If the developer isn't confident about even *where* some part of the code should be, and code from that confused developer actually made it into the kernel despite that confusion, why should a user have confidence in it?
A specific feature may be implemented in many ways. If there are several equivelent or nearly-equivelent ways, it makes sense to question your implementation decision. It does not necessarily imply the developer was unsure if "it" really belonged in that particular location; it is far more likely that the developer was unsure if there wasn't a better way of doing it that he was overlooking.
Sometimes writing code, something just doesn't feel right, even if you know your implementation is just fine. You have the feeling there's a better way. Usually, when you come back to it later, the better way is apperant. Often, the better way is simply cleaner code, not a better algorithm.
Comments like that are markers that welcome improvement, not an indication of lack of developer confidence.
Most people who are depressed are so because of biochemical imbalances and not because their teachers overpraised them as children.
Depression is correlated with biochemical changes, right enough. Depressive states are accompanied by changes in serotonin & norepinephrine levels. You can induce depression with oxotremorine, for instance.
But correlation does not imply biochemical "imbalance" naturally causes depression. It's just as likely that depression causes the biochemical imbalance.
Many cases of chronic unipolar depression (and bipolar mania / depression) may very well be tied to genetics or long-term chemical changes in the body. In non-genetic cases, what caused the imbalance in the first place? Could it not be a chemical dependency caused by long-term situational depression (that is, the body just gets used to the chemical state of being depressed)?
Most cases of depression (and the ones generally referred to by the root post) are not necessarily caused by some physical problem.
Don't believe me? How many times has a perfectly good mood been changed by an outside event? Why is there such a high rate of depression in veterans? Why did we have an increase in depression after 9/11/2001?
Praise from teachers is important. The praise should be balanced with expectations, though. I loved art class; not that I was any good, but the important thing wasn't the finished product, it was the process. I learned an appreciation for great art through my understanding (not mastery) of the process.
Unfortunately, in geometry, understanding and mastery are tied together. And there are many, many people who are incapable of understanding geometry. This doesn't make them worse than those of us who *do* get geometry; it just means they'll never design bridges or houses, or teach geometry. (Okay, they *might* teach geometry.)
The problem with MUMPS is the data integrity issue. As essentially a collective of hashed indexes where nodes can contain both data and more branches, it sucks for *any* kind of serious data retrieval. You basically have to create and maintain your own indexes, unless you go with Fileman, which is a massively moby hack, but a hack nonetheless.
The idea of the relational model is simple: it is based on set theory, which has a strong mathematical model. There is no equivelent model for object databases, nor for tree-based databases like MUMPS. There is no strong mathematical basis by which you can judge the integrity of your data.
Cache', by Intersystems (a Post-Relational Database!) is based on MUMPS. You've seen their adverts here on Slashdot. They claim to be object-relational, but they are no such thing: they are MUMPS. They went on a buying spree and purchased up most of the failing MUMPS vendors (DSM, MSM, etc), and now they are the big guys in the M world.
They have some pretty nify hacks which compiles their "object-oriented MUMPS" programming language (I forget what it's called) into straight M. Fun. Doesn't stop it from sucking hard.
MUMPS is, at best, a fairly bizarre language with persistent storage of global arrays.
MUMPS drives me nuts. It uses whitespace for blocking just like Python, but they had so much trouble with it, they eventually allowed a '.' to replace the whitespace, so you end up with code like this:
S node="" F S node=$O(^ZZZYYY(node)) D .. Q:node="" .. W "^ZZZYYY(node)=",node,! .. R Pause
(Sidenote: I have to admit, my exposure to MUMPS is one of the primary reasons I despise Python's whitespace-as-blocking. It seems replaces the poor aesthetics of brace-blocking with something more error-prone and stupid-looking, though more aesthetically pleasing. But all that's just opinion. I'm sure Python is a good language, just as I'm sure MUMPS is not.)
Look at the big white building to the northeast; it's shadow is definitely sourced from the south, just like the silver blurry thingee.
As far as the pin goes, I doubt this photo has ever seen a physical medium. It's a digital satellite photo; why would google (or anyone, for that matter) go through the trouble of printing it out and scanning it back in?
Don't forget "The Ophiuchi Hotline," by John Varley, 1977, in which people downloaded their brains for backup, and if they died, dumped it back into a clone.
Very good book, almost as good as "Gateway," and *way* better than "Neuromancer."
