But really, we might call it natural selection for the media industry. More on that later.

If you were just a baby when the movie "Ghostbusters" came out, you’d be about 23 today and most likely immersed in a digital reality. And there’s a chance, a small one, you remember life before the computer mouse.

I wasn’t much older than you, just seven, and the joke made in that movie was lost on me then. It’s a short joke, very quick and subtle and intended for a tiny audience:

Janine Melnitz:  You’re very handy, I can tell. I bet you like to read a lot, too.
Dr. Egon Spengler:     Print is dead.

Twenty-three years and countless new print publications ago.

I’ve made no secret about my skepticism that print is not just alive, but thriving in its own way, and the crowd you would expect to disagree did disagree. Not to pigeon-hole anybody.

And this opinion of mine runs directly counter to my current profession. I’m an online writer. Why that is doesn’t matter. Let’s go on with an examination of the print medium.

Before and since my diatribes on the vitality of print, there have been somewhat harrowing announcements from papers-of-record and from prominent magazines that their print doors are shutting while online doors are opening.

The San Francisco Chronicle would be the most resonant example, not to mention Perfect 10′s wailing in court about the death of their business model in an age abundant online porn.

The truth is that for longer than many of us can remember, the publishing industry was not only difficult and cost-prohibitive to get into, but the vast majority of new publications failed. This was the case long before the Internet.

Of course it makes sense from a cost and risk perspective to go online. It takes away a lot of headaches. Print is expensive and only a few can survive.

But it is lucrative, even still for those that do it right. Or perhaps Rupert Murdoch just spent $5 billion on a brand name instead of a newspaper (admittedly, Dow Jones is more than the Wall Street Journal, but ask people on the street which they’ve heard more about).

Part of the argument against the death of print is that there is still very much a need for local publications, especially in smaller regions, but also in places where paper costs nearly nothing to purchase and is easier and less complicated than a device you have to make sure is charged and functioning. So the value is there, in the niches and practicality of newspaper reach.

Another part of that argument is that for the past few decades (the decades before the digital age), the print world has been saturated by expensive glossy magazines with especially narrow niches born and failing on a regular basis. Even then, many of them succeeded because there was nowhere else to get that particular information in that much detail.

And then, the Internet happened. Niche was cheaper, readily available, and earnestly sought by niche enthusiasts.

Think of it in Darwinian terms: a habitat is so saturated with competition that some competition is ultimately forced to leave; adapt a niche, or perish. Just like there are now humans as well as chimps, there will be print as well as Web.

No comment on which is the chimp.

So, Henry Blodgett announcing that "newspapers are screwed" makes me think that maybe someone a couple million years ago looked at the gorilla with the same sympathy. But also I would think that, Blodgett being a financial mind, he would understand the Darwinistic culture of things in the market.

He might also note the saturation that is currently seeping through the seams of the Internet – everybody’s a reporter these days.

But one thing online reporters and publications will have trouble taking from the mainstream print media (believe me, I know – who do you think Larry Page and Sergey Brin are more willing to grant interviews to?) is the mainstream print media’s (i.e., the papers of record) authority in the journalism world.

When anybody can be a reporter, nobody takes reporters seriously, which leaves the sensible portion of the population to look towards the established truth-revealers. (This is a different topic, of course, than the value of printed books, which, as long as there are farts as old as I am, always will be preferred over a lighted, electricity-powered screen that’s hard on the eyes and less reliable and metamorphic – you know, birdcage liners and such.)

So what I’m trying to say in the above paragraph, in my long-winded way, is that newspapers carry a certain gravitas beyond even broadcast anchors that people see as credible and more valuable than just about any online source. (Just watch your professor’s face, young-uns, when you choose a Wikipedia or even Huffington Post source over the Washington Post.)

"What prospects then for the handful of high-quality producers of journalism who survive to ring in this future? Far greater pricing power. More money," says strategic analyst Seamus McCauley on his Virtual Economics blog.

Yes, because the specialists reign supreme in competitive environments.  

Obituaries are just one aspect of the site. Other categories include “fun,” “love,” “money,” “body,” “goals,” and “LifeMap.” Eons also features the hilariously named cRANKy “age relevant search.” This tool proves the site isn’t for people who just spend their days waiting for a visit from the grim reaper – among the top ten searches is the Shelby Mustang.

