I don't ever recall 10" floppy drives. They probably were 8" drives. Even by the mid 1980's 8" drives were getting rare. 5 1/4" had larger capacity, and were smaller and more reliable by then.
Inscribed pottery is hard to beat. The only problem with it is, that after 3000 years or so, there may be no one around who's capable of understanding the language it's written in. Heiroglyphics might help a bit, but then again there's always the possibility it may be misinterpreted.
BTW, I don't think mastadons were carniverous. It must have been the sabre-toothed cats you were thinking of.
A case for using benchmark executables that are compiled and built specifically for the processor they're to run on, using the best compiler available for each processor.
There's one big difference here. The inital organism is able to replicate itself. That, along with the possibility of imperfect replication and natural selection will lead to evolution, I maintain. This makes it possible for evolution to be able to produce ever more complex individuals.
So lets see now we want
* An inital organism type that is able to replicate itself, much of the time a perfect copy
* The possibility of imperfect replication, that will lead to a mutation and individuals with slightly different survival characteristics from the parent organism
* Environmental factors which favor, or disfavor the survival or organisms with certain characteristics.
(In item two i'll restrict mutations to slightly different survival characterists, as large ones in the real world would almost certainly be detrimental.)
Biology tells us that we have something called DNA that determines the characteristics of an organism. Biology tells us that when a simple single celled organism divides, the DNA is replicated, sometimes imperfectly. We know that environmental factors can favor or disfavor individual organisms survival because of relatively small changes in their physical being.
One could run a mathematical simulation that could prove whether a more 'complex' individual is capable from evolving from a more simple individual given the above hypotheses. This simulation would be a vast simplification of real world life forms, but it might prove to you that it is possible for something more complex to evolve from something simpler. I'm curious and might have to undertake this little project.
The fact that an organism replicates changes the situation from your tornato hitting a junk yard metaphor. Also you're looking at the evolution as making life become 'better'. You could look at it from the point of view that the original organism was perfect, and that because of evolution, hacked up, imperfect, fringe elements are able to survive. That is, today's organisms are far less perfect than the inital one. In a sense entropy does rule with evolution. Life, as a whole is far more disorganized and diverse than the simple one type of organism that started it all. Its filled with all kinds of kludged up, mis-copied DNA. Its just that some of these mal-formed organisms are more intelligent than the original.
Another way to think about this is that there is a set of possible finite sequences of nucleotide patterns. You know, those ATGC type things. Viable organisms (any organisms that could under some set of environmental factors survive and replicate) would have be an extremely small (relatively speaking) subset of the set of finite nucleotide sequences. But even the set of potentially viable organisms (by that I mean types of organisms) is a huge huge set. Now the set of organisms that are actually alive today, or were alive at one time during the Earth's history is a
very small subset (relatively speaking) of this second set. And even this set is huge. Now who's to say that the second set that i mentioned couldn't contain many many organisms with intelligence levels of say homo sapiens. They don't physically exist but who's to say that some patterns of nucleotides couldn't produce other intelligent beings. The fact that we exist was due to the fact that there existed a set of organisms, each of which was a viable organism, and that a series of small DNA changes links the orignial organism to modern man. This linked set probably doesn't exist for most of the potential viable organisms.
I know of a way where moderate changes of genetic code are possible and have a much higher probability of occuring than what one might expect. This also would serve to speed up evolution a bit and make possible 'jumps' like that which probably was seen when something became a mammal, or when a gilled fish became something that could breath air. This mechanism depends on diploid chromosome sets and dominance/recessiveness of genes.
About the only chance of solar powered cars really happening is if the solar panels are stationary, and the cars pick up their power through some kind of contacts on the roadway. You know, like those toy electronic race cars.
Itanium was dead at the starting gate for the same reason PowerPC and Sparc are dying: Not x86 compatible; doesn't run x86 software.
I don't think it is necessary to be x86 compatible to have a successful processor. It certainly will initially have a tougher go of it, but with open source software, it shouldn't be too hard to recompile and link to the new architecture. You do have to have good compiler support for the processor, however. From what I've been reading here, this is one area where Intel seems to have failed. What I read is that, although it is possible to write/generate code that executes efficiently on the Itanium, the current compilers do not do a good job of optomizing the code. And this is a decade after the architecture was announced.
