It says "System executes shutdown and reboot (once)". This whole step is the process that creates the snapshot, and from the description and from the picture it seemed clear to me that this process was not repeated every reboot.
I don't see the point in specifying "(once)" if it's going to happen every time it reboots.
But if the restoration is more likely to occur with harmful mutations, then it has the effect of steering towards beneficial ones.
That doesn't make any sense. How would the restoration process distinguish between harmful and beneficial mutations? I think someone's anthropomorphizing the process.
They discovered that the proteins were correcting any imbalance imposed on them through artificial mutations, constantly restoring the chain to working order.
This is describing a self-repair mechanism.
What we have found is that certain kinds of biological structures exist that are able to steer the process of evolution toward improved fitness.
RESTORING a damaged structure is not the same as STEERING the process of evolution, in fact what is being described is a feedback loop that slows down evolution. It's fairly straightforward to see how this can have evolved: if a section of DNA encodes a gene that is easily made inoperative through minor changes, then an organism in which these changes happen less often is more likely to survive.
This is no different than (say) biological structures that regulate the temperature of the genitals, reducing the chance of damage to DNA caused by higher temperatures. Like the scrotum.
This is an interesting mechanism, but it doesn't significantly change the model.
Then you should try Vista. It runs ActiveX low-priv [...]
[...] in a porous sandbox that has had several holes documented already.
A remote execute exploit that has to be followed by a well known and more-or-less unfixable privilege escalation exploit is not much of an improvement over a straight remote execute exploit.
and has all of XP SP2's "are you really sure you want to run this?" prompts too.
All those do is train users to approve security dialogs.
Worse, Apple seems to have gotten sucked into the stupid dialogs too.
And people who should know better, such as the folks working on Mozilla browsers, are getting on the same Microsoftian bandwagon.
1. They're taking a snapshot of the system that was made when you hibernated, and restoring that snapshot. 2. Next time you shut down it restores the same snapshot you made the first time, after your original clean boot.
The only real issue I see is that your file system cache (and any other file system state) now contains garbage, and will need to be invalidated (NOT FLUSHED). If the cache was left out of the original snapshot then just remounting the file system from scratch should solve that. This isn't really booting (you'll need to repeat the whole process after just about any time you modify system state, including a lot of things like registry changes), but it's also not specific to Windows and should DTRT with Linux, etc...
Why has backward compatibility trumped security for 8 years?
"Microsoft: putting the 'backwards' into 'backward compatibility'."
When Microsoft abandons ActiveX and other technologies that run unsandboxed binaries from random websites, then I'll start taking their claim that they care about security seriously.
The competing companies will even benefit from free advertising since Lego company advertising will effectively promote companies that simply call their product Legos.
Is the decision about the *shape* of the toys, or the *name* of the toys?
So, how much spam does everyone get each day on average?
Well, according to my mail logs, my mail server that currently provides mail service for myself in the past 8 hours:
Has blocked 2879 messages, based simply on the IP address, using RBLs. Has blocked 1013 messages, based on some early tests in mail delivery. Has passed 176 messages on for further filtering, with my address. I haven't checked how many were to my wife or to invalid addresses. Typically that's several hundred an hour.
The next level of filtering:
Dropped 18 messages completely. Filed 127 messages in the "probable spam" box, where they will be deleted within a week. Delivered 31 messages to my home server.
Of those messages, about half of those were filed as "spam" by Apple's Mail.app.
People don't upgrade their operating systems, unless the operating system offers to itself. They get a new computer with a new operating system.
If that was true, nobody would be running Linux, because to a first approximation zero percent of all PCs come with Linux installed.
Some past distributions maintained their own kernel forks, where they just implemented bug fixes and updated just a few components, retaining a stable ABI/API.
For long enough for it to matter, falling further and further behind the Linux "we don't maintain a stable API, sometimes we break it deliberately" kernel?
Name one.
It's been a few years since I've seen one.
Dude, I've been looking for a NeXT-style linux distro for 15 years. I've got the original GNUstep CD, the one that was just source code and libraries, right here... from 1996. It never evolved into a distro. The Linux world was already headed towards emulating Windows in Gnome and KDE.