Back to the obits section, though. The main page features notable and/or celebrity deaths. A “Local Obits (Beta Preview)” offers a searchable database of over 77 million obituaries. Members can “write the full life story,” “add a memory journal,” or “add a photo” of the deceased. There are also “Tributes,” “Loss & Grieving,” and “Send a Gift” sections, but my personal favorite is the “Way to Go” page.

“A little morbid humor never hurt anyone,” it begins. It’s very similar to the Darwin Awards – the top story right now is about “a 24-year-old who died Sunday underwent a liposuction procedure in the basement of an unlicenced doctor’s home.

Don’t write Eons off if you’re under 50 – the founder and CEO, Jeff Taylor, values you, too. In the “About Us” section, he encourages young people to join him “in being an evangelist for Eons and challenge yourself to see how many friends and family you can inspire to live the biggest life possible.” I’m not sure that I can count myself among the converted, but I like his site.

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It’s usually much more pleasant than fighting traffic and trying to find a place to park.

Strangely, the last four or five times I’ve taken the train, I’ve happened to sit next to someone using A Mac. That’s strange because the percentage of Macs sold would seem to make that statistically unlikely, so I wonder whether demographics would show a higher concentration of Mac use in certain areas. Maybe professionals (who are more apt to be riding the train from the ‘burbs) buy more Macs than blue collar folks? Maybe the East and West coasts are Mac friendly and the heartland prefers PC’s? Maybe it’s even that Red/Blue dichotomy: liberal, artsy types vote Democratic and buy Macs? I don’t know.. I only know that I’ve seen more Macs than I should. I also saw more Macs than I expected to see while walking around LinuxWorld earlier this year.

Mac should be a popular platform for the geeky crowd. It’s BSD based, and Apple releases source code through http://www.opendarwin.org/. What’s not to like? Gorgeous interface, run BSD ports with ease, compile almost all Linux software without problems, even run X if you want. There’s the perception that Macs are too expensive, but considering all that you get, I don’t think they really are. Sure, you might be paying a slight premium, but unless you are the type that buys the cheapest parts and self-assembles, so what? And you get a LOT of nice software bundled in. OK, OK, it’s not ALL open source, so if that gets you all riled up, I can understand you not wanting those apps.

But there seems to be more to it than that. Some folks over on the Linux side of things seem to have great animosity toward Mac, and disparage it quite cuttingly? Why is that? Is there some insecurity there, or are they just ignorant of what Mac OS X is? In some ways, Mac OS X is similar to Red Hat: they are offering their version of an OS that you can get source for. In Apple’s case, they are also bundling in some apps to sweeten the deal and of course are providing specific hardware to run it on. That’s something that some people see as a weakness, but I see as strength: Windows and Linux both have to deal with a terrible mess of drivers for a multitude of hardware. Microsoft of course gets more information from the hardware vendors more easily, but they still have to deal with the problems that can arise when you mix all this stuff together.

Apple, on the other hand, gets to pick their hardware carefully. Their OS doesn’t have to handle any old piece of junk that comes along. That’s a model that a Linux vendor could follow if it wanted too: build a specific piece of hardware and tailor the OS to it. Sure, other people could compete, but if your engineering savvy is better, you’ll succeed even though they could reverse engineer and duplicate everything you do.

That’s all Apple is really doing. I don’t see any rational reason for the rancor expressed by some of the open source community.

See Point, Counterpoint: Mac OS X Is Great for Fortysomething Unix Hackers also.

A.P. Lawrence provides SCO Unix and Linux consulting services http://www.pcunix.com

Genetics do not explain the present form of life, so genetic mutations can’t explain their origin. That is the contention of author Giuseppe Sermonti, whose book Why is a Fly Not a Horse? has been translated into English and made available from Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and bookstores everywhere.

The announcement for Dr. Sermonti’s book comes on the anniversary of the day John Scopes was found guilty of teaching Darwinism, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, in a Tennessee school in 1925. That event led to the Scopes Monkey Trial, where lawyer Clarence Darrow faced a prosecution aided by William Jennings Bryan in what has become a famous court case.

Eighty years later, Dr. Sermonti, a retired Professor of Genetics at the University of Perugia, contends examples exist in nature that go against Darwin’s theories. “He shows that there are more things in life than are dreamt of in Darwinian philosophy,” said biochemist Michael Behe, author of Darwin’s Black Box, in the announcement.

As might be expected, Dr. Sermonti has drawn criticism online for being a creationist. A web search for his name turns up an assortment of his own comments along with the usual jeers and catcalls. So is the author an anti-Darwin crank, overexposed to mystical ideas, or just a scientist who found an emptiness in his profession and seeks to find a greater purpose to life?

