One of the really annoying things about PNG is that the Quicktime plugin takes control of it when it's installed. So whenever you load up a PNG, you can't do much with it because of the plugin (like scroll around if the image is too big for the screen). And because so many people have the Quicktime plugin installed, it's a real pain for them to view PNG's.
For what it's worth though, R. Stevens over at Diesel Sweeties switched over to PNG's in order to cut bandwidth for the server and has experienced 0 problems.
I don't know why this was modded as funny. I think you've hit it right on the head. It's going to be the kids who really grew up with the 'net being ubiquitous who are going to use it to revolutionize things, much like the way kids like Woz, who grew up with electronics being ubiquitous, managed to revolutionize computing and make it a personal thing. The kids are getting smarter, and they're going to blow us all away. I can't wait personally.
MS does have a monopoly by my standard as well, because they have a strong lock on an entire form of communication. Granted, you can do computing with a Mac or Linux, but it's not nearly as good an option any more because of MS's disgusting practice of holding everyone else hostage via Windows or Office.
They do have a monopoly in Office suites, whether or not you care to admit it, and it's not because Office was always a better product, but because they were able to bundle it with Windows and place everyone else out of the game through their ownership of the OS. Lotus had a good office suite, as did Corel, and they were on par with MS's suite when they faded out. Same thing happened with the browser. You can't really do Office work on a Mac without MS Office, and it's a major reason why people say Linux isn't ready for the desktop. MS does have a monopoly on both the browser and Office, both as a result of their near complete dominance of the desktop marketplace.
It's actually a lot like the whole Ticketmaster debacle of a few years back. Sure, there was a competitor or two (which probably makes them not a monopoly by your definition) but they weren't realistic competitors, and the overwhelming power of Ticketmaster prevented them from really competing. You don't have to be the only game in town to be a monopoly, you just have to be the only one that people are forced to use.
You could always send a telegraph or write a letter rather than use AT&T. No one is forcing you to make that call, the same way no one is forcing you to have windows. Sure, there are alternatives, but are they truly valid?
Most people are locked in to Windows. Be was (is?) a great OS, but it didn't go anywhere even though it was easy to use as Windows and more stable than *NIX (from all accounts that I've heard). The fact that it failed should tell you something about the power MS has over vendors. Even Intel was backing Be for a while.
There was this pretty famous ad from the 50's that I have on my wall in small poster form. It's got a very angry and evil looking guy drying his hands. At the top in large red letters it says "Are your bathrooms breeding Bolsheviks?" It goes on to talk about how rough paper towls can breed discontentment in the workplace, and that discontentment can lead to Bolshevism in the American corporation. Needless to say, the ad was from a paper towl company.
This whole thing reminds me of that ad, like a repeat of history. Disgruntled employees undermining The American Way, pirating software in a communist fashion that destroys good corporate, American values. The communist domino effect that Americans were so worried about is the same idea as the Free Software cancer effect that Microsoft is throwing about now. It's all very absurd, and in addition to being a scare tactic, it places 100% of the blame on the companies themselves. "You have these rough paper towels, creating disgruntled Bolshevik employee software pirates!" No surer way to tick off a good customer than to blame them for doing something wrong and then telling them to run their business better.
There was a comment, I'm not sure if it was in this discussion or the one from the other day, but it really takes the wind out of my sails. The idea that we'll need.NET and passport the same way that we need MS Office in the business world. What MS seems to be doing is bypassing the server all together. They're saying "We can't win on the server the way we have on the desktop, not with Linux being free. How can we make the server a totally moot point?" Passport seems to be the answer.
MS is looking to control the net itself (hence the name) and they are going to let everyone else do the work for them. Mono is an important project because it gives Linux the chance to succeed in MS's brave new world (and I'm certain MS will succeed) but it's not Mono or Ximian or even Passport that scares me. It's where MS is going.
