I can’t help it—everything I read only makes sense in the light of evolution. Here, for instance, is a story about the popularity of the AK-47 assault rifle:
The AK-47’s popularity is generally attributed to its functional characteristics; ease of operation, robustness to mistreatment and negligible failure rate. The weapon’s weaknesses — it is considerably less accurate, less safe for users, and has a smaller range than equivalently calibrated weapons — are usually overlooked, or considered to be less important than the benefits of its simplicity. But other assault rifles are approximately as simple to manage, yet they have not experienced the soaring popularity of the Kalashnikov.
The AK-47’s ubiquity could alternatively be explained as a result of a path dependent process. Economic historians recognize that an inferior product may persist when a small but early advantage becomes large over time and builds up a legacy that makes switching costly. In the case of the AK-47 that early advantage may be that as a Soviet invention it was not subject to patent and so could be freely copied.
“Path dependency”…hey, that’s another phrase for something I hammer on all the time, that you can only understand the full extent of evolution if you understand the developmental processes underlying it. Many sub-optimal solutions persist because they are part of a developmental framework that isn’t easily changed.
And speaking of suboptimal…there’s Microsoft Word, an ungainly monstrosity if ever there was one. Both Science and Nature have rejected the use of the latest version of MS Word, because it is non-standard and effectively broken.
Because of changes Microsoft has made in its recent Word release that are incompatible with our internal workflow, which was built around previous versions of the software, Science cannot at present accept any files in the new .docx format produced through Microsoft Word 2007, either for initial submission or for revision. Users of this release of Word should convert these files to a format compatible with Word 2003 or Word for Macintosh 2004 (or, for initial submission, to a PDF file) before submitting to Science.
There’s a “path dependency” for you, the ubiquity of Word. Even highly evolved, complex and otherwise necessary pathways can be replaced, though, if more effective alternative pathways acquire greater importance. If the target of selection is the production of a functional end product (a standard readable file in this case) and there are multiple paths for delivering that end product (doc or pdf), the acquisition and spread of a deleterious mutation in the dominant pathway can lead to greater importance of the alternate.
Hmm, I have to go home and start a pot of minestrone soup for dinner…somebody explain that process in evolutionary terms for me.
Funny, it was Microsoft Windows that first occurred to me as an example.
If you haven’t seen David Pogue’s talk at TED and some of the comments he makes about Word – it’s a must:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/7
It’s amusing Microsoft chose to break backward compatibility. That’s probably not a super smart idea in the long run. It turns out (no surprise!) that for most of us, HTML is a better, open standard. Perhaps Microsoft’s decision to close the Word document format will result in a hemmorhage where they can least afford it.
By the way, I’ve been practicing a technique I call “the big freeze.” I use photoshop 4, office 97, and dreamweaver 2000. Guess what? They run like a bat out of hell on modern hardware! :) And they don’t autopatch themselves and reboot at annoying times or phone home to the software producer and tell them what I’ve been doing lately. But – more importantly – they just work, do what I need, and I don’t have Microsoft or Adobe in my pocket for $200 a year for an upgrade.
The next generation of hardware platforms and software frameworks will make it increasingly difficult to practice a “big freeze” model. So I am going to stockpile current hardware and I’ve verified that Windows 98 still boots (and runs fine!) on my motherboard(s).
(Curmudgeonly voice)
Someday people will look at me and say “Ranum was a genius before his time!” Someday!
(/Curmudgeonly voice)
mjr.
Yup. Office 2003, CricketGraph3.0 and Circadia (1982) are still working just fine.
My first thought was Betamax, though. My second was the string of talks and papers by Bill Whimsatt on the evolution of engines (particularly airplane engines). Same principle.
Also, think of post-WWII replacement of German and French by English as official language of trade, science, etc.
all ur base r belong to evolution.
Minestrone is irreducibly complex because one component without the basil or garlic will simply not work as a functional soup.
I just switched to Word 2007, and it is easy to save files in the earlier version if need be. Others have had problems opening files from me also. On the positive side – a nice feature of latest version of Word is that it is easy to make pdfs.
True nerds use Latex.
Unfortunately for PZ, Latex isn’t the result of natural selection- it was intelligently designed!
