by many orders of magnitude. Please read Julian Simon's ultimate resource 2, he's an economist that studied population & economic growth's affect on the environment.
I'm sorry to hear that Asimov was depressed since EVERY doomsday prediction made in the 70's (most infamously by Paul Erhlch) did not come true. In fact the end of the 20th century there was more food per capita and longer life spans globally as compared to the 19th and 18th centuries. These are facts, even the population doomsayers say yeah but the apocalypse is just around the corner.
Regarding hydroponics, it is already used commercially for specialty food items. It is not just used for growing 'pot' as someone else said. The reason it is not more widely used is that it is currently cheaper to use land to grow food. However, a decreasing the cost of energy could change that. Low cost energy would make fresh water and food even more available than it is today.
Sean, it sounds like you are advocating the following:
1. Have a tiny military that is barely on a par with the rest of the world.
2. Wait for a crisis and then react.
That's insane. We were unprepared for WW2 and we paid dearly for it in blood. We developed technology on the fly and many of our people died as a result. We flew bombers over Germany before we could give them fighter escort. The only thing that saved our bacon in the Pacific was our aircraft carriers, and guess what, they were built before the war. Look at Iraq in 1991. From our perspective that was almost a bloodless operation because we had a technically superior force.
Actually there is no shortage of living space on Earth. Standing shoulder to shoulder the entire population of the Earth can fit in a medium sized city. If you divide the entire population into groups of 4 on lots 100ft by 200ft we could all fit in Texas. It's not living space but activities like farming which use comparatively more space but even that can be solved more efficiently on Earth.
For instance if we developed really cheap energy source then we could build a 100 story building and grow food indoors. It's called hydroponics. All you need is energy to power the lamps and to provide the fresh water. The largest cost with desalinating sea water is energy. Note, cheap energy = prosperity on Earth.
Ahhhh... hitting all the classics, 'tax breaks for the rich' and our bloated military.
Our military budget only accounts for 15% of the U.S. budget. Ironically, it is one of the only spending items explicitly authorized in the constitution, not prescription drugs, not art,etc. Secondly, our military works. Only our military could have crushed the Taliban like it did in Afghanistan. Can you say Russia in 1980's? Lastly, we can't wait for a crisis and then start to build a military. When we need one it has to be ready.