We've known for a long time that MS wanted to control the internet. It was the first real platform challenge to them ever, and that's why they pushed so hard with IE. But that's not really enough, and they realize that now that they control the browser. You can't control the internet as a platform just by controlling the browser, it's still bound by the same rules as before. So what do they do? They make a new platform.
.NET isn't just a new platform the replace java, but a whole new platform to replace the internet itself as we know it. MS wants all services to communicate via.NET, be it clients and servers written on the platform to do custom transactions or ASP pages. They want to make it as easy as possible for you to write your apps in it (any language you want!) just so long as you're on their platform. Internet Applications will be written in.NET. This isn't about downloading Office as a service, it's about getting the news online or checking your bank account info or any of the other things that are replacing classical style services.
And MS is going to control all of it.
Granted, this could all be paranoia here, but I truly believe that MS wants nothing less than total control of the internet, and they've built a great platform in order to do it. This isn't just about privacy or Ximian or Java or any of it, it's about preventing total control of the future (and present really) of communication by a single entity with a penchant for crushing anything in its path. No single corporation should have control of something so important as the platform for the digital world. And the really terrifying part is that I have no idea how to stop it.
From what I understand, perl 5 will still be available for use the same way perl 4 is. If you don't want to use perl 6, then don't. Your CGI's will still work great.
FWIW, my roomate bought a comp from eMachines about 6 months ago. Imagine my surprise when I saw him using StarOffice on it because it came bundled. He never complained about it at all (aside from speed, which is more a severe lack of RAM problem than anything) because it is a perfectly viable alternative to MS Office. I hope it does start to be a bundled option for a lot of OEMs. "Don't want to pay for MS Office? Here's Star instead." It's certainly ready for it.
Actually, the synthesis of this information is one of the branches of the research I am doing right now... and if you'd like to dicuss it further, I wouldn't mind
You seem to think of government as being a homogeneous entity, with a single goal in mind. Perhaps you'd better consider the following:
1) Slashdot itself isn't homogeneous. People have varying opinions.
2) The government is composed of a lot of different parts, with different goals. The MS case has little to do with the Napster case, and the fact that you want to put them together suggests that you're just looking to push some buttons.
3) Many people who are for the antitrust suit against Microsoft are for it because they believe that Microsoft stifles everyone else's freedom, and that the government can interfere with Microsoft's freedom in order to protect everyone else's.
4) Many people are against the Napster case are against it because they see Napster as a tool of getting around the overcharging monopoly that is the RIAA. These people see Napster as a tool for freedom, and the idea of the government shutting it down, especially if it is actually driving CD sales, is seen as being hurtful to consumers.
As TheFrood said, things aren't so homgeneous. You may want to consider this a bit more before getting angry at "Slashdot" for being hypocritical.
There are alternatives to Microsoft products. I have machines that do not run any Microsoft software and do exactly what I want them to do. Therefore, they are not a monopoly. There are some things that you can only do with Microsoft products, but that's their right as a company - there are some things you can only do with fast Internet access, some things you can only do with a Ferrari, some things you can only do with Mutt the email reader.
And that's where the problem lies. Your Ma Bell example before was a good one. The telephone wasn't the only way to communicate. You could send a letter or a telegraph, but you couldn't use the phone without Ma Bell's toll fees. And yet, by your own words they were a monopoly.
Same thing with Microsoft. You can not do a lot of things without a Microsoft OS, and while this may be their "right" as a company, it certaintly doesn't help consumers to be locked in by this. While it does benefit in some ways, like the peripherals and IE (which has it's downsides too) it can most certainly hurt. Things like the ILoveYou virus, which I just had to eradicate from a computer at work, are prime examples of Microsoft not being the ideal "choice."