My understanding, perhaps wrong, is also that the rifle was designed for ease of manufacture.
The recipe for minestrone has evolved with the addition of New World ingredients, according to Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minestrone
Also, as minestrone actually means soup, the phrase “minestrone soup” contains a duplication that leaves one of the words free of selective pressures and able to evolve a new meaning.
How was that?
There is no way I could possibly do my paying job as well as all of the volunteer work without plain old Corel WordPerfect 5.1+, an ancient program by modern day standards. It is a DOS-based program, I believe I purchased my original program in 1990 and paid for 1 upgrade (I even have WordPerfect 6.0 but like 5.1 better). For the vast majority of my work, I need nothing more than basic word processing and basic spell check. Nothing I have ever tried beats it, and I’ve tried just about all of them. Oddly enough, there are a number of other people I know (can think of 6 off hand) who must write lengthy documents and their #1 choice is WordPerfect. I even know 1 person who still uses 3+!
Oh- and remember
Jesus saves, but Buddha uses incremental backups.
I experienced the opposite reaction when reading the Selfish Gene – it read like an applied economics book. Almost all of it can be translated in game-theoretic terms with minimum effort (not just the parts where he made the connection explicit)
The desire to eat a complex, varied meal instead of a single, nutritionally-complete food, can best be explained by highly-evolved foraging instincts that work to avoid dependency on a single foodsource and limit the damage done to local populations of food organisms.
Minestrone is a great example.
Nobody looking at TeX macros or at the concept of fragile commands in LaTeX can see much sign of intelligent design there.
(In fact there was a lot, but it was all applied to the job of typesetting: the interface TeX shows to users is a bit of an afterthought which is probably only easy to use if you are Knuth. LaTeX suffers from this and is at best a band-aid.)
For a free alternative to MS word, look up Open Office. It’s an open source program… It’s far from perfect, but it IS free and not all that hard to use.
Minestrone is irreducibly complex because one component without the basil or garlic will simply not work as a functional soup.
The point isn’t that we can without vital products call it a soup. The fact is, we can remove all the soup products and still have a very powerful and useful product of hot water. Which as we can clearly tell is used in a vast number of recipes. One should also carefully note that soups all use this same original pathway of heating water as a first step. So, the conclusion that all soup has a common ancestor isn’t outlandish.
In fact, I would venture to say that soup and stew are probably closely related.
You know, I used to do software development for Lucent Technologies. One of my well-known aphorisms (and one I’m sure people there got extremely tired of hearing), was that we were trying to “paddle up the Missouri to St. Paul.”
When you are doing that, you either have to recognize that to get to St. Paul, you have to either go back downstream and then up the Mississippi, or decide to travel overland, or just not give a shit about getting to St. Paul.
Looking at Lucent today, it’s obvious management just didn’t give a shit. :-)
Minestrone soup, like many organisms, is tasty.
How’s that? :)
One should also carefully note that soups all use this same original pathway of heating water as a first step.
Gazpacio soup involves neither water nor heat.
I still stubbornly use WordPerfect for most of my documents. My school used to use it, but switched to Word several years ago. Word is just too much of an unholy kludge for me to be comfortable with it. I pretty much had to use it for my dissertation (that’s what my committee wanted) and the experience made it hate it more than ever.
Speaking of ubiquity: Internet Explorer. When I installed the drivers for a new monitor I recently acquired, the installation software complained that I was using FireFox and informed me that automatic installation was supported only for Microsoft IE. I temporarily made IE my default and all was well, but the experience did not endear me to the monitor manufacturer. You can’t even support FireFox? Lame.
It is getting too far into the warm season for minestrone; gazpacho would be a much better choice. However, you are most probably developmentally constrained by the contents of your pantry. Also, currently the non-seasonality of good tomatoes in Minnesota would contribute to choosing a soup with a variety of ingredients that minimizes the effect of sub-par or canned tomatoes – you’re stuck on the wrong hill as if you were using branch-swapping heuristics.
Does the newest Microsoft Word still have the ‘blue background’ feature?
Tools/Options/General/Blue Background…
It’s kind of an ultimate creepy feature creep
Here’s it’s history
Wow, not even one comment on Windows Vista yet. Amazing.