You're saying you've seen one that doesn't just look like NeXT. One that works like NeXT. One that REALLY works that way?
OK, fine, you live in the world where a 5 year old driver works on a current version of Linux, or a new driver works on a 5 year old version of Linux, but my Wintendo using current cards in a 10 year old version of Windows is impossible, and where people didn't get totally pissed off because Vista broke because their video card or sound card.
I'd love to visit it.
And I don't even know what you mean by "Some had a idea of using a kernel and having stable ABI/APIs like Windows/OS X etc." because the kernel APIs aren't up to the distro, they're up to the Linux kernel guys. That would be "Imaginary Linux", yesno?
I guess these distros that you're talking about that were exactly like NeXTstep and OS X are imaginary too. It's for sure that I haven't seen one. And I've been looking.
You said that Perl, C++, and Java "suck the most", and that Lisp and Smalltalk are "good languages".
Um, yes? Good doesn't mean "best".
Yeah, you know better than all the rest of us working programmers out there, we're just stupid sheep for picking such lousy languages
Don't be deliberately daft. If you're a "working programmer" you know that "working programmers" don't get to pick the languages that are going to be used for a project. I'm working on software right now that uses C++ and Perl components. Not because I like them, but because they're what the rest of the project is using. That doesn't change the fact that the whole project would have been a lot better using languages that were well adapted to the problems that we're actually dealing with.
But, yes, I do know better than most programmers, because I've worked with more languages and systems than most programmers. My first job was in COBOL, I've written code in Fortran, Forth, Ratfor, Postscript, Lisp, Java, Javascript, SQL, DBLI, blah blah blah blah... that doesn't make me smart or them stupid, it just means I've got a broader perspective.
The idea that broad experience makes me unqualified to comment because I'm not some kind of ideal "average joe" is a lot more arrogant than anything I've written here.
I know which ones are *worst*. Which is the point I was making, not that Lisp or Smalltalk are the best, but that they (and most other modern languages) are better than C++ or Perl.
Or is it just possible that they're right and you don't see the whole picture?
About as likely as the possibility that Fortran was the best programming language in the '80s.
What makes a programming language popular involves a lot of things that have nothing to do with the quality of the language itself.
If bad design was all that relevant to success, Microsoft would have gone out of business 20 years ago.
Here is my experience with brand new wacom tablet devices: I just plugged it in and it immediately worked under Linux.
I wasn't talking about Wacom in particular, I was using them as an example of a piece of hardware that is likely to require drivers and/or software that isn't already bundled with Linux.
And I'm not even talking about "proprietary drivers". If the hardware is new, it doesn't matter if the manufacturer has released the driver source or not if your Linux version doesn't include them. You still have to be able to install them.
And dkms doesn't deal with the fact that the Linux kernel APIs (let alone the ABIs) are deliberately not kept stable, so any driver has a restricted window in which it will work. OS X had that problem up through Jaguar, and the stable APIs in Jaguar were a huge relief. THe intel transition produced another little storm of broken drivers, and hardware turned into deadware, and that caused quite a bit of unhappiness. Manu of the user-visible problems in Vista were due to Microsoft changing the driver API for the first time since Windows 2000, and that's been one of the things that's sold people on risking the switch to Linux or OS X.
I'm running Windows 2000 on my Wintendo. That was released in 1999, and hasn't been supported in years, but apart from Bluetooth devices pretty much every third party driver has Just Worked. Mac OS doesn't have that big a window of support, but I have plugged in drivers from this year in my Mac running Panther (released in 2003, over 5 years ago) and they worked.
Would a 5 year old Linux system work with a driver released in 2008? What would you need to do to make it work?
Currently, the last remaining one that uses packaging similar (although not as movable like on OS X), http://www.gobolinux.org/
Looking at GoboLinux, it doesn't look even vaguely similar to the NeXTstep style bundles in OS X. It's a linkfarm model, which is also a useful approach, but it's not what I'm talking about.