The GPL has been tested in a court of law-- several, even (Germany and the US being two big countries to test it). Google is your friend.
The GPL is not a contract. It is a grant of copyright under specific terms. One of the fundamental ideas of copyright is this: you cannot publish a copyrighted work without permission from the copyright owner. That's what the GPL is, permission from the copyright owner. The GPL outlines the conditions under which you may use the copyrighted work.
One of the reasons the GPL hasn't been in too many high-profile court cases is simple: the defending lawyers read the license of copyright, tell their clients they are screwed, and advise them to rectify their copyright breach.
It is up to the individual owners of the copyright to defend their copyright. That is the primary reason the FSF likes you to assign a copyright to them for your GPL works, so they can legally defend the copyright. Otherwise, it's up to each programmer to pursue violations themselves.
Enrollments have risen and fallen in direct proportion to the demand for graduates of the curriculum.
That's true-- but that also leaves at least a 4-year lag time between able-bodied graduates and demand (or lack of it). As we've seen in the industry, 4 years is a *long* time.
About 4 years ago we had a bust. People stopped going for the CS degree. A lot of people who had started out CS switched to something more lucrative, like english or fencing. That gives us a 6-year potential worker shortfall.
Not that it matters; US IT staff are being reduced to the role of sysadmin (a very respectable job, mind you). There are plenty of programmers in India and Russia and Brazil.
But to me, it looks less and less like a train wreck in hindsight.
Those are all excellent points. I think it all adds up to one thing: most of the.com folks had no fucking clue what they were doing, except living the high life. But it did push a lot of good concepts into the marketplace, and accelerated the growth of the net, both good things. Plus, it made geekdom acceptable, at least after high school.
There were some bad things, too: CEOs are making a hellofalot more than their average worker (300 to 1000 in most mid to large corporations, compared to 70 to 250, 30 years ago); investors are tech-skittish; and there are a lot of unemployed HTML "Programmers."
But, for the most part, we moved beyond our resting point. I think we're catching up with ourselves now, where the tech industry is really, really moving forward for real this time, for real. (Google is a prime example, with GMail and Google Maps.)
A lot of that is because of the Great Expansion of the late '90s, I believe.
I guess they owe it to their shareholders to fly the flag.
Nope. They owe it to their shareholders to do the best job possible to keep their company profitable; they can do that without being bastards. The only time they "owe" their shareholders something else is when they make promises; then they better deliver.
Case in point: when you say you are going to utterly destroy a competitor (ethics aside), you'd better have a real plan on how to do it. You had better not just have some pithy sayings to throw out at random and not-so-random gatherings. If you say Google is going down, you need a plan on bringing Google down. Even if the plan fails (at which point the board should judge your competence), you need a credible plan.
Lying to your stockholders by promising things you can't deliver is bad business. Yet it seems MS is on a rampage of deceipt. (That's not really news.) Personally, I think every time they make promises like this, the stockholders should hold them liable.
But maybe that's just me, being all bleeding-heart and wanting a little accountablity.
Uhm... those weren't buzzwords. Those are technical jargon. They proposed a system for multipath mitigation, in a time when a lot of research was being done in exactly that area.
(Multi-pathing is the tendency of a radio wave of a given frequency to reflect or refract such that the different paths arrive at an antenna at slightly different times, interfering with each other. In an office setting, with lots of objects, this is a real problem.)
Several then-current techniques were mentioned, including spread-spectrum (which mitigates multipathing at the expense of more power spread over a broader range of frequencies), and directional antenna, which makes for a more expensive system.
Their coding techniques were ingenious at the time. It's a good, solid patent. I don't like the patent system, but if you gotta have patents, they should be more like this, and a lot less like gene patents, or math patents, or playing with a cat using a laser pointer, or pushing a kid on a swing "underdog"-- all patents which exist.
And if it is true that this guy was first to figure out that 1) there is order in non-coding DNA and 2) this order can be used to gain access to coding DNA, then I don't see what's wrong with this patent in itself.
Because patents are supposed to be granted for inventions of utility, and not discoveries of nature?
Really, we won't know for a year or two after release. Take a look at the history of most consoles-- the recent PS2 games are far superior to the first couple of years' releases. The graphics are quite solid (at 60 fps), fluid, and gameplay takes advantage of that.
I've never been impressed with the PC-quality of the XBox. Halo was fun, but that was all about gameplay; the graphics weren't really that impressive. I've always thought the XBox graphics sucked.
