What exactly is evolution? Evolution is a theory. It is not a hypothesis.  A theory is a set of scientific principles that is supported by observable facts. A hypothesis, by contrast, is a statement not backed up by facts. 

The theory of evolution is as follows:

Fact #1: Random mutations occur in nature.

Fact #2: Mutations tend to be passed onto off-spring.

Fact #3: If one organism is genetically different enough from another organism then they will not be able to reproduce together.

Therefore:

Traits that benefit an organism (or at least don't kill it) will be passed onto its offspring.  Over millions of years, the accumulation of these changes, both big and small. will result in different species based on the local geographic conditions.

For example, a bear that spends most of its life swimming around in the water gives birth to offspring with clubbed feet. This bear is able to swim better as a result than other bears and is thus more likely to catch fish and therefore more likely to survive to pass on its genes. Over time, all the bears in that geographic area will have clubbed feet.

By contrast, same bear, 10 miles inland, born with same clubbed feet is no longer able to hunt food in the woods. It dies before it can reproduce. And with its death so too does that genetic trait.

Our water-loving, club-foot bears, by contrast, have now specialized (or adapted) to life in the water.  Even though they are, at this point, still the same species as their wood-prowling cousins, they no longer interact/interbreed because they spend all their time in the water.  But they are still the same species at this point.

Time passes. More genetic mutations occur over a very long period of time. Other changes are simply the result of certain genes that are already part of the bear being more survivable.  Living in the water all the time has fewer size restrictions. Larger bears are thus not at a hunting disadvantage as their forest living cousins are. So they get bigger and bigger as subsequent generations pass.  Bears, which are fatty to begin with, get fattier still because there's no disadvantage to it and those that are fatty can survive in the cold water better.  One day a genetic mutation results in offspring that has no hair.  The water-swimming club-footed, fatty large bear would have died if the mutation had occurred 50,000 years before when they didn't have all the fat on them from the cold water.  But now it's no disadvantage at all.  In fact, this bear can swim even faster thanks to not having hair dragging it down.  Those genes pass onto their off-spring.

Repeat the process over 50 million years and the genetic differences create a new species.  It's still basically a bear but it can no longer breed with its forest-living ancestors.  It doesn't look like a bear though. It's hairless and its arms are clubbed and its tail looks like a big old fin now and its hind legs are just vestigial.  One day, a human spots one in the water and gives it a name -- whale.

Of course, there are also various species that are in-between those stages or have gone off in their own directions.  After all, different environments favor different traits.  We have walrus's, seals, etc.  They took different paths from one another and became their own species.

What evolution is NOT:

Evolution does not talk about how life came to be on Earth in the first place.  There are no theories on how life started on Earth.  There are numerous hypothesis's on it. Maybe amino acids got together in some random way and pretty soon you have the earliest forms of primitive life.  Perhaps the first single celled life forms were seeded from aliens (which only begs the question, where did they come from?).  Maybe God or some other super-natural force created the first spark of life.  We don't know. We may never know (though my bet is that they'll find a way to create life in a lab at some point from inorganic molecules).

Evolution vs. Intelligent Design

Intelligent Design is a new hypothesis (or at least a new name for creationism). It argues that God or an alien force created life on earth and then has directed its "evolution" on earth.   It is not science.  It's not science because nothing in it can be scientifically tested or proven.  By contrast, evolution can and has been tested.  Even before we had DNA tracking technology, evolution had been well documented in countless cases (particularly in the case of Pacific Island birds where we can see a single species of bird turning into hundreds of species of different birds of different genus's in the course of hundreds of thousands of years).  Today, with the ability to look at Mitochondrial DNA we can literally graph where different species evolved from and how long ago it occurred.

What about "Missing Links"?

Discussion of missing links and the like do nothing to disprove evolution, as a theory.  When someone says "There is a hole in the fossil record" one might say "Well of course there is."  Missing links were more interesting before mitochondrial DNA research became widespread.  Barring a time machine, no one can say for 100% that evolution is how we have all the different types of animals we have today.  But it is, by far, the strongest explaination we have. 