I don’t know what the evolutionary parallel is here, but the best biological parallel I can come up with is “Broken Wrist.” We had a Microsoft employee address my IT shop, talking about how they had “hardened” Vista. Frankly, I scoffed. I just didn’t believe it. Coincidentally, I had moved my home PC to Kaspersky from Norton a couple months earlier.
(Norton is another evolutionary dead-end… Let’s not talk about that right now.)
So, imagine my surprise when, right after Vista came out, security firms rated various security schemes, and Norton was among the losers, while Kaspersky was among the winners… But Vista was the largest loser, and it wasn’t by just a little.
I really wonder how this is affecting PC sales. After all, I just haven’t seen a great reason (or even a good reason to change) to Vista. Great, I have to update my hardware to get Vista to run, and I still need to buy Kaspersky because Vista’s security is so bad? No. I’m keeping my current PC.
Vista is ME all over again. Anyone out there still running ME?
MSFT really needs to pay attention here. We have rejected Vista. Find out why, or the next generation of PCs will be running some variation of Linux…
Wow, not even one comment on Windows Vista yet. Amazing.
I don’t know what the evolutionary parallel is here, but the best biological parallel I can come up with is “Broken Wrist.” We had a Microsoft employee address my IT shop, talking about how they had “hardened” Vista. Frankly, I scoffed. I just didn’t believe it. Coincidentally, I had moved my home PC to Kaspersky from Norton a couple months earlier.
(Norton is another evolutionary dead-end… Let’s not talk about that right now.)
So, imagine my surprise when, right after Vista came out, security firms rated various security schemes, and Norton was among the losers, while Kaspersky was among the winners… But Vista was the largest loser, and it wasn’t by just a little.
I really wonder how this is affecting PC sales. After all, I just haven’t seen a great reason (or even a good reason to change) to Vista. Great, I have to update my hardware to get Vista to run, and I still need to buy Kaspersky because Vista’s security is so bad? No. I’m keeping my current PC.
Vista is ME all over again. Anyone out there still running ME?
MSFT really needs to pay attention here. We have rejected Vista. Find out why, or the next generation of PCs will be running some variation of Linux…
Double-posting: It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
#22 Word 2003 certainly has it…
…look up Open Office. It’s an open source program… It’s far from perfect…
It’s far MORE perfect than Office 2007. Last weekend I bought a new laptop, and reformatted the hard drive. Buh-bai, Windoze.
I installed Ubuntu Linux (free), with GIMP (free) and Firefox (free) and OpenOffice.org (that’s it’s name, by the way; “Open Office” is a different piece of software).
Gorgeous.
Hmmm, thanks for this post. Applying these ideas of developemental pathways, and sub-optimal solutions to social, political, and economic institutions, and the difficulty of change brings up some interesting ways of looking at things. Take issues with say the electoral college. On one level, many people see a variety of un-desirable and undemocratic consequences, yet the ability to change the institution, to ammend the constitution is a momentous and difficult process. Same with our entrenched use of automobiles and related urban planning practices. I suspect there are many people living in suburban America who would use their cars less if it was feasible to get where they would like to go, when they want to go. Unfortunately it is not possible to just switch modes into a more rational and ecological sustainable pattern of transportation and urban planning.
I use photoshop 4, office 97, and dreamweaver 2000.
I do this sort of thing to a degree, but there’s only so far you can take it in the real world. I need to run native in OSX, so I have to use Illustrator 10 at least. (It has some annoying bugs, but I’d still rather use it than a pig like CS2.) However, I end up being pushed along because I need to open files from everybody else.
More and more of late I have to fire up CS2 (and I’ll end up having to buy CS3) just to open some nothing graphic file that somebody’s sent me, and which could easily have been saved in Illustrator 6 format with no data loss, at a tenth the size.
Of course, Adobe is busy gratuitously making life harder by fiddling with the text data structures such that if you save CS2 files into old formats, it destroys the text structure, even though the old formats are perfectly capable of handling text in sophisticated ways. Meh.
So there’s only so much you can do with digging in your heels and refusing to “upgrade.”