Another thorn in the side of this processor was that it was two years late, which is nearly an eternity when it comes to brining a chip to market. So although the specs for the chip were impressive when it was first announced, two years changes things a lot. Ask Steve Jobs about the NeXT computer.
Finally, the first chips to come out ran hot. Not a good sign for reliability.
Given all these things, the sales number prospects for the chip did not look good and software developers were reluctant to develop or port software to the chip. This leads to that chicken-and-egg situation where customers are reluctant to buy the chip because of all the aforementioned problems, and software developers continuing to push off expending software effort to support it because of poor sales prospects.
The IA-64 architecture, or some other yet-to-be-developed chip using some of the same technologies still could be a success, but it would take a big push to get over the x86 momentum, and they'd have to execute the rollout of this chip in a much better fashon than what happened with the Itanium. That is, on time with a chip that does not test the limits of technology, and with a compiler that can produce very good optimized code. And the compiler would have to be free (as in beer) for any developers.
Another thing - according to a different poster who actually uses and suppports a Itanium based systems, Linux runs magnificently on the Itanium.
Personally, I wouldn't give a hairy rodent's rear about the architecture of the chip as long as there is enough software for it. And with lots of open source software out there, and the ability to compile and build it for the architecture (I'm not afraid of doing the mods necessary for porting some of it), with Linux and an excellent compiler, I'ld be a happy camper.
Ahh, yes. But you did not address my original evidence of the several species of birds on that island with similar coloration and size.
This is what evolution is about - the gradual changing and diversification of life. You're apparantly failing to look at things on evolutionary time scales, in terms of hundreds of thousands, or millions of years to affect a meaningful change. Those individual small changes gradually add up.
You state that the genes that gave rise to the changes in the examples I mentioned in an earlier post could already have been part of the genome, which is true. But they also may have been because of a true genetic mutation. Could they not? As you do not know for sure whether or not the genes existed in the organism prior to the changes seen.
By the way, the corn plant of today is so vastly different than what it started out as, that you would not even recognize the original plant as corn. It looks like just another grassy plant, no 'ears' of corn, and not the tall plant we have today.
When Intel first announced IA-64 they were quite up front about stating it would not be x86 compatible and that they wanted to rid themselves of a lot of x86 baggage with this architecture. Anyone who assumed that it would be x86 compatible must not have been paying attention.
"Controlled Flight into Terrain" used to describe an aircraft plowing into a hillside. Not a crash, "flight into terrain".
They're being more specific than just 'crash'. This would be in contrast to something like' Uncontrolled flight into terrain'. "Controlled flight into terrain " would describe a situation where the pilot had control of a plane but because of instrument failure or lack of visiblity, flew the plane into the mountainside or 'terrain'. No one on board would have known until at most an instant before the crash that anything was abnormal
On the other hand. I have an aversion to the use of 'partnering'. As in 'Our company is partnering with such and such a company to....'.
How would you like to be refused admision to your work place when all you did was eat some food containing some mono sodium glutemate for lunch?
Sounds good to me. As long as I still get paid. It wasn't my fault that the security wouldn't let me in to work, so I'm sure the court would side on my behalf concerning any pay disputes.
There numerous examples in support of evolution. Your original statement was that there is no evidence to support the theory of evolution. That statement is false. If you had said there is no definitive proof of evolution, your statement would have been correct, but that's not what you said.
Darwin, in Origin of Species gives numerous examples to support evolution via natural selection. Lab experiments with fruit flies have, over the course of 10 generations, produced fruit flies that lived twice as long as normal. How did they do this? They killed off all the early offspring of each generation of fruit flies. Only those flies which were still vital in their 'old age' were able to reproduce. What they ended up with were fruit flies that lived twice as long, natural selection in action.
What about the crops farmers raise? You know that those same plants, 5,000 years ago looked quite different. You wouldn't recognize the plant that gave rise to the corn plant. Wheat, rice, other grains are also very much different today then the plants that were originally first 'domesticated'.
