# Long file name display. Aqua shows the first handful of characters of a filename, followed by ellipsis (...) and then THE COMPLETELY UNINFORMATIVE last few characters. It should, of course, show AS MUCH of the leading the part of the filename as possible, then perhaps ellipsis and the extension. Perhaps.
Oddly enough, this is one aspect that I regard as a major improvement in Aqua. It is very common for me to have a bunch of files that are named similarly except for the last word or so. With the ellipses, I can readily tell which is which.
I know I'm going to get flamed to pieces for this, but isn't the i* software suite just doing what Microsoft did with Windows and Internet Explorer?
More like what Apple did with MacWrite and MacDraw. Now if Apple set it up so that the system would not function if you deleted them, that would be like what Microsoft tried to do with Explorer.
If time travel were possible, somebody (human, alien, whatever) from the future (perhaps billions of years into the future, or maybe just next week) would have traveled into the past already.
Unless, of course, time travel is such a disaster that the moment you invent one, you are instantly confronted with dozens of time-traveling assassins from the future.
there still is no proof that the advanced animals of today evolved from single celled organisms which some evolutionists believe
No, proof belongs to mathematics, not science. In science, nothing is ever proved. There is no proof of gravity. Or relativity. Theories can only be disproved. The closest you can get to proof is to confirm a prediction. And with evolution, we find one of the most amazing confirmations in all of science. Remember, the theory of natural selection predates knowledge of the genetic code. Yet from the theory, it was possible to predict the existence of genetic mutations, the patterns of relationships betwen different species, and the fact that those differences are identical to the mutational changes that occur spontaneously. All of these were strong preditions--that is, if any one of them had turned out not to be true, the theory would have been disproved. This is, of course, the hallmark of a good theory--it makes strong predictions. The reason Creationism does not qualify as a scientific prediction is that it makes no strong predictions. For example, there is no reason why a God would need to make the differences betwen species look exactly like mutations. He wouldn't even need to give them all the same genetic code. But a Creationist can always say, "He's God, so He can do anything He wants. He must have done this for some mysterious reason of His Own."
I see no experiments or proof where a new KIND was made by evolution Different Kinds can't interbreed
In science, there is no such thing as different "KINDs". Creationists have invented this term, now that there are examples of new species evolving. Apparently, the Creatinist definition of "KIND" is "a difference greater than science has observed to date."
I think the two are different and one does not prove the other.
The notion that a meaningful distinction can be drawn between "macro" and "micro" evolution has pretty much fallen by the wayside now that we are able to read the actual genetic codes of organisms, and we know for certain that differences between species are just an accumulation the same kinds of mutational variations that are observed within a population.
Today, the notion of "macroevolution" is preserved by Creationists, who use it as a fallback, each time evolution of a species is demonstrated in nature or in the lab, insisting, "OK, you can get that much evolution, but no more--anything bigger has to be done by God!"
You can prove that two objects are attracted to each other, but you can't explain why
You can't even prove that. You can measure the forces on two objects in numerous specific instances, but you have no guarantee that the forces will still be there tomorrow. When you go from these individual observations to a generalization ("the objects are attracted to each other"), you are constructing a theory. No such generalization can ever be proved true. You can only prove it false, by finding an exception.
Because we are not considering the single pattern the success, we are considering the count of heads the number of successes.
However, one choice is no more reasonable than the other. I could just as well say, "first half of the sequence heads, last half of the sequence tails," and that would be just as improbable as all heads. For any sequence, one could probably come up after the fact with some way of describing it that makes it sound special. Is it a prime number, expressed in binary? A power of a prime number? A number in the fibonacci sequence? A line from the Bible in ASCII code?