For many people, windows software is a necessity, and the fact is that Microsoft is anticompetitive. If you don't believe that, then go look at the findings of fact, which were upheld by the appeals court. Microsoft doesn't compete, they crush the "competition" in a way that stifles true innovation and prevents a lot of good. Sure, we have a billion and one features for MS Office (yes, it is the best office suite out there) but how many of those do you actually use? How would MS Office have competed in the long run with Lotus or Corel or any of the other major players had MS not crushed them by bundling it cheaply with their OS a few years ago?
MS does have some good stuff, most notably Excel (the only MS product I actually like), but they also have a monopoly on many critical features.
Sure, you can run Be or Linux sans Office, but that's like sending a letter via the pony express rather than using the telephone.
Ok, fair enough, perhaps saying that they can't do anything by themselves is an exageration, but they can't produce life by themselves, which is really the key. You can't consider RNA and DNA on their own because they belong in a complete system. Even viruses require a protein coat, and they're in between in the life/not-life category. To understand anything living, you need the proteins too.
A gene has been very specifically defined. It goes as follows: "a gene is a unit of heredity." That's all there is to it. All the rest is a function of that. DNA is a physical manifestation of this idea, and the different genes must all perform different functions, but all are units of heredity that are passed on to subsequent generations.
Not at all. As I stated in my previous post, DNA is not code. It's an analogy, but the simple fact is that proteins are not hardware, but rather they are a part of the whole system.
If you really want to look at a biological system as a computer program, it's a better idea to think of the proteins as part of the program, rather than the thing the program runs on.
The DNA contains instructions, but in no real linear order. That's one (of about a billion) reason why deciphering the human genome is so difficult. Granted, source code isn't necessarily linear either, but there is no entry point for the "program" of a living system. Even birth is not a starting point because there's already a bunch of stuff happening even before the cell is implanted (all life from life). While this can be likened to a compiler, it sheds light on the idea that DNA isn't so much a program itself but part of this gigantic system which includes a lot of other "programs." Just as a kernel can not really do much on its own, neither can DNA.
I'm not saying DNA is not like code, indeed the fact that we use the term "genetic code" at all indicates that there is some degree of similarity. But to consider DNA to be the entire thing is completely absurd. You can understand a program by looking at the source, but that's like saying you can understand a gene by looking at its protein sequence and such (which isn't completely true, but you can deduce a fair amount from it). You are looking at an entire system here, not just a single "program". It's actually very similar to a huge UNIX system, with a ton of small programs (proteins) that each do a few specific tasks. You can't understand UNIX by looking at one program and ignoring the rest. You also can't understand UNIX by looking at all the source code together (especially if you don't understand most of it, as we don't) because you don't know what programs are running at what time. Just because you have the source code to apache doesn't mean it's running right now. Same thing with proteins, you don't know if they're working right now. That's a major major problem, and it's one that neither the UNIX source nor the DNA has an answer to.
And yet, the DNA spans between genes are generally referred to as 'useless' or, in this case, 'meaningless drivel.' Am I missing something, or is this exactly where the good stuff is?
Not necessarily. You're caught in they typical/. trap of thinking of DNA as computer code. Granted, code is probably the best analogy we have, but it's still an analogy at best. You're very correct that living systems can operate by branching, looping, etc. just like programs. However, your mistake lies in looking too hard at the DNA and not hard enough at the whole system.
The fact is that DNA itself is pretty useless. It can't do anything without proteins, and it's the proteins that are actually acting on each other, on the DNA, and on the RNA. That said, it's probably the proteins that allow these functions in terms of things like splicing out introns (alternate splicing is a form of branching) and DNA replication via DNA polymerase and other helpers (a form of recursion).
While I personally don't believe that the intervening DNA sequences are complete garbage, I don't think they hold the processes you're looking for as much. I agree with the idea that they provide a lot of raw genetic material for evolution, and I also think they play a role in gene regulation by chromatin bundling and such.
However, the idea of DNA as a program is only a small part of the picture, and in reality even when we have the genome and the proteome, we're still going to have to figure out how everything works together. A living system is big and complex, with tons of parts we don't understand yet. It's going to be a fun time figuring it out.