If the government weren’t being headed by insane sociopathic kleptos, it might make sense to start regulating things like basic software upgrades. Maybe keep companies like Microsoft from trashing backward compatibility and foisting stuff like Vista, just cause they can.
The AK was designed to fit in with Soviet military doctrine: life is cheap. The AK was designed to be cheap and quick to manufacture in a poorly tooled plant. Idea was the Red Army gets kicked en masse out of a troop carrier on the battle field, run towards Capitalist Lackeys firing AK47s from hip, millions die, eventually they get through. Western long arms: short magazine, long barrel, can be fired lying down for better cover. We had fewer soldiers, better tooled plants, more accurate weapons, different military doctrine and we didn’t feel the need to send cheap guns to half the world as part of our revolutionary plan. We sent junk food instead.
>I do this sort of thing to a degree, but there’s only
>so far you can take it in the real world.
True. What do I know about the real world? I’m just a member of the executive team of a software company, a consultant, and I serve as an expert in software patents for about 5 law firms. Yeah, you’re right. In the real world, it just wouldn’t work! My clients would all complain when I send my proposals in in Office 97 format (nope: never happened once!) or my invoices out of good old Adobe Acrobat writer 5.0 (nope: never happened once!) I’d be unable to lecture at conferences because Powerpoint 97 wouldn’t work on any VGA projectors (nope: taught 35 classes and keynoted 5 conferences in the last year and not a single person commented that my powerpoint looks old) and of course my website, which is written in CSS/HTML wouldn’t work either because I don’t have the latest visual aids in my editor (nope: 1 million hits in my photography gallery last year, I guess it works OK)
I don’t know what “real world” you live in but it sure ain’t mine.
>So there’s only so much you can do with digging in your
>heels and refusing to “upgrade.”
You’re right!!!
I’ve saved, let’s see
Office 97 -> 2000 upgrade -> 2003 upgrade -> 2007 upgrade
Dreamweaver MX 2000 upgrade -> ?
Adobe photoshop -> 3 zillion upgrades…
Adobe acrobat -> …
never mind the RAM upgrades I didn’t need and the fact that my 1.3Ghz machine feels “really snappy” running PS4 compared to my buddy’s dual-core with 4GB of RAM running CS3… about $2000 in hardware upgrades I didn’t need… etc. etc.
You’re right!! By digging in my heels and refusing to upgrade I’ve had to find something else to spend (rough guess) about $5000 on! Gosh I’m glad I don’t live in the real world, where you have to pay software companies an arm and a leg for features you probably never even notice let alone need. I’m especially glad I don’t live in the real world where MacIntosh addicts got BF’d by their hero (“Gosh durn those powerPCs are loads faster than Intel processors!”) Steve Jobs when he got to make Apple’s books look fantastic by forcing the entire software and hardware installed base (“Gosh darn those Intel processors sure do rawk my stock options!”) to do a forklift upgrade. Good old Steve Jobs! If he sold cyanide-laced KOOL-ADE the MacDittoHeads would be placing advance orders.
Consider leaving the real world,
mjr.
I’m CEO of a 8 billion dollar company. I have 7 PhD’s, 2 Nobel prizes and an academy award for best actor.
Now that my credentials are established… I use LaTex.
Argument settled!
The problem with the Electoral college isn’t imho, its existence, but its application. In most states it throws all its votes towards the majority of districts, instead of splitting the votes according to region. This means that while it *can* work as a safe guard, if say one district in a state is agricultural, but the rest are not, by making sure that those people are represented, it instead will throw 100% of the vote, in most cases, to the wolves from the non-agricultural zones, if you assumed that was a key issue at some point. Same with everything else. Texas, assuming its one of those that throw is all in the pot by majority, *has* sections that would give at least one vote the opposite of everyone else there, but that wouldn’t happen, since the entire pot goes to the biggest group.
This is bad. Its very bad. Popular vote on the other hand *isn’t* much better. It means that if 90% of the population is in big cities, which it is, and some idiot promises them all something they want, they might all vote for the clown, even though he *only* represents the interests of “those” groups. Or, lets put it another way. Do you really want “popular vote” to elect someone, if the Bible belt is having 10-12 kids per family, out number your side 3-4:1, at least, and will all vote for a religious nut? There is a down side to getting rid of it. Its like sickle cell anemia. Getting rid of it looks good, until you notice the large swarm of disease bearing mosquitoes that are crawling out of the swamps around you. Its not at all certain that “fixing” things can’t/won’t make things worse.