And let us not forget the original context. The genetic sequence is not all the same nucleotide, or all the same amino acid, so the "all heads" analogy does not apply. I've seen a bunch of these bogus "probability of life" calculations. Typically, they assume that some particular sequence (of amino acids, or nucleotides, or whatever) is critical for life, and then calculate the probability of that happening by random chance. And of course, they get a very, very low number. This is *exactly* equivalent to flipping a bunch of coins and then calculating the probability of that specific sequence--and concluding that the probabililty is so low that the coins must be weighted. But in the case of the coins, while the probability of any specific sequence is very tiny, the probability of some sequence is 1. Similarly, the probability of life forming in any particular way might be very low, but the probability of it forming in some way could still be quite high. To know the actual probability of life, you have to sum over, not just how life actually formed, but also of all the possible ways life could have formed, but didn't. And nobody has even a clue of what those are, much less how many there are.
The probability of HHHTTT is the same as HTHTHT, the probability is NOT the same as HHHHHH.
Wrong. The probabilities of those three exact sequences are identical. 1 in 2^6. Perhaps you are thinking of the probability of "all heads," rather than the probability of those specific sequences. But after the fact, almost any sequence can seem special. For example, the probability of "all heads for the first half of the sequence, and all tails for the last half of the sequence" is exactly the same as "all heads". This is the danger of calculating probabilities after the fact.
Actually there are several far more comlicated questions involved. The answer tends to come out as "very to impossibly small given current knowledge" though.
Or more accurately, "impossibly small if one makes certain assumptions specifically designed to make the probability impossibly small." Nobody has more than a vague idea of what the first form of life was like. Make a different set of assumptions (see for example, Stuart Kaufman's The Origins of Order) and it becomes not merely likely, but virtually necessary! An honest person will admit that no such calculation can be made with any degree of confidence.
The number of *atoms in the universe* is 10^80. Even if all of those were interacting every day and could create the right combination, it still wouldn't raise the probability to where it is reasonable.
Sorry, we don't know the number of atoms in the universe. We don't even know whether it is finite. The number you cite is probably derived from an estimate of the number of atoms in what is sometimes called the "accessible" universe. This does not necessarily represent the entire universe--only that part that it would be possible to reach from here, given the speed of light. But there is no requirement that life evolve within a certain distance of here. If the total universe is infinite, then the liklihood of life appearing somewhere becomes 1.0.
To me (and no I'm not a Christian), it seems to be an indication of intent behind life (or something along those lines anyway). Anyone have any insight or links?
Actually, if you really study the biology, the idea of a single designer starts to look ridiculous. When examined closely, organisms don't bear the hallmark of a single designer with a unified master plan. Rather, they look like version 19.1 of a software program, patched and repatched (but unfortunately, not commented) by generations of different programmers.
But this begs the question, because that is still the product of intelligent design of a sort. People tend to go from the resemblance of living things to designed products to the conclusion that there must be a designer. But an equally valid hypothesis is that the internal workings of our brains may in some way resemble evolution. This seems very likely. There is plenty of evidence for competition at the neuronal level. So our very thoughts may be the product of a kind of randomization and selection process.
The probability of a precise sequence may be in question, but the probability of a given number of heads in that sequence is not. Coin tosses can be modeled as a binomial distribution where we check the number of heads and term those "successes" versus the number of tails and term those "failures".
No. the probability of a precise sequence is not in question. It is exactly 2^-(10^7). For every exact sequence. That's as true for "HTHHTHTTTH..." as it is for "HHHHHHHHH...."
So to judge retroactively, the liklihood of a series of throws, you need two critical pieces of information:
1) How many other sequences are "like" this sequence according to the criteria in question? Is this the only way the coins could have fallen that would have seemed "special"? In the case of life, the question reduces to "How many organizations of matter yield an 'organism' capable of replicating and evolving?" Nobody has an answer to this question. Most scientists likely agree that the probability of life developing exactly as it has on earth is probably very low...perhaps as low as the probability of any random sequence of 10^7 heads or tails. But that is not the question--the question is: what is the probability of some form of life developing? And that may be high--perhaps even as high as the probability that 10^7 throws will yield some sequence of heads and tails.