I'm going to see it tonight. I'm hoping that this is the first great video game movie ever. After the mega flops of the likes of Wing Commander (how did they fuck that up with a movie script plot already written?) and Tomb Raider (how could they not have copied Indy?) I'm really thinking this could be the one. CG or not doesn't matter, so much as that someone gets the idea of a game as a story, and the story as a movie, rather than the idea of movie as garbage.
When people talk about how great apt is, they're really talking about how great Debian as a whole is. One thing that really impressed me in to moving from Mandrake to Debian a while back was that Debian felt whole. It was a system, where Mandrake felt like a bunch of packages thrown together.
With apt, you not only get your package dependencies solved along with the latest software, you get the work that was put in to making Debian a coherent system that adheres to the Debian policy. You get a specific maintainer for each package who will (almost) always respond promptly to emails about bugs and such. You can get a ton of help on Debian's mailing lists. You yourself can even become a maintainer if you've got the gusto to do so. Granted, Mandrake covers a lot of these areas (and has a nicer install) but Debian feels like a system, where every other distro I tried just felt like a bunch of packages. Granted, I haven't tried Mandrake in a while, but somehow I just don't think what they're doing will match up to Debian's volunteer maintainer model, even now.
So when's it going to show up in the Gimp? This is some cool stuff. People could make custom filters without programming anything, just train the filter to do what you want. Let the computer do the thinking in terms of imitating the effect you want. Very very impressive.
It doesn't matter that they're trying to turn a profit. What does matter is that they're doing it in about as foolish a way possible (short of selling subscriptions a la MS). If they're trying to turn profit, alienating your core constituency is not the way to do it! It's simple marketing, and Caldera seems to have forgotten it.
They also seem to have forgotten the fact that they have a bunch of major competitors, most notably Redhat, Mandrake, and SuSE, who would probably love to soak up Caldera's share of the Linux market, both present and future. These competitors are not requiring site by site licenses for their products which are, for all intents and purposes, the exact same product as Caldera's. This is a lot like charging more for the store brand, which is suicide.
If Caldera wants to turn a profit they should really rethink this move and try and take a cue from Redhat. Brand some stuff like a database as your own. Don't restrict your core products, but provide services like the Redhat network. Help the community (Caldera already does this with Webmin) and don't try and alienate the people who are your best friends.
I think Mr. Carmack is right, although as another poster mentioned, one thing Marathon did that Doom, Wolf3d, et al never did was add an incredible plot. People still are combing through the dialogue to Marathon like it's a novel much the same way the Quake and Doom communities are still going strong. While you can debate the whether or not the engine was 2D (more like 2.5D I figure), it's a very different feat to create a story that rich, and it's not exactly the type of thing you'd expect out of a bunch of code monkeys.
If you're curious, go to the marathon story page and check out the stuff for yourself. It's epic in scale and it's full of mystery the way any great story is. They've created this incredible science fiction world that I've never seen another game pull off as effectively, especially in the FPS genre. People lauded Half Life for its in depth plot, but when you play it, it's a two bit hack job compared to Marathon's story. For instance, there's no character development at all in Half Life (and even less in Doom, Wolf, or Q123) but Marathon's AI's were all individuals.
I just don't see why everyone who posts about Marathon feels the need to lambast that it wasn't full 3D. That's not where it triumphed. It triumphed in plot, and I'm still waiting for another FPS to match the richness of Marthon's storyline.
This truth however, does not stop us from honoring what you guys did in making something that really was an incredible piece of work that did change a lot of things. While they weren't necessarily "firsts" they were important in being the trigger for a lot of changes. It doesn't matter if you guys invented 3D or multiplayer, what matters is that you guys created one of the best loved games of all time, and it's something that should be celebrated. Thanks for all the great work, and I hope for more great stuff to come.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Re:Gattaca is not dependent on scientific efficacy
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Heredity and Humanity
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Thank you for this post. You hit it square on the head.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn it Stevens! I still want my Clango head shirt and now this?