If you look at a field of grain just before harvest time, what you see is the whole field maturing (turning yellow) at the same time, within a few days. That doesn't happen without man's intervention. The genetic variation among wild plants would give variations of a couple of weeks in the maturation date.
The list of experiments and observations supporting evolution goes on and on and on. It's pretty well established in the scientific community. Read up and educate yourself about some of the studies and experiments that have been done. And now that you've been told, don't go around lying and saying there is no support for evolution.
There is no evidence whatsoever that one species has ever evolved into another one.
This is simply not true. Darwin, in his book Origin of Species shows evidence which supports that species evolve into others. In one case he mentions several species of birds found on a remote island. They all have the same coloration and size, but differ in the shape of their beaks and the food they eat. This is evidence that these separate species evolved from a single species of bird.
You've got to remember that although we've even gone to space, a place no worm could imagine going,
I believe that there were some worms that survived coming back from space when the Columbia disintegrated. So I'm sure there were a few worms around that didn't have to imagine going into space.
I'm an Iowan, and want to clarify some stuff I keep hearing about Iowa by tourists:
* yes, there is a lot of corn grown around here * yes, we do hold those silly caucuses here to help select the presidential candidates * those Iowa chops are really tasty * most kids don't walk two miles to school. They ride a school bus. * we don't have sex with sheep. I won't comment about the pigs, though. * don't confuse us with Ohio or Idaho. We really don't like that. It's like confusing americans with canadians. Worse actually since we don't care if you call canadians americans. * not all of us are outstanding in our fields, but alot of farmers do wear farmer caps. * We've never hosted an olympics. Certainly not a winter olympics as there's nothing close to a mountain around here.
How wrong you are. Typically the higher educated, higher paid people living in suburbs are the ones voting for bond levys for improved schools and services. It is the poorer people, the ones barely making a go of it and for which that extra $20 per month in taxes makes it even more difficult to balance their budgets, that vote against such things. Look at where the best schools generally are, the suburbs (especially white collar suburbs).
Used to be that businesses paid the lions share of taxes. IIRC, that's not the case anymore. Individual taxpayers foot most of the bill for government, or at least the Federal government.
The poor quality of urban schools has nothing to do with lack of funding. In Minnesota the urban schools have the highest per student spending and are the worst at educating these students. By far the worst. The problem in Minnesota is that many of the inner city families are non-english speaking and students do not get proper support from their families and social environment to encourage them to do well in school. And by the way, it's the suburbanites who end up paying for the additional costs of the inner city schools, not the other way around.
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will one person have to wear the red glasses while the other wears the blue ones?
I don't ever recall 10" floppy drives. They probably were 8" drives. Even by the mid 1980's 8" drives were getting rare. 5 1/4" had larger capacity, and were smaller and more reliable by then.
about secretaries having a nice set of dual floppies on their system.
BTW, I don't think mastadons were carniverous. It must have been the sabre-toothed cats you were thinking of.
A case for using benchmark executables that are compiled and built specifically for the processor they're to run on, using the best compiler available for each processor.
So lets see now we want
* An inital organism type that is able to replicate itself, much of the time a perfect copy
* The possibility of imperfect replication, that will lead to a mutation and individuals with slightly different survival characteristics from the parent organism
* Environmental factors which favor, or disfavor the survival or organisms with certain characteristics.
(In item two i'll restrict mutations to slightly different survival characterists, as large ones in the real world would almost certainly be detrimental.)
Biology tells us that we have something called DNA that determines the characteristics of an organism. Biology tells us that when a simple single celled organism divides, the DNA is replicated, sometimes imperfectly. We know that environmental factors can favor or disfavor individual organisms survival because of relatively small changes in their physical being.
One could run a mathematical simulation that could prove whether a more 'complex' individual is capable from evolving from a more simple individual given the above hypotheses. This simulation would be a vast simplification of real world life forms, but it might prove to you that it is possible for something more complex to evolve from something simpler. I'm curious and might have to undertake this little project.