That is, until I saw Jade Empire. I'm finally convinced the XBox graphics are superior to the PS2. But it took *years* for a game to come out to really take advantage of the machine.
I expect the same to be true of this next generation. This is Microsoft's first true game machine (the XBox was hardly anything more than a PC in an ugly box). It seems they may have gotten it right, though. The specs are impressive.
I'd say the PS3 and XBox are fairly-well matched. Now it's up to the game designers, and the ease of creating games for each platform, and how much each company bribes game companies to make exclusive games. Cross-platform games generally don't take full advantage of the hardware.
I've heard the PS2 is kind of a pain to target, while the XBox is so shielded with MS's OS that programmers can't get directly at the hardware. Don't know if that's true; it's just what I've read various places. But, it sounds like both sides have their problems, and both sides have their advantages.
Me, I just can't wait for some of these games. This is going to be a fan-fucking-tastic couple of years for gamers, and *we* are ultimately the winners.
Make every single page one colossal image with an image map for links!
Funny you should mention that. My first introduction to FrontPage was working on a non-profit website. They wanted me to make some "quick changes" to their site. I looked at their site-- it was a GIANT IMAGE of a webpage (text and all), with image maps and rollovers for links. The page could have been laid out with tables with no problems (this was in the ugly days before the DOM and CSS), but their previous web designer opted for this lame method.
So, it is a method that has been used before. Damn the unpredictable nature of the web! Double-damn user control!
Think about the amount of time game developers would have to spend just to take full advantage of the graphics (forgetting about gameplay).
No kiddin'. It was years before PS1 games were taking full advantage of the hardware. Same with PS2 games; compare R&C Up Your Aresenal to Rayman or any of the other early PS2 games, or event the first R&C. Big, big difference. The good thing is, it keeps the console fresh.
The XBox wasn't that big of deal because it was essentially a PC. The difference between Halo and Halo 2 wasn't really that great. With the XBox 360 being a different beast, there might be a huge difference between the first run games and the later games, as people learn to take advantage of the hardware.
...it is designed for low-cost, entry-level desktop PCs running value-based processors...
Uhm.... isn't it just MS-Windows XP with stuff ripped out? If so, then it is NOT "designed for low-cost, entry-level desktop PCs running value-based processors." It is designed for the exact same computers for which XP is designed.
It's marketed for cheap-assed computers. But it was designed for x86 computers.
Economic cost of Episode III: $628,880,000 Average price of movie ticket: $8.50 Skipping work to see a stupid movie: priceless
Seriously, though, this is EXACTLY LIKE the stupid headline on some stupid IT industry rag that said something idiotic like, "Slow modems cost the US $1.3B Annually!"
I wish *my* job was sitting around pulling numbers out of my ass, instead of accomplishing *real* work.
Yes, it's absurd-- and FUN. It's more fun to pretend it's a big event than really watching the movie itself.
Is there something wrong with that?
Me, I'm saving my skip-work-for-a-movie day for King Kong. But that's me. I'm kinda lonely in my absurdist pretensions; if I joined the Star Wars crowd I'd at least have a lot of company.
If you choose to call that "god", that's fine, and most of them would.
There's another name for it? If so, I've not heard.
Rather, it is, in its purest form, an attempt by those who already believe in God to reconcile that belief with evolution. It is not an attempt to prove God - believe it or not, most Christians realize that God cannot be proven.
I heartily disagree. If they were not trying use this as "proof" of God, they would not be trying so hard to get ID accepted as science. They would merelyl accept this as a personal belief and move on.
Not in the sense described by the grandparent, it's not. First, most mutations never result in a viable cell. So, right there, you have a selection filter, reducing the randomness of mutations.
The genetic diversity within a breeding population is a function of the accumulation of randomly occurring genetic changes.
Again, changes are not strictly random; they are selected for or against based on phenotypic viability, which vastly reduces the mathematical randomness. And genetic drift is itself also not completely random.
There are other tests than experiments. Evolution predicts certain things, including mitochondrial DNA similarities between similar species. This has been proven out in observation.
There is significantly more evidence for evolution than for ID, as ID has no evidence whatsoever.
Slashdot Mirror
If the developer isn't confident about even *where* some part of the code should be, and code from that confused developer actually made it into the kernel despite that confusion, why should a user have confidence in it?