Zeno:
What I hate is when I do the Microsoft Update (aside from the fact that it only runs on IE itself, I suppose that’s almost reasonable), seems like at least half the time, it resets IE as the default browser, and/or Outlook Express as the mail reader. Then the parent comes thinking it’s broken (at least they use Firefox/Thunderbird), even though it’s still perfectly usable from, what, at least three different icons/links?
It’s almost as though they didn’t want you to have a real choice, or something….
MikeM:
Guilty as charged, kind of. It’s on a dual-boot machine, which only boots into Windows once or twice a year, and then mainly for updates (as long as those last). So it’s not a priority for me.
It’s a special pet peeve of mine when people go sending MS Word doc files and such around as email attachments, or using them as part of a web site, as though they’re some kind of Internet standard or something, and any computer connected to the Internets *must* have Word installed. Ditto Excel, PowerPoint. And then there’ve been a few attachments so odd I didn’t even know what they’re supposed to be opened with. Not that I can’t usually find something else with which to open these files, but I hate condoning the impression that the Internet is the corporate property of Microsoft. I’ve probably put off a few people in the past with my replies when I’ve been sent such things.
Jeeze, Marcus, no need to go flamewar on me. I mostly agree with you. How nice for you that you don’t have a job that requires you to integrate data sent to you in incompatible recent formats. I do. And I can tell you that if I tell my clients sent me standard files that are critical parts of a project, if I tell them I can’t read said files because I’m still using old software, they won’t be my clients for long. Note: the problem isn’t files going out from me; it’s files coming in from the outside. THAT’s what forces the upgrades.
BTW, I’m on PowerPC and not Intel, and though you may not realize it, OSX was very much worth having (and I say that as someone who spent years in the System 7-9 world). In any case, the Illustrator compatibility problems I mentioned apply just as much on the PC side.
Screw minestrone. Real coders make gumbo!
re: TeX, there are a few different front-ends, iirc. back in the olden dayes we used to write TeX (and html) by hand. worked pretty well, actually.
but i think the best demonstration of the principle is mp3. open source, common, lots of different encoders, playable by almost everything. there are a ton of better formats available, ogg, flac, etc. even the vbr mp3s are rather uncommon. people stick with the first good thing that works, if they don’t have to pay for it.
I write TeX by hand. You mean there’s another way?
“Hmm, I have to go home and start a pot of minestrone soup for dinner…somebody explain that process in evolutionary terms for me.”
Well. Males compete for access to females, and often engage in elaborate displays of ornaments or other behaviors that advertise their fitness. Females choose, and when their choices are influenced by those things that are good indicators of fitness, that mate choice tends to lead to stable family groups, which can mean monogamy….and minestrone.
I write LaTeX in EMACS. Having discovered that with appropriate macro definitions I can code LaTeX as fast as my professors could lecture, I found myself the possessor of some pretty damn spiffy class notes.
Ah, “path dependency”. By which natural selection is cumulative. One works with what one has. Such a beautiful concept in all of its simplicity.
Sorry for ramping off the word-processor gag here, but this is a lovely opportunity to remind cre[a]tinists that their shrill denouncements of “evolution” are little more than a severe allergy to the notion of CHANGE, a condition enhanced by a powerful predisposition to willful stupidity:
Face it – everything EVOLVES all the time. Over time mountains erode flat and without an energy input from the Earth’s interior to drive tectonic plates or produce those “surface-blisters” known as volcanoes, cannot be raised anew. The fuel in your car runs down and must be replenished periodically. The Sun’s supply of hydrogen cannot be restored, and must inevitably end up as a white dwarf not much bigger than our little planet, composed largely of carbon. The white dwarf cannot avoid cooling and must eventually become a black dwarf.
The thought you have now isn’t the one you had 5 minutes or 5 months ago either: you CHANGE. You are EVOLVING. All the time. Face it.
Change happens. Evolution verily happens.
