In a good number of the fear-mongering articles I've had the displeasure of reading in the past few days regarding Dr. Hutchinson's comments about the feasibility of creating an artificial single-celled organism, there's quite a bit of historical myopia and semantic fuzziness around the word "life", as in "If we're creating life, doesn't that raise some loaded questions about history and religion?"
It certainly does raise those questions, but they're not the shocking new questions the authors (including Mr. Katz) are so pleased to be raising, but rather they're the same questions that have been thrown back and forth since the publication of The Origin of Species, now rediscovered in a new situation, i.e. man creating new species rather than good old evolution doing the work. This is not to imply that these questions aren't worth considering, but rather that this is simply a new facet to a century old debate.
There's also the matter of everyone speaking about "life" as if it had a concrete definition. Religious and scientific authorities both find themselves at a bit of a loss for words when asked, "What do you mean by life?" In the absence of such a definition, any debate on whether moral lines are being crossed will be fruitless. There are immense differences between creating a new bacterium and creating a new mammal. Though, come to think of it, we did that back in the day.
So stop your mule-ing and give us something to talk about.
A fascinating article and a concise (relatively speaking:) summation of the uneasiness I have felt toward the CISC/RISC labels for a number of years.
One thought: the root cause of the popularity of OOO-execution hardware (and one of the reasons I'm surprised the IA-64 doesn't have it) might be that the companies that make chips aren't always the same companies that make compilers. Therefore, since marketers enjoy throwing around measurements of their chip's performance relative to other chips (with the compiler being merely a footnote, if mentioned at all), the chip maker can't afford to leave the ranking of their product up to the skill of some other company's compiler programmers. Hence, they must take out an insurance policy of sorts by including the capability of OOO execution, which is essentially a way of saying that you don't trust compilers to do their job properly.
I wouldn't say they're abandoning Solaris as a revenue stream. I would assume they make loads off of support contracts, which cover software problems as well as hardware failures. Trust me, most companies would much rather pay Sun what amounts to an insurance premium for support than to pay employees or contractors to wade through the OS code to fix their problem. As long as they control what contributions make it into the standard Solaris distribution (thereby making support no more impossible than it currently is), they'll still make some $ off Solaris. Speaking of the impossibility of supporting an OS, I wonder if they'll impose conditions on firms wanting to contract Sun for support. I also wonder whether they'll maintain their OS subscription program after the release, with the benefit of an easy-to-install precompiled OS. Sound familiar? paisleylad
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It certainly does raise those questions, but they're not the shocking new questions the authors (including Mr. Katz) are so pleased to be raising, but rather they're the same questions that have been thrown back and forth since the publication of The Origin of Species, now rediscovered in a new situation, i.e. man creating new species rather than good old evolution doing the work. This is not to imply that these questions aren't worth considering, but rather that this is simply a new facet to a century old debate.
There's also the matter of everyone speaking about "life" as if it had a concrete definition. Religious and scientific authorities both find themselves at a bit of a loss for words when asked, "What do you mean by life?" In the absence of such a definition, any debate on whether moral lines are being crossed will be fruitless. There are immense differences between creating a new bacterium and creating a new mammal. Though, come to think of it, we did that back in the day.
So stop your mule-ing and give us something to talk about.
Jonathan
One thought: the root cause of the popularity of OOO-execution hardware (and one of the reasons I'm surprised the IA-64 doesn't have it) might be that the companies that make chips aren't always the same companies that make compilers. Therefore, since marketers enjoy throwing around measurements of their chip's performance relative to other chips (with the compiler being merely a footnote, if mentioned at all), the chip maker can't afford to leave the ranking of their product up to the skill of some other company's compiler programmers. Hence, they must take out an insurance policy of sorts by including the capability of OOO execution, which is essentially a way of saying that you don't trust compilers to do their job properly.
paisleylad
I wouldn't say they're abandoning Solaris as a revenue stream. I would assume they make loads off of support contracts, which cover software problems as well as hardware failures. Trust me, most companies would much rather pay Sun what amounts to an insurance premium for support than to pay employees or contractors to wade through the OS code to fix their problem. As long as they control what contributions make it into the standard Solaris distribution (thereby making support no more impossible than it currently is), they'll still make some $ off Solaris. Speaking of the impossibility of supporting an OS, I wonder if they'll impose conditions on firms wanting to contract Sun for support. I also wonder whether they'll maintain their OS subscription program after the release, with the benefit of an easy-to-install precompiled OS. Sound familiar? paisleylad