Questioning a line of thought or belief, whether it is Mr. Darrow or Dr. Sermonti asking the questions, should be encouraged. That’s the only way to get answers in life.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.

This isn’t the first time Kansas has visited the issue either. They’ve already changed the rules on teaching evolution twice since 1999 depending entirely on the political ideology of the board members.

The Discovery Institute leads the legions against the Darwin’s evolution. They say at the very least that intelligent design should be given fair consideration. Discovery Institute geophysicist Stephen C. Meyer calls efforts to change standards “an academic freedom proposal.”

The Institute’s website covers their thoughts on the matter:

2) What is Discovery’s position on proposed revisions to the Kansas science standards?

Discovery Institute supports the Minority Report drafted by members of the Kansas science standards writing committee. The Minority report recommends expanding the information presented to students about biological and chemical evolution by including some of the scientific criticisms of these theories. It also recommends the adoption of a definition of science that is consistent with the definition of science adopted by other states. The Minority Report does not propose teaching intelligent design theory.

The foes of intelligent design are mobilizing and calling in the troops although they refuse to participate in the official examinations by the Kansas State Board of Education. They say it encourages the intelligent design advocates and gives them additional ammunition for their cause.

“Intelligent design has no scientific credibility, but they very effectively market a controversy,” Steven B. Case, head of the Kansas science standards committee told the Washington Post. “They speak well in sound bites. ‘Intelligent design’ is a good one. They never specify a designer.”

John Stith is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

What:

Darwin is FreeBSD for the PowerPC processor (G3 and up actually). It is open source and can be downloaded free of charge from http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/darwin/ (an Apple site). The download is about 120 megs and the installation can’t be easier. If you have ever tried to install Linux you will envy Darwin’s install. It is truly drag and drop (and there’s not even any dragging!). Just double click, select an empty partition and you are in UNIX. I said before that Darwin is the underlying level of OS X. Here is what that means:

As you can tell, Darwin is on the bottom of our chart; this means it controls all the base level OS operations. You can access Darwin in the Terminal.app in OS X (in the Utilities folder). That’s all good but we power users want more. For that we move to why.

Why:

Why not? Well, it isn’t user friendly, has no native GUI (X Windows can be installed but isn’t part of Darwin), can’t run any of your applications, and the list gets longer. What it does, it does well: all UNIX functions. Aqua is beautiful but takes RAM and CPU cycles. That is a waste if you are using your box as a server. OS X has real powerful server tools like Apache built-in, and MySQL and PHP can be installed making OS X a powerful web server. The same server can be run from Darwin without the wasted RAM and CPU cycles that Aqua brings. In fact, Darwin can be your network’s NAT server (for sharing net access). You can have an older G3 serve as your router/firewall/webserver all without paying a dime. Even if you don’t want to use those features there is no easier way to learn UNIX (except using it in the terminal).

How:

Once you run the installer, go up to the startup disk control panel and select the disk (or partition) with Darwin on it. If you don’t want to make it the default disk, just hold Option at startup and select the boot disk at that point (instead of using the startup disk control panel). After a few minutes you will have a blinking cursor; type the following:

root

You will get the following message: “Welcome to Darwin!”. This signifies that you are all logged in and are ready to do anything you choose. Here are the commands I found most useful:

ls = list files in current directory
cd = change directory (cd / takes you to the main directory)
mkdir = make directory, creates folder
pico = opens up pico (a text editor). A file string followed by pico will open that file in pico (Ex: pico /files/test.pl will open a file called test.pl located in the /files directory)

All the OS X directions in my Perl tutorial apply to Darwin (since it is OS X).

To connect to the internet I edited the /etc/iftab file in pico to read:

en0 inet 192.168.1.102 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
en0 inet -DHCP-

The IP address is specified by my router so that will change depending on your setup.

After I was on the net I did an FTP transfer. To connect to an FTP server type:

ftp ftp.servername.TLD (replace TLD with the ending tld)

It will prompt you for a username if necessary and then a password. You can use the cd and ls commands to move around the file tree. Type: get FILENAME to download files and: put PATH/TO/FILE.txt to upload files. Type ? for a list of all commands.

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Jon Gales is a PHP consultant and internet publisher. He writes
Macintosh slanted content for both MacMerc.com and MacDesignOnline.com.
Jon publishes both MobileTracker.net and NewsIsCrappy.com.