The MECHANISMS responsible for a particular aspect of evolutionary change is what merits your attention, as it has long since merited the attentions of scientists.
For LIFE, Darwin proposed “natural selection” of inheritable traits as the mechanism responsible for its evolution. Subsequent observations have not only confirmed the general truth of it, but inspired the recognition of cumulative and “path-dependent” (among other) aspects of the hypothesis.
Darwin didn’t dream up the concept of evolution, though. He merely proposed a mechanism for a phenomenon that had already long been regarded as blindingly obvious. (At least to those at the time who were looking rather than praying).
The naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, for example, initially regarded species to be statically unchanging. When he looked closer he began to realize that species “transmuted” in form over time.
Being a stubborn scientific sort, he needed to develop a hypothetical MECHANISM to explain this transmutation. He came up with something known as the “inheritance of acquired characteristics or traits”. (The offspring of giraffes, for example, acquired longer necks BECAUSE their parents strove to reach higher branches, etc. – somehow the heredity was supposed to be modifiable by the striving).
He also saddled himself with the notion that organisms were constantly evolving toward increasing complexity or goal-oriented perfection through “spontaneous generation”.
Lamarck managed this explanation of evolution by 1809, almost 30 years before Darwin first conceived his own mechanism of natural selection, and fully a half century before he published it.
Of course, life doesn’t evolve the Lamarckian way, but evolve it manifestly does. Over long spans of time. FACE IT.
Interestingly enough, the goal-oriented aspect of Lamarckian evolution DOES have an application: for example, wherever intelligent engineers seek to improve on their technological products like, say, automobiles or aircraft, which have undergone an extraordinary EVOLUTION over time. The same may be said for the breeding of domestic plants and animals.
Natural life has no directed goal; the “path-dependency” of selection restricts the course of an organism’s evolution. Its CUMULATIVE natural selection: natural processes can only work on already existing configurations. One does not find a tick spontaneously transmuting into a toad, even though both have exactly the same genetic apparatus to work with. A tick’s genes, which are tremdendously complex, are configured for making ticks. The probability that they will all spontaneously reshuffle themselves in order to produce a toad, whose genes are also tremendously complex, isn’t zero, its astronomical.
Technology is rather more Lamarckian in character, though. As powerful an influence we’ve had on the environment, so far its been relatively benign: just wait until intelligent self-replicating von Neumann machines ramp up, adapting themselves MUCH more swiftly than natural organisms can ever hope to…willing to face that? You know, real and really big problems that humans may actually face? Or are you all going to selfishly continue praying for salvation from death? I don’t think the von Neumann replicators will be praying much as they inherit the Earth.
I quite liked Word 6 and have been installing it on successive versions of Windows rather than have or use the horrible Office stuff. Unfortunately, although Word 6 started off fine on Windows Vista, the naughty HP printer driver I had to install for my new HP printer-scanner (because Vista apparently isn’t compatible with many older printers and scanners) conflicted with Word 6 and trashed it. So now it won’t run (and neither will it uninstall because WinV doesn’t believe in its existence).
I tried contacting HP but they were pretty useless other than being generally sympathetic. I already know Microsoft is useless. There was no sign of a fix last time I checked – but then I’m probably the only person in the world with that particular combination of SW and HW. Sub-optimal is almost something of a euphemism for the actual situation with M$ rubbish.
Post #30, by Peter McGrath:
Excellent summary of an influential weapon and the driving philosophies of the competing societies.
There it is again: “evolution is just another worldview, which makes it no more valid than my own stupid beliefs”.
Cram it, Goldstein.
If EVERYTHING makes sense in the light of evolution, why are there still Goldsteins?
Oh yeah – sub-optimal.
taken from this summary:
the AK-47 was meant to be used by any two-bit nation’s most illiterate conscripts to fight elite forces worldwide, whereas the M-16 was meant to be used by elite forces to fight every two-bit nation’s most illiterate conscripts worldwide.
meanwhile, an ancestral technology branch has fought itself in countless conflicts the world over, and won every time. ;-)
Both influential weapons, AK-47 (and its derivatives) and nuclear bomb. One is cheap, mass-produced, caused virtually tremendous amout of casualties, the other is expensive, in a sense mass-produced, can cause megadeath (or even ruin the whole planet) but scarcely used in actions.