The fact that an organism replicates changes the situation from your tornato hitting a junk yard metaphor. Also you're looking at the evolution as making life become 'better'. You could look at it from the point of view that the original organism was perfect, and that because of evolution, hacked up, imperfect, fringe elements are able to survive. That is, today's organisms are far less perfect than the inital one. In a sense entropy does rule with evolution. Life, as a whole is far more disorganized and diverse than the simple one type of organism that started it all. Its filled with all kinds of kludged up, mis-copied DNA. Its just that some of these mal-formed organisms are more intelligent than the original.
Another way to think about this is that there is a set of possible finite sequences of nucleotide patterns. You know, those ATGC type things. Viable organisms (any organisms that could under some set of environmental factors survive and replicate) would have be an extremely small (relatively speaking) subset of the set of finite nucleotide sequences. But even the set of potentially viable organisms (by that I mean types of organisms) is a huge huge set. Now the set of organisms that are actually alive today, or were alive at one time during the Earth's history is a very small subset (relatively speaking) of this second set. And even this set is huge. Now who's to say that the second set that i mentioned couldn't contain many many organisms with intelligence levels of say homo sapiens. They don't physically exist but who's to say that some patterns of nucleotides couldn't produce other intelligent beings. The fact that we exist was due to the fact that there existed a set of organisms, each of which was a viable organism, and that a series of small DNA changes links the orignial organism to modern man. This linked set probably doesn't exist for most of the potential viable organisms.
I know of a way where moderate changes of genetic code are possible and have a much higher probability of occuring than what one might expect. This also would serve to speed up evolution a bit and make possible 'jumps' like that which probably was seen when something became a mammal, or when a gilled fish became something that could breath air. This mechanism depends on diploid chromosome sets and dominance/recessiveness of genes.
About the only chance of solar powered cars really happening is if the solar panels are stationary, and the cars pick up their power through some kind of contacts on the roadway. You know, like those toy electronic race cars.
Also wikibooks.org
I don't think it is necessary to be x86 compatible to have a successful processor. It certainly will initially have a tougher go of it, but with open source software, it shouldn't be too hard to recompile and link to the new architecture. You do have to have good compiler support for the processor, however. From what I've been reading here, this is one area where Intel seems to have failed. What I read is that, although it is possible to write/generate code that executes efficiently on the Itanium, the current compilers do not do a good job of optomizing the code. And this is a decade after the architecture was announced.
Another thorn in the side of this processor was that it was two years late, which is nearly an eternity when it comes to brining a chip to market. So although the specs for the chip were impressive when it was first announced, two years changes things a lot. Ask Steve Jobs about the NeXT computer.
Finally, the first chips to come out ran hot. Not a good sign for reliability.
Given all these things, the sales number prospects for the chip did not look good and software developers were reluctant to develop or port software to the chip. This leads to that chicken-and-egg situation where customers are reluctant to buy the chip because of all the aforementioned problems, and software developers continuing to push off expending software effort to support it because of poor sales prospects.
The IA-64 architecture, or some other yet-to-be-developed chip using some of the same technologies still could be a success, but it would take a big push to get over the x86 momentum, and they'd have to execute the rollout of this chip in a much better fashon than what happened with the Itanium. That is, on time with a chip that does not test the limits of technology, and with a compiler that can produce very good optimized code. And the compiler would have to be free (as in beer) for any developers.
Another thing - according to a different poster who actually uses and suppports a Itanium based systems, Linux runs magnificently on the Itanium.
Personally, I wouldn't give a hairy rodent's rear about the architecture of the chip as long as there is enough software for it. And with lots of open source software out there, and the ability to compile and build it for the architecture (I'm not afraid of doing the mods necessary for porting some of it), with Linux and an excellent compiler, I'ld be a happy camper.
This is what evolution is about - the gradual changing and diversification of life. You're apparantly failing to look at things on evolutionary time scales, in terms of hundreds of thousands, or millions of years to affect a meaningful change. Those individual small changes gradually add up.
You state that the genes that gave rise to the changes in the examples I mentioned in an earlier post could already have been part of the genome, which is true. But they also may have been because of a true genetic mutation. Could they not? As you do not know for sure whether or not the genes existed in the organism prior to the changes seen.
