OK, I take your point. What you're basically saying is that evolution has a "sampling rate" which is related to the generation length - say, 20 years-ish for a human being. Environmental changes that occur too quickly relative to this sampling rate won't affect evolution because they are above the "Nyquist frequency" (apologies if this analogy means nothing to you; it just occurred to me and it's an interesting thought). If Information Theory applies, and it may well do, as we are talking about the transmission of genetic information from one generation to another, then an environmental pressure must be present for at least twice the averaged generation length to have any affect at all. But that might not be that long - 40 or 50 years would appear to be enough. I'm talking about tiny changes. I doubt that such changes would be enough for anyone to really notice. Mass die-offs aside (which of course would be noticed, but I'm talking about something subtler), it's likely that society wouldn't even notice, even if changes were quite substantial - it would just be that generation's "normal". Even cultural changes which happen more rapidly are quickly forgotten - who takes any notice of old people anyway?;-) If we grew an extra limb or an ear or something that would probably not escape attention, but subtle changes like slightly stunted growth or a drop in fertility would probably slip by. How do we know if present day fertility rates are anything like those of 500 years ago? We don't for sure - populations were vastly different, infant mortality much higher and records scanty. It's anyone's guess how we've changed in subtle ways since then. We do know we are a lot taller for example. This is usually put down to better nutrition, and so it is - but that in itself is an environmental pressure. If our food supply became much scarcer tomorrow, would the next generation immediately revert to short stature? I doubt it - genes for taller growth have already been selected for in the last few generations, because the environment contains sufficient food energy to allow it. That generation would grow tall, but undernourished, which would start causing a deselection of the tallness genes. I believe evolution is about many, tiny incremental changes, not gross mutations. In this light, human evolution is proceeding exactly at the same rate that it always has, and is far from stalled.
Well, you've just demonstrated that you don't properly understand evolution either. An environmental factor doesn't have to directly affect the genetics (as in causing a mutation, for example). It only has to affect the reproductive ability of a body compared to another body. Estrogen-mimicking molecules are sure to do that, for example by reducing sperm counts - with some people more affected than others even given the same "dose" of the agent. Those more adversely affected will produce fewer offspring, therefore those less affected will tend, over time, to increase their presence in the gene pool. Thus indirectly there is an affect on the genetic material in the gene pool. Most evolution is of this type - subtle environmental pressure that probably doesn't have any measurable effect at the individual level - its an accumulative, emergent outcome that gently pushes us in some direction. Any effects will take numerous generations to become apparent, which is why this sort of "harmless" input to the environment might turn out to be incredibly insidious - just because we can't detect any effects on the scale of our own daily lives doesn't mean there isn't one.
First off, human evolution became stalled the moment we started making our environment adapt to us
Crap. Yes, we alter our environment, but that environment continues to alter us, just as it always has. Mankind's evolution is no more stalled now than it ever was -in fact it may be accelerating because we have changed our environment so rapidly recently.
Take plastics. We have flooded our environment with them in the last 60 or 70 years, and we THINK (based on nothing other than blind hope) they are mostly harmless in evolutionary terms. But we don't know, and 70 years is not long enough to know. There is some indication that in fact they might be changing us - for example by flooding the ecosystem with estrogen-mimicking molecules. How evolution will respond is anyone's guess, but IT WILL DO SO, because that's how it works. That's just one example. Every change we have made to the way we live, eat, pollute, interfere directly with drugs and surgery - it all has an impossible-to-predict effect on our evolution.
And for the record, yes, I was with the PC crowd when Apple was still stuck in the 80's with their crappy Mac OS 9.
Umm, in the 80s the latest Mac OS version was 6.0.something. And it was still light years ahead of Windows 2.0, which is all you could run GUI-wise on your PC at the time. System 7.0 came out around about the same time as Windows 3.0, in about 1991. Mac OS 9 wasn't released until about 1998, and at that time, yes, its architecture was behind the curve. Still more usable than Windows, but didn't tick all the geek boxes.