A new episode of PowerUser.TV is now available.  The recently launched podcast site is a team effort between WinCustomize.com and Neowin.net. The new episode covers the recent controversy with Grand Theft Auto, some views on Internet Explorer 7 beta 1, and the demise of OS/2.

This October will be the 12th year that I've run a C-class corporation.  That means stockholders and what not.  As a result, I have long been familiar with the rights and priviledges of stock holders, even minority ones.

In 12 years of business, I don't think anyone could find a single disgruntled business partner.  That is, in 12 years, no one we've worked with has ever expressed any dissatisfaction with how they were treated. So even though we're "evil capitalists" I think we've tried to be ethical, evil, capitalists.

But what if we started firing people left and right who owned stock? Maybe our reasons were legitimate. But what woudl the rights of the minority shareholder be?

Unlike public corporations, private corporations (closely held corporations) do have to tip toe a bit on how they treat their shareholders. The majority shareholders have to treat minority holders "fairly", "honestly", and "openly".  It is called the "fiduciary" duty.  Officers, board of directors, are even more liable -- legally -- to treat minority holders fairly.

The courts have ruled already on what happens to private corporations who violate these rules.  The relief has included:

· Dissolution of the corporation;

· Ordering a buy-out of the minority shares;

· Appointment of a provisional director, custodian or receiver;

· Rescinding corporate acts unfair to the minority;

· Awarding damages to minority shareholders.

Many private corporations have discovered that they cannot just walk over minority holders. Having 51% control of a company, for instance, doesn't give you the ability to go hog-wild.  As distasteful as it often is for majority shareholders, major corporate decisions have to be documented, minutes included from meetings, with minority share holders.  I couldn't, for instance, simply terminate a significant shareholder of the company without a formalized vote and ample documentation (heck, I can't even fire employees without ample documentation).

The best route to take with shareholders is to just set your company up with a formalized ethical business practices.  Individual actions, even ones that the officers feel are perfectly just and right, can be interpreted to be unethical and judged illegal. That is why openness with shareholders is key.  Document. Document. Document.  And openness between shareholders.

Software patents are the devil. Let me get that out of the way.  My day job is writing commercial software so it's not just open-source people who don't like software patents.  Software patents are incredibly prone to abuse and are really only of use to companies with deep pockets to enforce their patent.

In 1995, Stardock considered getting a software patent.  It had come up with a way to embed web-based content into the desktop.  So users would be able to have pieces of their desktop wallpaper be displaying information and data from the Internet via web portals in the desktop itself.  This was 3 years before Active Desktop made its debut.  But as we started to go through the patent process, we realized that it would be incredibly expensive to enforce because the patent office itself was incredibly backward technologically. They didn't understand what we were trying to patent so enforcing the patent against violators would have been tricky.

Software patents can also have a chilling effect on innovation.  For example, imagine if Stardock had patented the technology behind WindowBlinds.  Windows XP would have had to license it from Stardock or fight Stardock's patent (ironically, Microsoft went ahead and patented their uxtheme implementation despite the fact that it's the same as what WindowBlinds does but we don't care as long as they don't try to enforce their patent). 

Not having software patents doesn't hurt intellectual property rights.  Patents are just one form of protection.  There is still copyright and there's trade secrets.  Admittedly, trade secrets are tougher in software because some companies will run people's software through a decompiler to see how it works and can make a copy of it that way. 

No system is perfect and in a world with "one-click purchase" patents and other such nonsense, I think we have to pick with lesser of two evils.

Thanks to a new hack, PC users can now run the beta of MacOS X for X86 on their standard PC.  The first set of hacks required the user to run it via VMWare.  But apparently newer hacks allow it to run as a regular operating system on a regular old PC.

Users of X86 MacOS have observed that the OS runs significantly faster on the X86 platform than on the PowerPC platform.  There have been numerous explainations offered for why this is the case.