By the way, the corn plant of today is so vastly different than what it started out as, that you would not even recognize the original plant as corn. It looks like just another grassy plant, no 'ears' of corn, and not the tall plant we have today.
When Intel first announced IA-64 they were quite up front about stating it would not be x86 compatible and that they wanted to rid themselves of a lot of x86 baggage with this architecture. Anyone who assumed that it would be x86 compatible must not have been paying attention.
They're being more specific than just 'crash'. This would be in contrast to something like' Uncontrolled flight into terrain'. "Controlled flight into terrain " would describe a situation where the pilot had control of a plane but because of instrument failure or lack of visiblity, flew the plane into the mountainside or 'terrain'. No one on board would have known until at most an instant before the crash that anything was abnormal
On the other hand. I have an aversion to the use of 'partnering'. As in 'Our company is partnering with such and such a company to....'.
That's probably because they are almost always used as adjectives with word 'brain'.
Sounds good to me. As long as I still get paid. It wasn't my fault that the security wouldn't let me in to work, so I'm sure the court would side on my behalf concerning any pay disputes.
Darwin, in Origin of Species gives numerous examples to support evolution via natural selection. Lab experiments with fruit flies have, over the course of 10 generations, produced fruit flies that lived twice as long as normal. How did they do this? They killed off all the early offspring of each generation of fruit flies. Only those flies which were still vital in their 'old age' were able to reproduce. What they ended up with were fruit flies that lived twice as long, natural selection in action.
What about the crops farmers raise? You know that those same plants, 5,000 years ago looked quite different. You wouldn't recognize the plant that gave rise to the corn plant. Wheat, rice, other grains are also very much different today then the plants that were originally first 'domesticated'. If you look at a field of grain just before harvest time, what you see is the whole field maturing (turning yellow) at the same time, within a few days. That doesn't happen without man's intervention. The genetic variation among wild plants would give variations of a couple of weeks in the maturation date.
The list of experiments and observations supporting evolution goes on and on and on. It's pretty well established in the scientific community. Read up and educate yourself about some of the studies and experiments that have been done. And now that you've been told, don't go around lying and saying there is no support for evolution.
Roundup - Ready Soybeans.
Genetically modified, i.e. its genes were mutated to produce soybeans which can tolerate glyphosate herbicide.
There's already a 'Z' language.
They weren't absorbed, they were assimilated.
Resistance was futile.
This is simply not true. Darwin, in his book Origin of Species shows evidence which supports that species evolve into others. In one case he mentions several species of birds found on a remote island. They all have the same coloration and size, but differ in the shape of their beaks and the food they eat. This is evidence that these separate species evolved from a single species of bird.
I beg to differ.
I believe that there were some worms that survived coming back from space when the Columbia disintegrated. So I'm sure there were a few worms around that didn't have to imagine going into space.
I'm an Iowan, and want to clarify some stuff I keep hearing about Iowa by tourists:
* yes, there is a lot of corn grown around here
* yes, we do hold those silly caucuses here to help select the presidential candidates
* those Iowa chops are really tasty
* most kids don't walk two miles to school. They ride a school bus.
* we don't have sex with sheep. I won't comment about the pigs, though.
* don't confuse us with Ohio or Idaho. We really don't like that. It's like confusing americans with canadians. Worse actually since we don't care if you call canadians americans.
* not all of us are outstanding in our fields, but alot of farmers do wear farmer caps.
* We've never hosted an olympics. Certainly not a winter olympics as there's nothing close to a mountain around here.
She was really the teeter-totter vote.
Used to be that businesses paid the lions share of taxes. IIRC, that's not the case anymore. Individual taxpayers foot most of the bill for government, or at least the Federal government.
The poor quality of urban schools has nothing to do with lack of funding. In Minnesota the urban schools have the highest per student spending and are the worst at educating these students. By far the worst. The problem in Minnesota is that many of the inner city families are non-english speaking and students do not get proper support from their families and social environment to encourage them to do well in school. And by the way, it's the suburbanites who end up paying for the additional costs of the inner city schools, not the other way around.