Some people think that if you make a complex enough computer it will become sentient
Not unless it's organised just so. And we haven't really stumbled across the correct organisation yet. Chances are it could be a lot simpler than we think (after all, some incredibly complex and intelligent behaviour is exhibited by even a small brain - say, a Sparrow's - the image processing alone is awesome compared to what we can do with machines) - but we just don't know yet. An interesting book is Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach" which takes the view that yes, build a system with enough "neurons" and it will become sentient. I have a feeling that it's not just the number of neurons, but the way they link that matters. What isn't up for argument (I hope!) is that sentience doesn't require any sort of supernatural force. However, there are still eminent scientists who do believe that.
It's not that it's rocket science, it's that it's drudge work
Well, it can be. I must admit I get a bit bored writing setter methods which are always the same. But then again, it takes a few seconds, and it's done, so I can forget about it and move on. I don't believe any language or framework could ever eliminate drudge work completely, and compared to C++, Cocoa/Obj-C is very productive in this respect. There's a lot of boiler plate stuff the the IDE could help out with but currently doesn't - expanding a header definition of a class into the skeleton implementation, writing getter and setter methods for you and so on. I'll take any of these handy editor-level features over runtime garbage collection any day.
Actually, what Bush said was: "There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, it's probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on...ehh, shame on you. It fool me. We can't get fooled again."
The Garbage Collection thing is overrated. And people talk about Cocoa's memory management as if it were rocket science. It's not, it's really, really simple. Elegant, even. Most of the time you can more or less ignore it, you don't have to bother too much about autorelease pools and so on. It just works. OK, there are a few rules you need to learn, but they are simple - takes ten minutes. Compared to the learning curve of the whole framework it's a tiny proportion of the time. So if you're a Cocoa developer, you'll need to learn it, so invest ten minutes. If you're not, it makes not one jot of difference to you anyway, so stop touting Garbage Collection as some great coming feature that will magically mean end-user improvements.
I actually find the whole retain/release/autorelease thing trivial, my code doesn't leak, (a bigger likelihood if you get it wrong is that your program will crash, which will usually tell you something's wrong!), and I prefer keeping it lean and mean, without some unpredictable garbage collector cutting in and stealing cycles that I want!
OK, Americans probably won't be familiar with this site, but it certainly did (for a while) have quite a big impact on popular culture in the UK. Most people I know have re-met people they knew at school through the site. I did too, meeting up with an old mate after 22 years (turned out he lived 2 miles from me, after I'd moved through 5 other different places!). Hard to say if it really changed the world - but it might have changed the UK a bit. Since The Observer is a UK paper, the list is a bit parochial in that sense.
For every sob story, there's the other sort. I have used a G3 iBook since it first came out as my daily workhorse. It has only ever had one problem, which was the chafing and eventual breaking of the cable that supplied the screen backlight with power - a common problem on that model apparently. I replaced the cable myself and other than that it has been 100% reliable. Now consider the abuse it has received. Daily use of between 4-8 hours a day for over five years. Travelled between the UK and Australia several times, as well as many other trips. Taken apart several times - first to upgrade the hard disk from 10GB to 40GB. Second to overclock the processor from 500MHz to 600MHz - even soldering the mboard didn't break it. Third time to replace the cable I mentioned. The take-apart and put back together I got down to less than 1/2 hour. It's all about confidence - and not being too precious about losing a screw. Oh, I also replaced the keyboard a while back - not because it wasn't working but because I used it so heavily that some of the letters wore off. Now I just bought a new MacBook to replace it, the G3 will be semi-retired to acting as a music and wireless printer server. It's given me nothing but total service, and hasn't even worn that badly - though it definitely has a slightly used look about it. A great machine, I hope the Macbook will prove as good.
To put this in perspective, I just bought a new Macbook (2GHz). Running XBench it actually benchmarks on the Open GL tests (and most graphics tests) 250% faster than the "baseline" G5 system that XBench currently uses as its 100% rating. Sure, for hardcore gamers this is still probably not fast enough, but it's very respectable. 99% of the uses to which a Mac is good for it's entirely adequate. I was initially a bit leery of the integrated graphics chipset after what I'd read on the web, but in practice I couldn't be happier (though I'm not a gamer). Seems to me it's a bit like those who knock the Ferrari for "only" doing 190mph when the Jaguar M220 can do 220mph - it's entirely academic for what you'll use it for in the real world.