One of the really annoying things about PNG is that the Quicktime plugin takes control of it when it's installed. So whenever you load up a PNG, you can't do much with it because of the plugin (like scroll around if the image is too big for the screen). And because so many people have the Quicktime plugin installed, it's a real pain for them to view PNG's.
For what it's worth though, R. Stevens over at Diesel Sweeties switched over to PNG's in order to cut bandwidth for the server and has experienced 0 problems.
I don't know why this was modded as funny. I think you've hit it right on the head. It's going to be the kids who really grew up with the 'net being ubiquitous who are going to use it to revolutionize things, much like the way kids like Woz, who grew up with electronics being ubiquitous, managed to revolutionize computing and make it a personal thing. The kids are getting smarter, and they're going to blow us all away. I can't wait personally.
Oh come on... don't you want to see GNU BOB?
MS does have a monopoly by my standard as well, because they have a strong lock on an entire form of communication. Granted, you can do computing with a Mac or Linux, but it's not nearly as good an option any more because of MS's disgusting practice of holding everyone else hostage via Windows or Office.
They do have a monopoly in Office suites, whether or not you care to admit it, and it's not because Office was always a better product, but because they were able to bundle it with Windows and place everyone else out of the game through their ownership of the OS. Lotus had a good office suite, as did Corel, and they were on par with MS's suite when they faded out. Same thing happened with the browser. You can't really do Office work on a Mac without MS Office, and it's a major reason why people say Linux isn't ready for the desktop. MS does have a monopoly on both the browser and Office, both as a result of their near complete dominance of the desktop marketplace.
It's actually a lot like the whole Ticketmaster debacle of a few years back. Sure, there was a competitor or two (which probably makes them not a monopoly by your definition) but they weren't realistic competitors, and the overwhelming power of Ticketmaster prevented them from really competing. You don't have to be the only game in town to be a monopoly, you just have to be the only one that people are forced to use.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
You could always send a telegraph or write a letter rather than use AT&T. No one is forcing you to make that call, the same way no one is forcing you to have windows. Sure, there are alternatives, but are they truly valid?
Most people are locked in to Windows. Be was (is?) a great OS, but it didn't go anywhere even though it was easy to use as Windows and more stable than *NIX (from all accounts that I've heard). The fact that it failed should tell you something about the power MS has over vendors. Even Intel was backing Be for a while.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
There was this pretty famous ad from the 50's that I have on my wall in small poster form. It's got a very angry and evil looking guy drying his hands. At the top in large red letters it says "Are your bathrooms breeding Bolsheviks?" It goes on to talk about how rough paper towls can breed discontentment in the workplace, and that discontentment can lead to Bolshevism in the American corporation. Needless to say, the ad was from a paper towl company.
This whole thing reminds me of that ad, like a repeat of history. Disgruntled employees undermining The American Way, pirating software in a communist fashion that destroys good corporate, American values. The communist domino effect that Americans were so worried about is the same idea as the Free Software cancer effect that Microsoft is throwing about now. It's all very absurd, and in addition to being a scare tactic, it places 100% of the blame on the companies themselves. "You have these rough paper towels, creating disgruntled Bolshevik employee software pirates!" No surer way to tick off a good customer than to blame them for doing something wrong and then telling them to run their business better.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
There was a comment, I'm not sure if it was in this discussion or the one from the other day, but it really takes the wind out of my sails. The idea that we'll need .NET and passport the same way that we need MS Office in the business world. What MS seems to be doing is bypassing the server all together. They're saying "We can't win on the server the way we have on the desktop, not with Linux being free. How can we make the server a totally moot point?" Passport seems to be the answer.