2) How many times did you throw the coins before getting that sequence? A probability of 2^-(10^7) for all heads doesn't seem nearly so low, if you discover that those 10^7 coins were thrown 10^70 times. In the context of life, we can ask, "How many places in the universe could life have formed?" After all, there is nothing all that obviously special about the earth. What if there are 10^70--or 10^700--planets like our earth in the universe? Then even if the probability of life was as low as you imagine, it would happen somewhere. Again, this is a crucial piece of information. Unless you know how many planets exist, you cannot make any calculation of the probability of life. And nobody has a good idea of this number
So we don't need to know the details of a particular crackpot calculation of the probability of life--because we already have know that the critical information required to make such a calculation does not exist!
That's the selection part. Selection reflects how the organism interacts with its environment, and the environment is decidedly nonrandom. As is readily demonstrated in computer simulation, random variation in the presence of selection yields non-random results
Evolutionists are increasingly using this tactic to back away from their positoin because they know it is untenable. Evolution as generall regarded and promoted (by Gould, Dawkins, etc.) very definitely *does* attempt to explain the origin of life. It has to, because to do otherwise might be to admit God's toe in the door, and thay can't deal with that. Nice try, but if you can't explain the origin of life, you're not even in the game.
Wrong. It is more correct to say that Creationists, in the face of overwhelming evidence in support of evolution, have retreated into trying to somehow lump the origin of life--a question on which there is no scientific consensus--in with evolution. Go back to Darwin. You will discover that Darwin's theory of natural selection presupposes life.
Of course, most evolutionary biologists--and indeed, virtually all scientists--presume that the the origin of life will eventually be explained in terms of natural processes. But that does not make it part of the theory of evolution. It is merely what it means to be a scientist--to have the courage to reject the easy explanation that "God did it."
Not to mention that if such an evolutionary supposition were true, it would require that original living thing to posess, but not express, all genes for every living thing that has ever followed, an argument I've not yet heard even the wackiest evolutionist make.
I would hope not, because it makes no sense. There are well-established genetic mechanisms for the creation of new genes.
I don't know what argument you are trying to defeat with your first paragraph, but it's certainly not related to the post you were replying to
Well, let me see if I can phrase it more simply: It is next to impossible to calculate the probability of something that has already occurred. Some statisticians will insist that it is inappropriate even to try, since the probability of an event that has already occurred is by definition 1.0. If you decide to attempt it anyway, there are numerous subtle biases and fallacies, most of which tend to greatly reduce the apparent probability. Just to give you an example, here are some possible causes of error.
We do not live on a random planet, we live upon a planet on which life is present. Perhaps, if we could "reset" the universe and run the "experiment" again, life would not have formed on this planet at all, but would have formed somewhere else very far away. Thus, it is incorrect to attempt to calculate the probability that it could have formed by chance here. This is exactly equivalent to trying to the error calculate the probability of a particular long series of heads or tails after you have thrown it. So the appropriate calculation would be the probability that life would have formed anywhere in the universe. This requires accurate knowledge of the number of planets in the universe suitable for life, which we do not have. It is even possible that the universe is infinite, containing an infinite number of planets. Note that in an infinite universe, the overall probability of life forming somewhere is 1.0, no matter how small the probablilty is on a per planet basis (so long as it is nonzero).
It is also incorrect to try to calculate the liklihood of random formation of DNA sequence comparable to even the simplest modern organisms. One part of the error is fairly obvious: the first form of life was doubtless much simpler than any modern life form. How much simpler? Nobody knows; we don't even know what the first form of life was made of--so there is no basis for such a calculation. But even if you make a guess at that figure, you would not be able to make such a calculation. Again, this is like the coin error. If we were to reset the universe, would we get the same form of life, or one that is completely different? So to do this calculation, you must know every way in which matter can be organized to produce a living organism. Obviously, nobody has this knowledge.
I have used genetic algorithms extensively to solve real world problems, and sure - it is better than random search. However, GaS are not nearly as good as they would need to be to solve the problem they have supposedly solved.