Vista is a blatant ripoff of Copland! Apple managed not to deliver a new operating system YEARS before Microsoft! Shedding features left, right and centre just to get something out of the door? Been there, done that. Finally giving up and rolling what can be made to work into a half-assed release just to get something out of the door? Yawn, Apple had that ten years ago.
when Buick first introduced turn signals to cars, don't you think Ford did the same one year later
This raises an interesting point. In the car industry, standards are laid down that all cars must be built to comply with, for obvious safety reasons. Many of those requirements came from innovations by manufacturers, but probably equally many were thought up by standards committees who are just thinking about what makes things better/safer.
There is no such similar standards requirements in the computer industry, but perhaps there ought to be. With so much of our various economies relying on this stuff working, perhaps it would be better if there were design principles laid down in law that everyone had to comply with. That would kill a lot of the arguments about who stole what from whom, since everyone would have to have, e.g. backup systems built-in, a certain resistance to viruses, certain usability standards, document interchange standards, etc. Leaving it to the market to sort this out obviously hasn't worked, since the market is heavily biased towards one system that would fail to comply with even the most rudimentary of reasonable standards.
Don't worry about it. The tagging concept doesn't work, and will never work as long as any "moran" (I think you mean 'moron') can edit the damn things. Sensible people simply ignore them.
Those who have read Bruce Sterling's "The Difference Engine" will start to realise that perhaps his vision was more prophetic than Orwell's. For those unfamiliar, the idea is that if Babbage had perfected his difference engine, there might have been an information technology revolution over 100 years ago, and consequently a very rapid decent into a total surveillance society. Far fetched, but the true value of the novel is that it warns what happens when things are done just because they CAN be done, and no thought ever given to whether they SHOULD be done, simply because as a society the technology isn't really grasped until it's too late. We are at that point now. We work away in our own little niches, building 'cool' stuff because it can be done - but the powers that be are harnessing all this stuff in ways that are truly very frightening indeed.
OK for Mac people seeing as most of them don't properly understand computers anyway br
OK, it's an obvious troll, but I'll bite. "PC people" DO properly understand computers? No, by definition, they don't. In fact I would bet that as a percentage of the user base, more Mac people are technically literate than PC users.
I don't what exactly got "hacked" but odds are it was simply an.htaccess file that didn't have its permissions set correctly. That can happen to any Apache server running on anything, so to point the finger at OS X in this case is just trolling.
Sisters, eh? Can't live with 'em, can't shoot 'em. Your sister sounds like my sister, stubborn, lazy and wilfully stupid. Despite having an IQ of 150+ and a PhD. Unfortunately I think there's a very large segment of the population that is in the same category.
While all Mac fans surely welcome the increase in "our" profile and corresponding relevance, etc, I hope it doesn't go too far. Just enough so we can hold our heads up in polite company and stop having to feel apologetic for being the minority. I reckon about 25% market share would be about optimum - easily enough to kill complacency in other sections of the market, drive innovation, yet retain enough exclusivity. It would also help prevent or slow down the backsliding that I see in institutions such as our local university, where we have about 40% Macs installed, and most Mac users jealously guard them - but the powers at the top want to force a single standard on everyone, and guess what that is? A higher profile for Mac would at least force them to investigate why their users are so keen on them, take them more seriously, and maybe they'll even learn something.
but the foremost is that, having a pseudo "split" supply, you make wireless communication and amplification much easier on the device.
I don't see what difference a split supply makes to efficiency. However, it seems unlikely that the new mouse is working this way anyway, since if you RTFA, it shows that the two batteries are optional - you can run it on one, trading weight for battery life.
I also suspect the laser LED is one of the biggest power drags on the batteries, not the bluetooth.
And yes, I AM an electronics engineer, or at least was, in a former career.