Microsoft is all about speeding up rare but high visibility operations (like precaching programs, and shortcutting reboot time) regardless of whether it actually makes the user more productive (yeh, Word starts up faster, but it doesn't run faster, and that video mastering you were running in the background is swapping to death because it's got to compete with copies of a dozen apps you haven't used in a week reserving space in RAM).
I see nothing wrong with package management on Linux OSes. If you do, feel free to give input.
OK, let's say Wacom comes out with a new tablet and wants to include Linux support, here's how the user experience is going to be:
Windows: insert the CD (doubleclick on autorun.exe if you have autorun turned off), click "OK" on the license, plug in your tablet.
Mac: insert the CD and doubleclick on the driver.pkg file, slick "OK" on the license, plug in your tablet.
Linux: If you're using the latest version of Ubuntu, su to root then run "setup.sh" in a terminal. If that fails, follow the Debian instructions below.
If you have a Red Hat or SUSE System, open up a terminal and type "rpm -gibberish", unless it's RHEL X.Y or later, in which case you run "yum -gibberish". If you have a kernel older than 2.Y, you need to upgrade to 2.Z, then run "yum -gibberish". If you're using Fedora, you need to use this other gibberish.
If you're using a Debian system, run "dpkg -gibberish", unless it's Ubuntu later than A.B or "Freaky Comet", then you don't need to install the drivers, except for E, F, and G... you need to run THIS install script and
If you're using an EeePC, rotsa ruck.
Note, if the CD in your package is version P.Q or earlier, you need to download an updated image...
And that's assuming Wacom's willing to include 14 different sets of RPMs and DEBs for the most recent release of a half dozen of the most popular Linux distros.
many Linux distributions and some have implemented different packaging models (including those implementing ones similar to OS X)
I've been looking for one like that. Haven't found one yet. URL?
That's more or less how the Sonnet G3 processor upgrade for the Powermac 7200 worked. They used the motherbord as an I/O coprocessor and did all the heavy lifting on what's basically a complete G3 on a PCI card.
Slashdot Mirror
It says "System executes shutdown and reboot (once)". This whole step is the process that creates the snapshot, and from the description and from the picture it seemed clear to me that this process was not repeated every reboot.
I don't see the point in specifying "(once)" if it's going to happen every time it reboots.
But if the restoration is more likely to occur with harmful mutations, then it has the effect of steering towards beneficial ones.
That doesn't make any sense. How would the restoration process distinguish between harmful and beneficial mutations? I think someone's anthropomorphizing the process.
That doesn't match the description: if you look at the diagram it claims that the process of creating the hibernate image is done once only.
This is describing a self-repair mechanism.
RESTORING a damaged structure is not the same as STEERING the process of evolution, in fact what is being described is a feedback loop that slows down evolution. It's fairly straightforward to see how this can have evolved: if a section of DNA encodes a gene that is easily made inoperative through minor changes, then an organism in which these changes happen less often is more likely to survive.
This is no different than (say) biological structures that regulate the temperature of the genitals, reducing the chance of damage to DNA caused by higher temperatures. Like the scrotum.
This is an interesting mechanism, but it doesn't significantly change the model.
Then you should try Vista. It runs ActiveX low-priv [...]
[...] in a porous sandbox that has had several holes documented already.
A remote execute exploit that has to be followed by a well known and more-or-less unfixable privilege escalation exploit is not much of an improvement over a straight remote execute exploit.
and has all of XP SP2's "are you really sure you want to run this?" prompts too.
All those do is train users to approve security dialogs.
Worse, Apple seems to have gotten sucked into the stupid dialogs too.
And people who should know better, such as the folks working on Mozilla browsers, are getting on the same Microsoftian bandwagon.
What it looks like they're doing:
1. They're taking a snapshot of the system that was made when you hibernated, and restoring that snapshot.
2. Next time you shut down it restores the same snapshot you made the first time, after your original clean boot.
The only real issue I see is that your file system cache (and any other file system state) now contains garbage, and will need to be invalidated (NOT FLUSHED). If the cache was left out of the original snapshot then just remounting the file system from scratch should solve that. This isn't really booting (you'll need to repeat the whole process after just about any time you modify system state, including a lot of things like registry changes), but it's also not specific to Windows and should DTRT with Linux, etc...