The only thing we can state with any certainty is that genetic algorithms are much better than random search. How much better they can be, I don't think anybody is in a position to know. I don't think a quantitative comparison can be made between genetic algorithms set up to solve the sort of "baby" problems that are feasible with modern computers, and organisms whose very genetic organization clearly reflects selection that has favored those organisms best able to evolve. However, one thing is clear--all genetic differences between species are consistent with mutation and selection.
You have got to be kidding. Evolution doesn't try to explain the origin of life?
Nope. Evolution is a theory of how life has changed, not how it formed in the first place. The question of the origin of life is a very different, and much more controversial question. There are numerous hypotheses as to how life may have originated, but none that is generally accepted. There is not even general agreement on whether the first life form was protein, nucleic acid, or something completely different (one hypothesis suggests clay). And while there is overwhelming evidence to support evolution, there is very little in the way of solid data that bears on the origin of life.
Whether we're talking about 10,000,000 heads coming up or some other combination is beside the point. The point is that the odds are vanishingly small of any pre-specified combination coming up (where the result for each coin is specified independently). The odds in this case are very easy to compute: 1/2 raised to the 10,000,000 power.
Precisely. And the key lies in the meaning of "prespecified." The outcome of evolution is not "prespecified" because we already know the outcome, just as I already knew the outcome of my series of coin tosses. Both are "post-specified" after the fact. And that makes that sort of probabilistic calculation invalid.
And of course natural selection is not a random process, but natural selection cannot work until reproduction is established, hence it cannot help produce the first living cell.
So what? Natural selection is not even hypothesized as being the origin of the first replicating organism, so that is a straw man. The origin of life is a completely different question from the evolution of living organisms. And since nobody has any real knowledge of what the first replicating organism was like, there is no meaningful way of calculating its probability.
He proves rigorously that Neo-Carwinian evolution could not have happened -- or rather is about as unlikely as tossing 10,000,000 coins at random and having them all come up heads (yes, that is "possible", I guess).
Let's say I toss 10,000,000 coins, and make a careful record of the sequence of heads and tails. Now, I calculate the probability of that exact sequence, and discover that it is exactly as low as the probability of having them all come up heads. Have I proved that the coins are weighted? Or influenced by God? No, because every sequence of coins has exactly the same very low probability, but nevertheless one of them has to come up. This is the falacy of calcuating probabilities backwards. Every attempt I've seen to calculate the probability of evolution falls into that same basic error.
Remember, also, that natural selection is not a random process, even though it has random elements. For example, it is possible to use an evolutionary simulation to solve an equation, even when there is only one possible solution--and it is far more efficient than trying to guess the answer randomly.
So we have witnessed one species become another? Where was I? Rather, we have witnessed dogs get big, small, and get new colors, shorter tails, bigger eyes, But over thousands and thousands of years, they're still dogs.
Right, and a robin and a sparrow are both birds, but they're still different species. In fact, if we were to discover animals in the wild as different as, say a Great Dane and a Chihuahua, any scientist in the world would classify them as different species. Indeed, they are so different that they are essentially unable to breed, one of the classic definitions of a species. We call them "breeds" of dog, not because they aren't different enough to qualify as species, but because they are the product of artificial selection--selective breeding--rather than natural selection.
After 9 iterations, OS9 was pretty well optimized within the limits of its architecture, and Apple was mainly doing minor tweaks. OSX is a new OS for Apple, and while the basic functionality has been in place, a lot of tweaks and amenities have remained. For example, they are just now adding features like spring-loaded folders, which were present in OS9.
Well, here's a thought: Maybe Apple should consider support for a limited set of x86 hardware.
Perhaps, if Motorola and IBM fail to keep up with the performance of Intel's processor line, Apple will do that. But most likely, the limited set of x86 hardware would be Apple-branded x86 machines.
We have a long way to go before we have to worry about the ethical implications of augmented abilities. What such stories stress too rarely is that none of these add-ons work nearly as well as the factory-standard equipment that most of us were born with. Never mind customization--we're still trying to get halfway-decent replacement parts.