A specific feature may be implemented in many ways. If there are several equivelent or nearly-equivelent ways, it makes sense to question your implementation decision. It does not necessarily imply the developer was unsure if "it" really belonged in that particular location; it is far more likely that the developer was unsure if there wasn't a better way of doing it that he was overlooking.
Sometimes writing code, something just doesn't feel right, even if you know your implementation is just fine. You have the feeling there's a better way. Usually, when you come back to it later, the better way is apperant. Often, the better way is simply cleaner code, not a better algorithm.
Comments like that are markers that welcome improvement, not an indication of lack of developer confidence.
Cleveland has had Deliver Me Food for years.
Most people who are depressed are so because of biochemical imbalances and not because their teachers overpraised them as children.
Depression is correlated with biochemical changes, right enough. Depressive states are accompanied by changes in serotonin & norepinephrine levels. You can induce depression with oxotremorine, for instance.
But correlation does not imply biochemical "imbalance" naturally causes depression. It's just as likely that depression causes the biochemical imbalance.
Many cases of chronic unipolar depression (and bipolar mania / depression) may very well be tied to genetics or long-term chemical changes in the body. In non-genetic cases, what caused the imbalance in the first place? Could it not be a chemical dependency caused by long-term situational depression (that is, the body just gets used to the chemical state of being depressed)?
Most cases of depression (and the ones generally referred to by the root post) are not necessarily caused by some physical problem.
Don't believe me? How many times has a perfectly good mood been changed by an outside event? Why is there such a high rate of depression in veterans? Why did we have an increase in depression after 9/11/2001?
Praise from teachers is important. The praise should be balanced with expectations, though. I loved art class; not that I was any good, but the important thing wasn't the finished product, it was the process. I learned an appreciation for great art through my understanding (not mastery) of the process.
Unfortunately, in geometry, understanding and mastery are tied together. And there are many, many people who are incapable of understanding geometry. This doesn't make them worse than those of us who *do* get geometry; it just means they'll never design bridges or houses, or teach geometry. (Okay, they *might* teach geometry.)
The idea of the relational model is simple: it is based on set theory, which has a strong mathematical model. There is no equivelent model for object databases, nor for tree-based databases like MUMPS. There is no strong mathematical basis by which you can judge the integrity of your data.
Cache', by Intersystems (a Post-Relational Database!) is based on MUMPS. You've seen their adverts here on Slashdot. They claim to be object-relational, but they are no such thing: they are MUMPS. They went on a buying spree and purchased up most of the failing MUMPS vendors (DSM, MSM, etc), and now they are the big guys in the M world.
They have some pretty nify hacks which compiles their "object-oriented MUMPS" programming language (I forget what it's called) into straight M. Fun. Doesn't stop it from sucking hard.
MUMPS is, at best, a fairly bizarre language with persistent storage of global arrays.
MUMPS drives me nuts. It uses whitespace for blocking just like Python, but they had so much trouble with it, they eventually allowed a '.' to replace the whitespace, so you end up with code like this:(I stole that from this duscussion.)
(Sidenote: I have to admit, my exposure to MUMPS is one of the primary reasons I despise Python's whitespace-as-blocking. It seems replaces the poor aesthetics of brace-blocking with something more error-prone and stupid-looking, though more aesthetically pleasing. But all that's just opinion. I'm sure Python is a good language, just as I'm sure MUMPS is not.)
Look at the big white building to the northeast; it's shadow is definitely sourced from the south, just like the silver blurry thingee.
As far as the pin goes, I doubt this photo has ever seen a physical medium. It's a digital satellite photo; why would google (or anyone, for that matter) go through the trouble of printing it out and scanning it back in?
That's a cool photo, whatever it is.
Don't forget "The Ophiuchi Hotline," by John Varley, 1977, in which people downloaded their brains for backup, and if they died, dumped it back into a clone.
Very good book, almost as good as "Gateway," and *way* better than "Neuromancer."
The GPL has been tested in a court of law-- several, even (Germany and the US being two big countries to test it). Google is your friend.
The GPL is not a contract. It is a grant of copyright under specific terms. One of the fundamental ideas of copyright is this: you cannot publish a copyrighted work without permission from the copyright owner. That's what the GPL is, permission from the copyright owner. The GPL outlines the conditions under which you may use the copyrighted work.
One of the reasons the GPL hasn't been in too many high-profile court cases is simple: the defending lawyers read the license of copyright, tell their clients they are screwed, and advise them to rectify their copyright breach.