Why has backward compatibility trumped security for 8 years?
"Microsoft: putting the 'backwards' into 'backward compatibility'."
When Microsoft abandons ActiveX and other technologies that run unsandboxed binaries from random websites, then I'll start taking their claim that they care about security seriously.
OK, I don't speak Dutch, but...
The competing companies will even benefit from free advertising since Lego company advertising will effectively promote companies that simply call their product Legos.
Is the decision about the *shape* of the toys, or the *name* of the toys?
Ma ba na em num en ba mu fu shi ba fu nam.
So, how much spam does everyone get each day on average?
Well, according to my mail logs, my mail server that currently provides mail service for myself in the past 8 hours:
Has blocked 2879 messages, based simply on the IP address, using RBLs.
Has blocked 1013 messages, based on some early tests in mail delivery.
Has passed 176 messages on for further filtering, with my address. I haven't checked how many were to my wife or to invalid addresses. Typically that's several hundred an hour.
The next level of filtering:
Dropped 18 messages completely.
Filed 127 messages in the "probable spam" box, where they will be deleted within a week.
Delivered 31 messages to my home server.
Of those messages, about half of those were filed as "spam" by Apple's Mail.app.
That's pretty low by my standards. Good work.
...it's no surprise that they're trying it in RL.
Rename the product, make some minor changes in the UI, it worked so well for Windows Me.
People don't upgrade their operating systems, unless the operating system offers to itself. They get a new computer with a new operating system.
If that was true, nobody would be running Linux, because to a first approximation zero percent of all PCs come with Linux installed.
Some past distributions maintained their own kernel forks, where they just implemented bug fixes and updated just a few components, retaining a stable ABI/API.
For long enough for it to matter, falling further and further behind the Linux "we don't maintain a stable API, sometimes we break it deliberately" kernel?
Name one.
It's been a few years since I've seen one.
Dude, I've been looking for a NeXT-style linux distro for 15 years. I've got the original GNUstep CD, the one that was just source code and libraries, right here... from 1996. It never evolved into a distro. The Linux world was already headed towards emulating Windows in Gnome and KDE.
You're saying you've seen one that doesn't just look like NeXT. One that works like NeXT. One that REALLY works that way?
Name it.
OK, fine, you live in the world where a 5 year old driver works on a current version of Linux, or a new driver works on a 5 year old version of Linux, but my Wintendo using current cards in a 10 year old version of Windows is impossible, and where people didn't get totally pissed off because Vista broke because their video card or sound card.
I'd love to visit it.
And I don't even know what you mean by "Some had a idea of using a kernel and having stable ABI/APIs like Windows/OS X etc." because the kernel APIs aren't up to the distro, they're up to the Linux kernel guys. That would be "Imaginary Linux", yesno?
I guess these distros that you're talking about that were exactly like NeXTstep and OS X are imaginary too. It's for sure that I haven't seen one. And I've been looking.
*sigh*
It's not just one word, you came right out of the starting blocks ragging on me about my choice of "the best" languages.
And now you're raving on about how "everyone" is this, that, or the other thing.
But, whatever, you "win". Ciao.
You said that Perl, C++, and Java "suck the most", and that Lisp and Smalltalk are "good languages".
Um, yes? Good doesn't mean "best".
Yeah, you know better than all the rest of us working programmers out there, we're just stupid sheep for picking such lousy languages
Don't be deliberately daft. If you're a "working programmer" you know that "working programmers" don't get to pick the languages that are going to be used for a project. I'm working on software right now that uses C++ and Perl components. Not because I like them, but because they're what the rest of the project is using. That doesn't change the fact that the whole project would have been a lot better using languages that were well adapted to the problems that we're actually dealing with.
But, yes, I do know better than most programmers, because I've worked with more languages and systems than most programmers. My first job was in COBOL, I've written code in Fortran, Forth, Ratfor, Postscript, Lisp, Java, Javascript, SQL, DBLI, blah blah blah blah... that doesn't make me smart or them stupid, it just means I've got a broader perspective.