The fact that the hack exists already raises questions over the future of MacOS.  It will be difficult for Apple to price their Mac-PCs at a premium if their OS runs just fine on a Dell or HP box.  What has traditionally made the Macintosh "special" is its usability features -- the complete package.  The Mac has had a certain mystique that is likely to be harmed if users perceive that the Mac is really just an OS that can run on any old hardware.

Last month is usually the slowest month of the year for skinning, but some skinners were in over-drive last month.  Here are some highlights of top skinners.

#1 Pixtudio.  Pixtudio's release of Sputnik really helped propel the classic skinning team back to its #1 perch.

#2 JJ Ying. JJ Ying's been a skinning madman and was nearly #1 overall thanks to his strong advocacy score. JJ Ying's incredible work such as with Star Wars cursors and TargetWB were outstanding.

#3 Adni18 stayed near the top.  Not as active in July as he's been in the past. His Vista-1 wallpaper was enough to keep him in the top 3 and his Omega 13 WindowBlinds skin released in June was still going strong.

Thank you guys for your excellent skins and themes!

 

Half the fun of a next-generation console comes from the furious rumormongering that precedes its arrival, and the Microsoft Xbox 360 has been no exception. But with the Xbox 360's release date now only three months away, it's time to revisit the platform and see which rumored features have been confirmed, which have been shot down, and which remain firmly in the realm of speculation.

These days, we are so divorced from the concept of barter and trade that we easily overlook that the entire customer/shop relationship is really just a specific type of trade.  At the end of the day, we are all still bartering, still trading.

When someone buys something from a shop, they are trading one thing for another -- money for a product or service.  In a sense, both parties are "Customers".  This realiziation -- that both parties are customers -- had pretty much died by the late 20th century thanks to the rise of mass consumerism and retail businesses.  The 20th century brought us the phrase "the customer is always right".

The 21st century, I suspect, will return people to the realization that being a customer is a two-way street.  Anyone thinking differently need only look at the terms of service of World of Warcraft, for instance.  In that, Blizzard can revoke your service at any time should you violate any of their rules.

WinCustomize operates much the same way.  Not often, but occasionally, a user will aggravate us to the point where we'll forcibly refund them.  Or looked at from another point of view, we demand a refund from the customer.  That is, we demand they stop using our service and hand back the money they paid to use it. 

Such an instance came up today and motivated me to write this.  They believed, wrongly, that simply because they had purchased a WinCustomize subscription that they had the right to comment and post on the forums.  That is not the case at all.  When someone purchases a subscription they are trading money for a very specific set of services -- unlimited bandwidth use, a personal page, the skin browser, etc.  Being able to post on the forums or make comments is related to one's user access (click on any profile and you will see that there is Access class and User Level.  They are distinct. 

This particular user had lost his posting priviledges due to repeated (and I mean REPEATED) instances of abusive behavior on the forums and news.  He was in the process of getting back his access (we generally give second chances to users who have contributed to the various skin libraries here) when he started emailing us personally with various demands including removing all his skins/themes/etc.  At which point he got his wish but lost his "second chance".  And at that point, having tired of his personal attacks in email, I decided we'd "Refund" him his WC subscription and exile him so that we wouldn't have to deal with him.

The point being, being a customer is a two-way street.  When you buy something, you are making a specific trade. Typically money for a very explicitly listed set of goods and or services.  Too often, especially on-line, people think that their exchange of money implicitly gives them the right to behave rudely.  Such is not the case.  And just as a customer is inclined to demand a refund for payment towards a service if the provider is repeatedly rude to them, so to can the service provider terminate the relationship with the "customer".

The September issue of Computer Games Magazine has a pretty good preview of Galactic Civilizations II and the direction we're going.  It should be at a newstand in North America right about now.

WinCustomize and Neowin have teamed up to produce PowerUser.TV, a technology-focused podcast with the power user in mind. Hosted by Kristin Hatcher, the show will cover topics of interest to the tech user. Shows will consist of three segments of 9-12 minutes per segment, and will air every Friday. The show will cover everything from A to Z in the tech world, an will also contain exclusive interviews with the movers and shakers of the personal computing world.

Links:
View: PowerUser.tv Homepage
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