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OK, I take your point. What you're basically saying is that evolution has a "sampling rate" which is related to the generation length - say, 20 years-ish for a human being. Environmental changes that occur too quickly relative to this sampling rate won't affect evolution because they are above the "Nyquist frequency" (apologies if this analogy means nothing to you; it just occurred to me and it's an interesting thought). If Information Theory applies, and it may well do, as we are talking about the transmission of genetic information from one generation to another, then an environmental pressure must be present for at least twice the averaged generation length to have any affect at all. But that might not be that long - 40 or 50 years would appear to be enough. I'm talking about tiny changes. I doubt that such changes would be enough for anyone to really notice. Mass die-offs aside (which of course would be noticed, but I'm talking about something subtler), it's likely that society wouldn't even notice, even if changes were quite substantial - it would just be that generation's "normal". Even cultural changes which happen more rapidly are quickly forgotten - who takes any notice of old people anyway? ;-) If we grew an extra limb or an ear or something that would probably not escape attention, but subtle changes like slightly stunted growth or a drop in fertility would probably slip by. How do we know if present day fertility rates are anything like those of 500 years ago? We don't for sure - populations were vastly different, infant mortality much higher and records scanty. It's anyone's guess how we've changed in subtle ways since then. We do know we are a lot taller for example. This is usually put down to better nutrition, and so it is - but that in itself is an environmental pressure. If our food supply became much scarcer tomorrow, would the next generation immediately revert to short stature? I doubt it - genes for taller growth have already been selected for in the last few generations, because the environment contains sufficient food energy to allow it. That generation would grow tall, but undernourished, which would start causing a deselection of the tallness genes. I believe evolution is about many, tiny incremental changes, not gross mutations. In this light, human evolution is proceeding exactly at the same rate that it always has, and is far from stalled.
Well, you've just demonstrated that you don't properly understand evolution either. An environmental factor doesn't have to directly affect the genetics (as in causing a mutation, for example). It only has to affect the reproductive ability of a body compared to another body. Estrogen-mimicking molecules are sure to do that, for example by reducing sperm counts - with some people more affected than others even given the same "dose" of the agent. Those more adversely affected will produce fewer offspring, therefore those less affected will tend, over time, to increase their presence in the gene pool. Thus indirectly there is an affect on the genetic material in the gene pool. Most evolution is of this type - subtle environmental pressure that probably doesn't have any measurable effect at the individual level - its an accumulative, emergent outcome that gently pushes us in some direction. Any effects will take numerous generations to become apparent, which is why this sort of "harmless" input to the environment might turn out to be incredibly insidious - just because we can't detect any effects on the scale of our own daily lives doesn't mean there isn't one.
First off, human evolution became stalled the moment we started making our environment adapt to us
Crap. Yes, we alter our environment, but that environment continues to alter us, just as it always has. Mankind's evolution is no more stalled now than it ever was -in fact it may be accelerating because we have changed our environment so rapidly recently.
Take plastics. We have flooded our environment with them in the last 60 or 70 years, and we THINK (based on nothing other than blind hope) they are mostly harmless in evolutionary terms. But we don't know, and 70 years is not long enough to know. There is some indication that in fact they might be changing us - for example by flooding the ecosystem with estrogen-mimicking molecules. How evolution will respond is anyone's guess, but IT WILL DO SO, because that's how it works. That's just one example. Every change we have made to the way we live, eat, pollute, interfere directly with drugs and surgery - it all has an impossible-to-predict effect on our evolution.
Stalled. My arse.
And for the record, yes, I was with the PC crowd when Apple was still stuck in the 80's with their crappy Mac OS 9.
Umm, in the 80s the latest Mac OS version was 6.0.something. And it was still light years ahead of Windows 2.0, which is all you could run GUI-wise on your PC at the time. System 7.0 came out around about the same time as Windows 3.0, in about 1991. Mac OS 9 wasn't released until about 1998, and at that time, yes, its architecture was behind the curve. Still more usable than Windows, but didn't tick all the geek boxes.
Some people think that if you make a complex enough computer it will become sentient
Not unless it's organised just so. And we haven't really stumbled across the correct organisation yet. Chances are it could be a lot simpler than we think (after all, some incredibly complex and intelligent behaviour is exhibited by even a small brain - say, a Sparrow's - the image processing alone is awesome compared to what we can do with machines) - but we just don't know yet. An interesting book is Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach" which takes the view that yes, build a system with enough "neurons" and it will become sentient. I have a feeling that it's not just the number of neurons, but the way they link that matters. What isn't up for argument (I hope!) is that sentience doesn't require any sort of supernatural force. However, there are still eminent scientists who do believe that.