It is up to the individual owners of the copyright to defend their copyright. That is the primary reason the FSF likes you to assign a copyright to them for your GPL works, so they can legally defend the copyright. Otherwise, it's up to each programmer to pursue violations themselves.
Hope that helps clear things up.
eventually the Indian Economy becomes too expensive and the market moves elsewhere until there is nowhere else to go that is cheaper.
What does that mean for America?
That India will one day offshore to America?
Enrollments have risen and fallen in direct proportion to the demand for graduates of the curriculum.
That's true-- but that also leaves at least a 4-year lag time between able-bodied graduates and demand (or lack of it). As we've seen in the industry, 4 years is a *long* time.
About 4 years ago we had a bust. People stopped going for the CS degree. A lot of people who had started out CS switched to something more lucrative, like english or fencing. That gives us a 6-year potential worker shortfall.
Not that it matters; US IT staff are being reduced to the role of sysadmin (a very respectable job, mind you). There are plenty of programmers in India and Russia and Brazil.
But to me, it looks less and less like a train wreck in hindsight.
.com folks had no fucking clue what they were doing, except living the high life. But it did push a lot of good concepts into the marketplace, and accelerated the growth of the net, both good things. Plus, it made geekdom acceptable, at least after high school.
Those are all excellent points. I think it all adds up to one thing: most of the
There were some bad things, too: CEOs are making a hellofalot more than their average worker (300 to 1000 in most mid to large corporations, compared to 70 to 250, 30 years ago); investors are tech-skittish; and there are a lot of unemployed HTML "Programmers."
But, for the most part, we moved beyond our resting point. I think we're catching up with ourselves now, where the tech industry is really, really moving forward for real this time, for real. (Google is a prime example, with GMail and Google Maps.)
A lot of that is because of the Great Expansion of the late '90s, I believe.
I guess they owe it to their shareholders to fly the flag.
Nope. They owe it to their shareholders to do the best job possible to keep their company profitable; they can do that without being bastards. The only time they "owe" their shareholders something else is when they make promises; then they better deliver.
Case in point: when you say you are going to utterly destroy a competitor (ethics aside), you'd better have a real plan on how to do it. You had better not just have some pithy sayings to throw out at random and not-so-random gatherings. If you say Google is going down, you need a plan on bringing Google down. Even if the plan fails (at which point the board should judge your competence), you need a credible plan.
Lying to your stockholders by promising things you can't deliver is bad business. Yet it seems MS is on a rampage of deceipt. (That's not really news.) Personally, I think every time they make promises like this, the stockholders should hold them liable.
But maybe that's just me, being all bleeding-heart and wanting a little accountablity.
Uhm... those weren't buzzwords. Those are technical jargon. They proposed a system for multipath mitigation, in a time when a lot of research was being done in exactly that area.
(Multi-pathing is the tendency of a radio wave of a given frequency to reflect or refract such that the different paths arrive at an antenna at slightly different times, interfering with each other. In an office setting, with lots of objects, this is a real problem.)
Several then-current techniques were mentioned, including spread-spectrum (which mitigates multipathing at the expense of more power spread over a broader range of frequencies), and directional antenna, which makes for a more expensive system.
Their coding techniques were ingenious at the time. It's a good, solid patent. I don't like the patent system, but if you gotta have patents, they should be more like this, and a lot less like gene patents, or math patents, or playing with a cat using a laser pointer, or pushing a kid on a swing "underdog"-- all patents which exist.
And if it is true that this guy was first to figure out that 1) there is order in non-coding DNA and 2) this order can be used to gain access to coding DNA, then I don't see what's wrong with this patent in itself.
Because patents are supposed to be granted for inventions of utility, and not discoveries of nature?
I'd say the PS3 and XBox are fairly-well matched.
Uhm... that is, the PS3 and the XBox 360 are fairly well matched.
Really, we won't know for a year or two after release. Take a look at the history of most consoles-- the recent PS2 games are far superior to the first couple of years' releases. The graphics are quite solid (at 60 fps), fluid, and gameplay takes advantage of that.
I've never been impressed with the PC-quality of the XBox. Halo was fun, but that was all about gameplay; the graphics weren't really that impressive. I've always thought the XBox graphics sucked.
That is, until I saw Jade Empire. I'm finally convinced the XBox graphics are superior to the PS2. But it took *years* for a game to come out to really take advantage of the machine.