.NET isn't just a new platform the replace java, but a whole new platform to replace the internet itself as we know it. MS wants all services to communicate via .NET, be it clients and servers written on the platform to do custom transactions or ASP pages. They want to make it as easy as possible for you to write your apps in it (any language you want!) just so long as you're on their platform. Internet Applications will be written in .NET. This isn't about downloading Office as a service, it's about getting the news online or checking your bank account info or any of the other things that are replacing classical style services.
MS is looking to control the net itself (hence the name) and they are going to let everyone else do the work for them. Mono is an important project because it gives Linux the chance to succeed in MS's brave new world (and I'm certain MS will succeed) but it's not Mono or Ximian or even Passport that scares me. It's where MS is going.
We've known for a long time that MS wanted to control the internet. It was the first real platform challenge to them ever, and that's why they pushed so hard with IE. But that's not really enough, and they realize that now that they control the browser. You can't control the internet as a platform just by controlling the browser, it's still bound by the same rules as before. So what do they do? They make a new platform.
And MS is going to control all of it.
Granted, this could all be paranoia here, but I truly believe that MS wants nothing less than total control of the internet, and they've built a great platform in order to do it. This isn't just about privacy or Ximian or Java or any of it, it's about preventing total control of the future (and present really) of communication by a single entity with a penchant for crushing anything in its path. No single corporation should have control of something so important as the platform for the digital world. And the really terrifying part is that I have no idea how to stop it.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
From what I understand, perl 5 will still be available for use the same way perl 4 is. If you don't want to use perl 6, then don't. Your CGI's will still work great.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Yeah, and they could hire John Romero and Tom Hall to write it. It'd be great!
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
FWIW, my roomate bought a comp from eMachines about 6 months ago. Imagine my surprise when I saw him using StarOffice on it because it came bundled. He never complained about it at all (aside from speed, which is more a severe lack of RAM problem than anything) because it is a perfectly viable alternative to MS Office. I hope it does start to be a bundled option for a lot of OEMs. "Don't want to pay for MS Office? Here's Star instead." It's certainly ready for it.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Actually, the synthesis of this information is one of the branches of the research I am doing right now... and if you'd like to dicuss it further, I wouldn't mind
:-)
Cool! What kind of stuff? I'm always game
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
You seem to think of government as being a homogeneous entity, with a single goal in mind. Perhaps you'd better consider the following:
1) Slashdot itself isn't homogeneous. People have varying opinions.
2) The government is composed of a lot of different parts, with different goals. The MS case has little to do with the Napster case, and the fact that you want to put them together suggests that you're just looking to push some buttons.
3) Many people who are for the antitrust suit against Microsoft are for it because they believe that Microsoft stifles everyone else's freedom, and that the government can interfere with Microsoft's freedom in order to protect everyone else's.
4) Many people are against the Napster case are against it because they see Napster as a tool of getting around the overcharging monopoly that is the RIAA. These people see Napster as a tool for freedom, and the idea of the government shutting it down, especially if it is actually driving CD sales, is seen as being hurtful to consumers.
As TheFrood said, things aren't so homgeneous. You may want to consider this a bit more before getting angry at "Slashdot" for being hypocritical.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
There are alternatives to Microsoft products. I have machines that do not run any Microsoft software and do exactly what I want them to do. Therefore, they are not a monopoly. There are some things that you can only do with Microsoft products, but that's their right as a company - there are some things you can only do with fast Internet access, some things you can only do with a Ferrari, some things you can only do with Mutt the email reader.
And that's where the problem lies. Your Ma Bell example before was a good one. The telephone wasn't the only way to communicate. You could send a letter or a telegraph, but you couldn't use the phone without Ma Bell's toll fees. And yet, by your own words they were a monopoly.
Same thing with Microsoft. You can not do a lot of things without a Microsoft OS, and while this may be their "right" as a company, it certaintly doesn't help consumers to be locked in by this. While it does benefit in some ways, like the peripherals and IE (which has it's downsides too) it can most certainly hurt. Things like the ILoveYou virus, which I just had to eradicate from a computer at work, are prime examples of Microsoft not being the ideal "choice."