No, it wasn't Specter, which was sort of a Battlezone clone. The game I'm thinking of was a pure maze game, with no shooting at all. It did not have a particularly tiny window, although I wouldn't be surprised if they reduced the width somewhat. And it was very fast; presumably, it either used 2D raycasting or some other highly efficient method.
No, the approach of modifying the base of the graphics buffer to achieve smooth scrolling did not work on the Apple II, because the memory location of the Apple II's graphics buffer was fixed by the hardware (well, two locations actually, since it did provide for double buffering. Basically, there was no way to scroll on the Apple II without rewriting the entire graphics buffer.
However, I do remember an Apple II maze game with a first-person perspective, long before Wolfenstein 3D. And it was lightning fast (unfortunately, I don't recall the name). I'd love to know how that was implemented. However it was a pure maze game, not a shooter.
I will grant you that current evolutionary theory is not an extension of the theories of creationists. I will also grant you that these time scales are still much slower than creationists'. However, punctuated equilibrium does argue for periods of "faster" evolution for some value of "faster."
This is sheer obfuscation. The creationists were not arguing about whether or not the rates of evolutionary phylogenetic change are uniform. They were arguing that there is no significant evolutionary change, and that all significant change occurs instantaneously as a result of a miracle. So to imply that evolutionists are coming around to the creationist point of view because some now think that significant change can occur in a hundred thousand years instead of a million is ludicrous.
My point was that the gist of the creationists' complaint was correct. Granted, the reasoning behind their complaint was probably flawed.
Science is not a game show. You don't get points for being right for the wrong reasons. And in this case, they weren't even right.
Their argument has been that fossils are only created during catastrophic events and that fossils cut across multiple layers of rock. Thus the fossil record represents not millions but thousands of years. Look here, for example [creationscience.com] I am not endorsing this argument - I'm just saying that they've been making it for a long time.
Indeed they have. In fact, the argument was disposed of long before Darwin. Leonardo da Vinci addressed and disproved this argument for fossil seashells. But in creationism, no argument, no matter how stupid, ever dies.
What I'm saying is that scientists would do well to listen to their biggest critics rather than reacting with such hostility. People with such a radically different world view can often see flaws in tenets that scientists just blindly accept.
I will grant that this sounds plausible. In fact, I believed it once myself, and even went to the trouble of following up a number of creationist claims. And you know what I discovered? Every one was in some sense fraudulent! I came to the conclusion that these guys are not interested in discovering the truth. They think they already know the Truth, and they just want to convince you. And if they have to tell a few "white" lies along the way, that's OK, because it's all in the service of Truth.
What's interesting to me is the uniformly violent reaction of the "educated" crowd to creation scientists (e.g. read a few of the above posts). I'll admit they somewhat deserve it because of their history of intolerance and quackery but they have been correct about a number of things, many of which are still to be discovered.
Leaving off the ludicrous "many of which are still to be discovered," the real reason why scientists have such a negative reaction against creationism is the penchant of creationists for engaging in intellectually dishonest debating tricks, and the strong suspicion that they are doing so knowingly. Here's a good example:
Take for example the BS theories of evolution that were passed around as fact until recently. You know, the ones that said that evolution happens at a very slow rate. Creationists argued against this for years because of the nature of how fossils are created. Evolutionists finally caught on and now almost all the recent theories talk about periods of very rapid evolution.
Here, the "trick" is obfuscation as to what constitutes "slow". The fact that some current evolutionary theorists believe that speciation can occur more rapidly than previous thought is distorted to suggest that they now agree with the assertions of the creationists. In fact, all evolutionary biologists--even "puctuated equilibrium" theorists like the last Stephen Jay Gould--still believe that the most rapid evolutionary change happens at a rate that is enormously slower than the creationist time scale of a few thousand years. And it has nothing whatsoever to do with "the nature of how fossils are created." And anybody who has read even a tiny bit of the scientific literature knows this quite well.