AK-47 becomes a state-of-the-art gear of war, while nuclear bomb acts as the presupposition of Cold War and Post-Cold War history.
So, which is in fact the WMD?
Sephy: an argument could be made that the AK-47 is among the strongest forces for egalitarianism ever invented, whereas the nuclear warhead is intrinsically a device of oppression. in fact, George Orwell made it.
#34
You can download free Excel/Word/PPT readers from microsoft.
khan: will these freely-downloadable-from-microsoft readers run on a non-microsoft operating system?
yeah, that’s kindof what us free software freaks mean about condoning the impression of the internet as microsoft’s corporate property. not that OpenOffice.org doesn’t usually read such files just fine, but still.
The reason why nobody comments on Vista is that nobody has it. XP works pretty fine (at least after Service Pack 2), and Vista (as everything from Microsoft) is outrageously expensive.
The reason why nobody comments on Vista is that nobody has it. XP works pretty fine (at least after Service Pack 2), and Vista (as everything from Microsoft) is outrageously expensive.
For years my solution to all the MicroCrap files people would send me was DocMorph
http://docmorph.nlm.nih.gov/docmorph/LoginCheckA.asp
which will translate most things to PDF. To real pdf, I believe, not the new improved form introduced a few years ago to prevent compatibility.
But Google wins again, in its not-evil moments. I send the Word & Excel files to Google and have a somewhat machine-readable and editable copy of the document. It’s a good bet, as computer bets go, that Google will succeed in supporting new formats well enough for my purposes.
As to not updating: I’m about to have to look into DOSEMU to see if it really works (on a Unix-Inside Mac) with my Managing Your Money and FoxPro applications, because you can no longer be sure that OS/2 will properly run on new MoBos. Bummer.
btw, since i made the reference earlier, just for kicks I thought some might like to see the classic original again.
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/content/content.php?id=11940&name=11940_AYB_1_.swf&title=all%20yor%20base%20r%20blong%202%20us&date=1180929600&quality=b&uj=0&w=550&h=400
Easy. You’ve never covered a pot of soup, left it to cook for an hour, and opened it up to find a chocolate cake. Soups do not give birth to cakes. Therefore god exists.
I agree. Everything is evolution. What does evolution do to everything it touches? It basically makes life able to better specialize and better reproduce those specializations.
Now here are the ingredients for your soup, googled of course.
2 tbsp. olive oil
1-2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 lg. diced onion
2 c. diced potatoes
1 c. diced celery
1 c. sliced zucchini
1 c. green beans
2 c. shredded cabbage
4 c. beef or chicken broth
2 c. peeled tomatoes
1 can cannellini or northern beans
1/2 lb. sm. shell pasta
Chopped parsley & basil
Fresh ground pepper.
These are all organisms that have adapted to their environment to better reproduce. This is all thanks to their ability to take advantage of really fucking weird mobile plants that only have two roots that they use to move instead of absorb nutrients with. Every single second of every single day there is an organism or object that takes advantage of our need for it.
Take grass for example. Not just any old grass but the green soft grass that everybody uses for their lawns. That’s an organism taking advantage of us! That is an organism surviving in its environment.
My favorite example is tobacco. Unlike other organisms like lettuce, carrots and cows, tobacco tricks us into reproducing it. Tobacco takes advantage of our brain chemistry and modifies it enough so that we think we need tobacco to function. That has evolved.
But how? I imagine that tobacco is a distant relative of another plant that our ancestors ate. Then as our ancestors found other plants with more nourishment that tasted better, tobacco started getting ignored more and more. Except for a couple different families of plants that the animals just seemed to love. It just so happened that these few families had a chemical inside them that reacted with our ancestors’ bodies in almost the same way nicotine does with ours today.
Anyway, your soup. Your soup is all the evidence for evolution anybody should need. Each of those individual ingredients has evolved a symbiotic relationship with each other. This symbiotic relationship is called, soup. Not just any kind of soup, but a special species of soup called the mighty minestrone.
this is a terrible admission to make for an old CS guy… but when I saw Christian Burnham’s post
my first thought was *naughty* – not Knuth!
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