For many people, windows software is a necessity, and the fact is that Microsoft is anticompetitive. If you don't believe that, then go look at the findings of fact, which were upheld by the appeals court. Microsoft doesn't compete, they crush the "competition" in a way that stifles true innovation and prevents a lot of good. Sure, we have a billion and one features for MS Office (yes, it is the best office suite out there) but how many of those do you actually use? How would MS Office have competed in the long run with Lotus or Corel or any of the other major players had MS not crushed them by bundling it cheaply with their OS a few years ago?
MS does have some good stuff, most notably Excel (the only MS product I actually like), but they also have a monopoly on many critical features.
Sure, you can run Be or Linux sans Office, but that's like sending a letter via the pony express rather than using the telephone.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Ok, fair enough, perhaps saying that they can't do anything by themselves is an exageration, but they can't produce life by themselves, which is really the key. You can't consider RNA and DNA on their own because they belong in a complete system. Even viruses require a protein coat, and they're in between in the life/not-life category. To understand anything living, you need the proteins too.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
A gene has been very specifically defined. It goes as follows: "a gene is a unit of heredity." That's all there is to it. All the rest is a function of that. DNA is a physical manifestation of this idea, and the different genes must all perform different functions, but all are units of heredity that are passed on to subsequent generations.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Not at all. As I stated in my previous post, DNA is not code. It's an analogy, but the simple fact is that proteins are not hardware, but rather they are a part of the whole system.
If you really want to look at a biological system as a computer program, it's a better idea to think of the proteins as part of the program, rather than the thing the program runs on.
The DNA contains instructions, but in no real linear order. That's one (of about a billion) reason why deciphering the human genome is so difficult. Granted, source code isn't necessarily linear either, but there is no entry point for the "program" of a living system. Even birth is not a starting point because there's already a bunch of stuff happening even before the cell is implanted (all life from life). While this can be likened to a compiler, it sheds light on the idea that DNA isn't so much a program itself but part of this gigantic system which includes a lot of other "programs." Just as a kernel can not really do much on its own, neither can DNA.
I'm not saying DNA is not like code, indeed the fact that we use the term "genetic code" at all indicates that there is some degree of similarity. But to consider DNA to be the entire thing is completely absurd. You can understand a program by looking at the source, but that's like saying you can understand a gene by looking at its protein sequence and such (which isn't completely true, but you can deduce a fair amount from it). You are looking at an entire system here, not just a single "program". It's actually very similar to a huge UNIX system, with a ton of small programs (proteins) that each do a few specific tasks. You can't understand UNIX by looking at one program and ignoring the rest. You also can't understand UNIX by looking at all the source code together (especially if you don't understand most of it, as we don't) because you don't know what programs are running at what time. Just because you have the source code to apache doesn't mean it's running right now. Same thing with proteins, you don't know if they're working right now. That's a major major problem, and it's one that neither the UNIX source nor the DNA has an answer to.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
The fact is that DNA itself is pretty useless. It can't do anything without proteins, and it's the proteins that are actually acting on each other, on the DNA, and on the RNA. That said, it's probably the proteins that allow these functions in terms of things like splicing out introns (alternate splicing is a form of branching) and DNA replication via DNA polymerase and other helpers (a form of recursion).
While I personally don't believe that the intervening DNA sequences are complete garbage, I don't think they hold the processes you're looking for as much. I agree with the idea that they provide a lot of raw genetic material for evolution, and I also think they play a role in gene regulation by chromatin bundling and such.