Slashdot Mirror
Today, the notion of "macroevolution" is preserved by Creationists, who use it as a fallback, each time evolution of a species is demonstrated in nature or in the lab, insisting, "OK, you can get that much evolution, but no more--anything bigger has to be done by God!"
And let us not forget the original context. The genetic sequence is not all the same nucleotide, or all the same amino acid, so the "all heads" analogy does not apply. I've seen a bunch of these bogus "probability of life" calculations. Typically, they assume that some particular sequence (of amino acids, or nucleotides, or whatever) is critical for life, and then calculate the probability of that happening by random chance. And of course, they get a very, very low number. This is *exactly* equivalent to flipping a bunch of coins and then calculating the probability of that specific sequence--and concluding that the probabililty is so low that the coins must be weighted. But in the case of the coins, while the probability of any specific sequence is very tiny, the probability of some sequence is 1. Similarly, the probability of life forming in any particular way might be very low, but the probability of it forming in some way could still be quite high. To know the actual probability of life, you have to sum over, not just how life actually formed, but also of all the possible ways life could have formed, but didn't. And nobody has even a clue of what those are, much less how many there are.
Actually, if you really study the biology, the idea of a single designer starts to look ridiculous. When examined closely, organisms don't bear the hallmark of a single designer with a unified master plan. Rather, they look like version 19.1 of a software program, patched and repatched (but unfortunately, not commented) by generations of different programmers.
But this begs the question, because that is still the product of intelligent design of a sort. People tend to go from the resemblance of living things to designed products to the conclusion that there must be a designer. But an equally valid hypothesis is that the internal workings of our brains may in some way resemble evolution. This seems very likely. There is plenty of evidence for competition at the neuronal level. So our very thoughts may be the product of a kind of randomization and selection process.
No. the probability of a precise sequence is not in question. It is exactly 2^-(10^7). For every exact sequence. That's as true for "HTHHTHTTTH..." as it is for "HHHHHHHHH...."
So to judge retroactively, the liklihood of a series of throws, you need two critical pieces of information:
1) How many other sequences are "like" this sequence according to the criteria in question? Is this the only way the coins could have fallen that would have seemed "special"? In the case of life, the question reduces to "How many organizations of matter yield an 'organism' capable of replicating and evolving?" Nobody has an answer to this question. Most scientists likely agree that the probability of life developing exactly as it has on earth is probably very low...perhaps as low as the probability of any random sequence of 10^7 heads or tails. But that is not the question--the question is: what is the probability of some form of life developing? And that may be high--perhaps even as high as the probability that 10^7 throws will yield some sequence of heads and tails.
2) How many times did you throw the coins before getting that sequence? A probability of 2^-(10^7) for all heads doesn't seem nearly so low, if you discover that those 10^7 coins were thrown 10^70 times. In the context of life, we can ask, "How many places in the universe could life have formed?" After all, there is nothing all that obviously special about the earth. What if there are 10^70--or 10^700--planets like our earth in the universe? Then even if the probability of life was as low as you imagine, it would happen somewhere. Again, this is a crucial piece of information. Unless you know how many planets exist, you cannot make any calculation of the probability of life. And nobody has a good idea of this number
So we don't need to know the details of a particular crackpot calculation of the probability of life--because we already have know that the critical information required to make such a calculation does not exist!
Of course, most evolutionary biologists--and indeed, virtually all scientists--presume that the the origin of life will eventually be explained in terms of natural processes. But that does not make it part of the theory of evolution. It is merely what it means to be a scientist--to have the courage to reject the easy explanation that "God did it."