It's not that it's rocket science, it's that it's drudge work
Well, it can be. I must admit I get a bit bored writing setter methods which are always the same. But then again, it takes a few seconds, and it's done, so I can forget about it and move on. I don't believe any language or framework could ever eliminate drudge work completely, and compared to C++, Cocoa/Obj-C is very productive in this respect. There's a lot of boiler plate stuff the the IDE could help out with but currently doesn't - expanding a header definition of a class into the skeleton implementation, writing getter and setter methods for you and so on. I'll take any of these handy editor-level features over runtime garbage collection any day.
Actually, what Bush said was: "There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, it's probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on ...ehh, shame on you. It fool me. We can't get fooled again."
The Garbage Collection thing is overrated. And people talk about Cocoa's memory management as if it were rocket science. It's not, it's really, really simple. Elegant, even. Most of the time you can more or less ignore it, you don't have to bother too much about autorelease pools and so on. It just works. OK, there are a few rules you need to learn, but they are simple - takes ten minutes. Compared to the learning curve of the whole framework it's a tiny proportion of the time. So if you're a Cocoa developer, you'll need to learn it, so invest ten minutes. If you're not, it makes not one jot of difference to you anyway, so stop touting Garbage Collection as some great coming feature that will magically mean end-user improvements.
I actually find the whole retain/release/autorelease thing trivial, my code doesn't leak, (a bigger likelihood if you get it wrong is that your program will crash, which will usually tell you something's wrong!), and I prefer keeping it lean and mean, without some unpredictable garbage collector cutting in and stealing cycles that I want!
OK, Americans probably won't be familiar with this site, but it certainly did (for a while) have quite a big impact on popular culture in the UK. Most people I know have re-met people they knew at school through the site. I did too, meeting up with an old mate after 22 years (turned out he lived 2 miles from me, after I'd moved through 5 other different places!). Hard to say if it really changed the world - but it might have changed the UK a bit. Since The Observer is a UK paper, the list is a bit parochial in that sense.
For every sob story, there's the other sort. I have used a G3 iBook since it first came out as my daily workhorse. It has only ever had one problem, which was the chafing and eventual breaking of the cable that supplied the screen backlight with power - a common problem on that model apparently. I replaced the cable myself and other than that it has been 100% reliable. Now consider the abuse it has received. Daily use of between 4-8 hours a day for over five years. Travelled between the UK and Australia several times, as well as many other trips. Taken apart several times - first to upgrade the hard disk from 10GB to 40GB. Second to overclock the processor from 500MHz to 600MHz - even soldering the mboard didn't break it. Third time to replace the cable I mentioned. The take-apart and put back together I got down to less than 1/2 hour. It's all about confidence - and not being too precious about losing a screw. Oh, I also replaced the keyboard a while back - not because it wasn't working but because I used it so heavily that some of the letters wore off. Now I just bought a new MacBook to replace it, the G3 will be semi-retired to acting as a music and wireless printer server. It's given me nothing but total service, and hasn't even worn that badly - though it definitely has a slightly used look about it. A great machine, I hope the Macbook will prove as good.
its weak 3d graphics abilities
To put this in perspective, I just bought a new Macbook (2GHz). Running XBench it actually benchmarks on the Open GL tests (and most graphics tests) 250% faster than the "baseline" G5 system that XBench currently uses as its 100% rating. Sure, for hardcore gamers this is still probably not fast enough, but it's very respectable. 99% of the uses to which a Mac is good for it's entirely adequate. I was initially a bit leery of the integrated graphics chipset after what I'd read on the web, but in practice I couldn't be happier (though I'm not a gamer). Seems to me it's a bit like those who knock the Ferrari for "only" doing 190mph when the Jaguar M220 can do 220mph - it's entirely academic for what you'll use it for in the real world.
Islamic terrorists will be attacked. Not invaded. Attacked. Their cities will be summarily carpet-bombed
Yeah, that'll fix it. America will be loved and respected once again and everything will be just tickety-boo.