However, the idea of DNA as a program is only a small part of the picture, and in reality even when we have the genome and the proteome, we're still going to have to figure out how everything works together. A living system is big and complex, with tons of parts we don't understand yet. It's going to be a fun time figuring it out.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I'm going to see it tonight. I'm hoping that this is the first great video game movie ever. After the mega flops of the likes of Wing Commander (how did they fuck that up with a movie script plot already written?) and Tomb Raider (how could they not have copied Indy?) I'm really thinking this could be the one. CG or not doesn't matter, so much as that someone gets the idea of a game as a story, and the story as a movie, rather than the idea of movie as garbage.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
When people talk about how great apt is, they're really talking about how great Debian as a whole is. One thing that really impressed me in to moving from Mandrake to Debian a while back was that Debian felt whole. It was a system, where Mandrake felt like a bunch of packages thrown together.
With apt, you not only get your package dependencies solved along with the latest software, you get the work that was put in to making Debian a coherent system that adheres to the Debian policy. You get a specific maintainer for each package who will (almost) always respond promptly to emails about bugs and such. You can get a ton of help on Debian's mailing lists. You yourself can even become a maintainer if you've got the gusto to do so. Granted, Mandrake covers a lot of these areas (and has a nicer install) but Debian feels like a system, where every other distro I tried just felt like a bunch of packages. Granted, I haven't tried Mandrake in a while, but somehow I just don't think what they're doing will match up to Debian's volunteer maintainer model, even now.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
So when's it going to show up in the Gimp? This is some cool stuff. People could make custom filters without programming anything, just train the filter to do what you want. Let the computer do the thinking in terms of imitating the effect you want. Very very impressive.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
It doesn't matter that they're trying to turn a profit. What does matter is that they're doing it in about as foolish a way possible (short of selling subscriptions a la MS). If they're trying to turn profit, alienating your core constituency is not the way to do it! It's simple marketing, and Caldera seems to have forgotten it.
They also seem to have forgotten the fact that they have a bunch of major competitors, most notably Redhat, Mandrake, and SuSE, who would probably love to soak up Caldera's share of the Linux market, both present and future. These competitors are not requiring site by site licenses for their products which are, for all intents and purposes, the exact same product as Caldera's. This is a lot like charging more for the store brand, which is suicide.
If Caldera wants to turn a profit they should really rethink this move and try and take a cue from Redhat. Brand some stuff like a database as your own. Don't restrict your core products, but provide services like the Redhat network. Help the community (Caldera already does this with Webmin) and don't try and alienate the people who are your best friends.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I think Mr. Carmack is right, although as another poster mentioned, one thing Marathon did that Doom, Wolf3d, et al never did was add an incredible plot. People still are combing through the dialogue to Marathon like it's a novel much the same way the Quake and Doom communities are still going strong. While you can debate the whether or not the engine was 2D (more like 2.5D I figure), it's a very different feat to create a story that rich, and it's not exactly the type of thing you'd expect out of a bunch of code monkeys.
If you're curious, go to the marathon story page and check out the stuff for yourself. It's epic in scale and it's full of mystery the way any great story is. They've created this incredible science fiction world that I've never seen another game pull off as effectively, especially in the FPS genre. People lauded Half Life for its in depth plot, but when you play it, it's a two bit hack job compared to Marathon's story. For instance, there's no character development at all in Half Life (and even less in Doom, Wolf, or Q123) but Marathon's AI's were all individuals.
I just don't see why everyone who posts about Marathon feels the need to lambast that it wasn't full 3D. That's not where it triumphed. It triumphed in plot, and I'm still waiting for another FPS to match the richness of Marthon's storyline.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
This truth however, does not stop us from honoring what you guys did in making something that really was an incredible piece of work that did change a lot of things. While they weren't necessarily "firsts" they were important in being the trigger for a lot of changes. It doesn't matter if you guys invented 3D or multiplayer, what matters is that you guys created one of the best loved games of all time, and it's something that should be celebrated. Thanks for all the great work, and I hope for more great stuff to come.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Thank you for this post. You hit it square on the head.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."