I would hope not, because it makes no sense. There are well-established genetic mechanisms for the creation of new genes.We do not live on a random planet, we live upon a planet on which life is present. Perhaps, if we could "reset" the universe and run the "experiment" again, life would not have formed on this planet at all, but would have formed somewhere else very far away. Thus, it is incorrect to attempt to calculate the probability that it could have formed by chance here. This is exactly equivalent to trying to the error calculate the probability of a particular long series of heads or tails after you have thrown it. So the appropriate calculation would be the probability that life would have formed anywhere in the universe. This requires accurate knowledge of the number of planets in the universe suitable for life, which we do not have. It is even possible that the universe is infinite, containing an infinite number of planets. Note that in an infinite universe, the overall probability of life forming somewhere is 1.0, no matter how small the probablilty is on a per planet basis (so long as it is nonzero).
It is also incorrect to try to calculate the liklihood of random formation of DNA sequence comparable to even the simplest modern organisms. One part of the error is fairly obvious: the first form of life was doubtless much simpler than any modern life form. How much simpler? Nobody knows; we don't even know what the first form of life was made of--so there is no basis for such a calculation. But even if you make a guess at that figure, you would not be able to make such a calculation. Again, this is like the coin error. If we were to reset the universe, would we get the same form of life, or one that is completely different? So to do this calculation, you must know every way in which matter can be organized to produce a living organism. Obviously, nobody has this knowledge.
The only thing we can state with any certainty is that genetic algorithms are much better than random search. How much better they can be, I don't think anybody is in a position to know. I don't think a quantitative comparison can be made between genetic algorithms set up to solve the sort of "baby" problems that are feasible with modern computers, and organisms whose very genetic organization clearly reflects selection that has favored those organisms best able to evolve. However, one thing is clear--all genetic differences between species are consistent with mutation and selection.Let's say I toss 10,000,000 coins, and make a careful record of the sequence of heads and tails. Now, I calculate the probability of that exact sequence, and discover that it is exactly as low as the probability of having them all come up heads. Have I proved that the coins are weighted? Or influenced by God? No, because every sequence of coins has exactly the same very low probability, but nevertheless one of them has to come up. This is the falacy of calcuating probabilities backwards. Every attempt I've seen to calculate the probability of evolution falls into that same basic error.
Remember, also, that natural selection is not a random process, even though it has random elements. For example, it is possible to use an evolutionary simulation to solve an equation, even when there is only one possible solution--and it is far more efficient than trying to guess the answer randomly.
After 9 iterations, OS9 was pretty well optimized within the limits of its architecture, and Apple was mainly doing minor tweaks. OSX is a new OS for Apple, and while the basic functionality has been in place, a lot of tweaks and amenities have remained. For example, they are just now adding features like spring-loaded folders, which were present in OS9.
We have a long way to go before we have to worry about the ethical implications of augmented abilities. What such stories stress too rarely is that none of these add-ons work nearly as well as the factory-standard equipment that most of us were born with. Never mind customization--we're still trying to get halfway-decent replacement parts.
Hmmmm...maybe that's why Superman never seemed all that interested in Lois.
No, it wasn't Specter, which was sort of a Battlezone clone. The game I'm thinking of was a pure maze game, with no shooting at all. It did not have a particularly tiny window, although I wouldn't be surprised if they reduced the width somewhat. And it was very fast; presumably, it either used 2D raycasting or some other highly efficient method.
No, the approach of modifying the base of the graphics buffer to achieve smooth scrolling did not work on the Apple II, because the memory location of the Apple II's graphics buffer was fixed by the hardware (well, two locations actually, since it did provide for double buffering. Basically, there was no way to scroll on the Apple II without rewriting the entire graphics buffer.
However, I do remember an Apple II maze game with a first-person perspective, long before Wolfenstein 3D. And it was lightning fast (unfortunately, I don't recall the name). I'd love to know how that was implemented. However it was a pure maze game, not a shooter.
I will grant that this sounds plausible. In fact, I believed it once myself, and even went to the trouble of following up a number of creationist claims. And you know what I discovered? Every one was in some sense fraudulent! I came to the conclusion that these guys are not interested in discovering the truth. They think they already know the Truth, and they just want to convince you. And if they have to tell a few "white" lies along the way, that's OK, because it's all in the service of Truth.