Vista is a blatant ripoff of Copland! Apple managed not to deliver a new operating system YEARS before Microsoft! Shedding features left, right and centre just to get something out of the door? Been there, done that. Finally giving up and rolling what can be made to work into a half-assed release just to get something out of the door? Yawn, Apple had that ten years ago.
when Buick first introduced turn signals to cars, don't you think Ford did the same one year later
This raises an interesting point. In the car industry, standards are laid down that all cars must be built to comply with, for obvious safety reasons. Many of those requirements came from innovations by manufacturers, but probably equally many were thought up by standards committees who are just thinking about what makes things better/safer.
There is no such similar standards requirements in the computer industry, but perhaps there ought to be. With so much of our various economies relying on this stuff working, perhaps it would be better if there were design principles laid down in law that everyone had to comply with. That would kill a lot of the arguments about who stole what from whom, since everyone would have to have, e.g. backup systems built-in, a certain resistance to viruses, certain usability standards, document interchange standards, etc. Leaving it to the market to sort this out obviously hasn't worked, since the market is heavily biased towards one system that would fail to comply with even the most rudimentary of reasonable standards.
Don't worry about it. The tagging concept doesn't work, and will never work as long as any "moran" (I think you mean 'moron') can edit the damn things. Sensible people simply ignore them.
Those who have read Bruce Sterling's "The Difference Engine" will start to realise that perhaps his vision was more prophetic than Orwell's. For those unfamiliar, the idea is that if Babbage had perfected his difference engine, there might have been an information technology revolution over 100 years ago, and consequently a very rapid decent into a total surveillance society. Far fetched, but the true value of the novel is that it warns what happens when things are done just because they CAN be done, and no thought ever given to whether they SHOULD be done, simply because as a society the technology isn't really grasped until it's too late. We are at that point now. We work away in our own little niches, building 'cool' stuff because it can be done - but the powers that be are harnessing all this stuff in ways that are truly very frightening indeed.
OK for Mac people seeing as most of them don't properly understand computers anyway
br OK, it's an obvious troll, but I'll bite. "PC people" DO properly understand computers? No, by definition, they don't. In fact I would bet that as a percentage of the user base, more Mac people are technically literate than PC users.
Some old British survey book
And you, sir, are a fuckwit.
I don't what exactly got "hacked" but odds are it was simply an .htaccess file that didn't have its permissions set correctly. That can happen to any Apache server running on anything, so to point the finger at OS X in this case is just trolling.
Do you think people would buy Ferraris if everyone drove one? Childish or not, it's human nature.
Sisters, eh? Can't live with 'em, can't shoot 'em. Your sister sounds like my sister, stubborn, lazy and wilfully stupid. Despite having an IQ of 150+ and a PhD. Unfortunately I think there's a very large segment of the population that is in the same category.
... with baited breath...
ewwww...... you need to see a dentist. Or perhaps you meant bated?
While all Mac fans surely welcome the increase in "our" profile and corresponding relevance, etc, I hope it doesn't go too far. Just enough so we can hold our heads up in polite company and stop having to feel apologetic for being the minority. I reckon about 25% market share would be about optimum - easily enough to kill complacency in other sections of the market, drive innovation, yet retain enough exclusivity. It would also help prevent or slow down the backsliding that I see in institutions such as our local university, where we have about 40% Macs installed, and most Mac users jealously guard them - but the powers at the top want to force a single standard on everyone, and guess what that is? A higher profile for Mac would at least force them to investigate why their users are so keen on them, take them more seriously, and maybe they'll even learn something.
Is this history in the right book?
No. That's why the publisher cut the chapter and it's been published as a free download.
but the foremost is that, having a pseudo "split" supply, you make wireless communication and amplification much easier on the device.
I don't see what difference a split supply makes to efficiency. However, it seems unlikely that the new mouse is working this way anyway, since if you RTFA, it shows that the two batteries are optional - you can run it on one, trading weight for battery life.
I also suspect the laser LED is one of the biggest power drags on the batteries, not the bluetooth.
And yes, I AM an electronics engineer, or at least was, in a former career.