I expect the same to be true of this next generation. This is Microsoft's first true game machine (the XBox was hardly anything more than a PC in an ugly box). It seems they may have gotten it right, though. The specs are impressive.
I'd say the PS3 and XBox are fairly-well matched. Now it's up to the game designers, and the ease of creating games for each platform, and how much each company bribes game companies to make exclusive games. Cross-platform games generally don't take full advantage of the hardware.
I've heard the PS2 is kind of a pain to target, while the XBox is so shielded with MS's OS that programmers can't get directly at the hardware. Don't know if that's true; it's just what I've read various places. But, it sounds like both sides have their problems, and both sides have their advantages.
Me, I just can't wait for some of these games. This is going to be a fan-fucking-tastic couple of years for gamers, and *we* are ultimately the winners.
Make every single page one colossal image with an image map for links!
Funny you should mention that. My first introduction to FrontPage was working on a non-profit website. They wanted me to make some "quick changes" to their site. I looked at their site-- it was a GIANT IMAGE of a webpage (text and all), with image maps and rollovers for links. The page could have been laid out with tables with no problems (this was in the ugly days before the DOM and CSS), but their previous web designer opted for this lame method.
So, it is a method that has been used before. Damn the unpredictable nature of the web! Double-damn user control!
Think about the amount of time game developers would have to spend just to take full advantage of the graphics (forgetting about gameplay).
No kiddin'. It was years before PS1 games were taking full advantage of the hardware. Same with PS2 games; compare R&C Up Your Aresenal to Rayman or any of the other early PS2 games, or event the first R&C. Big, big difference. The good thing is, it keeps the console fresh.
The XBox wasn't that big of deal because it was essentially a PC. The difference between Halo and Halo 2 wasn't really that great. With the XBox 360 being a different beast, there might be a huge difference between the first run games and the later games, as people learn to take advantage of the hardware.
Maybe.
...it is designed for low-cost, entry-level desktop PCs running value-based processors...
Uhm.... isn't it just MS-Windows XP with stuff ripped out? If so, then it is NOT "designed for low-cost, entry-level desktop PCs running value-based processors." It is designed for the exact same computers for which XP is designed.
It's marketed for cheap-assed computers. But it was designed for x86 computers.
Economic cost of Episode III: $628,880,000
Average price of movie ticket: $8.50
Skipping work to see a stupid movie: priceless
Seriously, though, this is EXACTLY LIKE the stupid headline on some stupid IT industry rag that said something idiotic like, "Slow modems cost the US $1.3B Annually!"
I wish *my* job was sitting around pulling numbers out of my ass, instead of accomplishing *real* work.
Yes, it's absurd-- and FUN. It's more fun to pretend it's a big event than really watching the movie itself.
Is there something wrong with that?
Me, I'm saving my skip-work-for-a-movie day for King Kong. But that's me. I'm kinda lonely in my absurdist pretensions; if I joined the Star Wars crowd I'd at least have a lot of company.
This is one area where cathedral development seems to be far superior to bazar development...
What, in issuing empty promises?
Dude, I didn't buy MS. I did use the NeXT, and then I used Linux.
I was an Amiga user until 1996. I held back as long as I could but all of you "X86" people put MSFT into the position they are now in.
*ahem*
If you choose to call that "god", that's fine, and most of them would.
There's another name for it? If so, I've not heard.
Rather, it is, in its purest form, an attempt by those who already believe in God to reconcile that belief with evolution. It is not an attempt to prove God - believe it or not, most Christians realize that God cannot be proven.
I heartily disagree. If they were not trying use this as "proof" of God, they would not be trying so hard to get ID accepted as science. They would merelyl accept this as a personal belief and move on.
Yes, mutation is random.
Not in the sense described by the grandparent, it's not. First, most mutations never result in a viable cell. So, right there, you have a selection filter, reducing the randomness of mutations.
The genetic diversity within a breeding population is a function of the accumulation of randomly occurring genetic changes.
Again, changes are not strictly random; they are selected for or against based on phenotypic viability, which vastly reduces the mathematical randomness. And genetic drift is itself also not completely random.
There are other tests than experiments. Evolution predicts certain things, including mitochondrial DNA similarities between similar species. This has been proven out in observation.
There is significantly more evidence for evolution than for ID, as ID has no evidence whatsoever.