The idea that broad experience makes me unqualified to comment because I'm not some kind of ideal "average joe" is a lot more arrogant than anything I've written here.
Yeah, you know which languages are best.
I know which ones are *worst*. Which is the point I was making, not that Lisp or Smalltalk are the best, but that they (and most other modern languages) are better than C++ or Perl.
Or is it just possible that they're right and you don't see the whole picture?
About as likely as the possibility that Fortran was the best programming language in the '80s.
What makes a programming language popular involves a lot of things that have nothing to do with the quality of the language itself.
If bad design was all that relevant to success, Microsoft would have gone out of business 20 years ago.
Here is my experience with brand new wacom tablet devices: I just plugged it in and it immediately worked under Linux.
I wasn't talking about Wacom in particular, I was using them as an example of a piece of hardware that is likely to require drivers and/or software that isn't already bundled with Linux.
And I'm not even talking about "proprietary drivers". If the hardware is new, it doesn't matter if the manufacturer has released the driver source or not if your Linux version doesn't include them. You still have to be able to install them.
And dkms doesn't deal with the fact that the Linux kernel APIs (let alone the ABIs) are deliberately not kept stable, so any driver has a restricted window in which it will work. OS X had that problem up through Jaguar, and the stable APIs in Jaguar were a huge relief. THe intel transition produced another little storm of broken drivers, and hardware turned into deadware, and that caused quite a bit of unhappiness. Manu of the user-visible problems in Vista were due to Microsoft changing the driver API for the first time since Windows 2000, and that's been one of the things that's sold people on risking the switch to Linux or OS X.
I'm running Windows 2000 on my Wintendo. That was released in 1999, and hasn't been supported in years, but apart from Bluetooth devices pretty much every third party driver has Just Worked. Mac OS doesn't have that big a window of support, but I have plugged in drivers from this year in my Mac running Panther (released in 2003, over 5 years ago) and they worked.
Would a 5 year old Linux system work with a driver released in 2008? What would you need to do to make it work?
Currently, the last remaining one that uses packaging similar (although not as movable like on OS X), http://www.gobolinux.org/
Looking at GoboLinux, it doesn't look even vaguely similar to the NeXTstep style bundles in OS X. It's a linkfarm model, which is also a useful approach, but it's not what I'm talking about.
I like Lisp syntax. I like Smalltalk syntax. I got no complaints about either.
Microsoft is all about speeding up rare but high visibility operations (like precaching programs, and shortcutting reboot time) regardless of whether it actually makes the user more productive (yeh, Word starts up faster, but it doesn't run faster, and that video mastering you were running in the background is swapping to death because it's got to compete with copies of a dozen apps you haven't used in a week reserving space in RAM).
I see nothing wrong with package management on Linux OSes. If you do, feel free to give input.
OK, let's say Wacom comes out with a new tablet and wants to include Linux support, here's how the user experience is going to be:
Windows: insert the CD (doubleclick on autorun.exe if you have autorun turned off), click "OK" on the license, plug in your tablet.
Mac: insert the CD and doubleclick on the driver .pkg file, slick "OK" on the license, plug in your tablet.
Linux: If you're using the latest version of Ubuntu, su to root then run "setup.sh" in a terminal. If that fails, follow the Debian instructions below.
If you have a Red Hat or SUSE System, open up a terminal and type "rpm -gibberish", unless it's RHEL X.Y or later, in which case you run "yum -gibberish". If you have a kernel older than 2.Y, you need to upgrade to 2.Z, then run "yum -gibberish". If you're using Fedora, you need to use this other gibberish.
If you're using a Debian system, run "dpkg -gibberish", unless it's Ubuntu later than A.B or "Freaky Comet", then you don't need to install the drivers, except for E, F, and G... you need to run THIS install script and
If you're using an EeePC, rotsa ruck.
Note, if the CD in your package is version P.Q or earlier, you need to download an updated image...
And that's assuming Wacom's willing to include 14 different sets of RPMs and DEBs for the most recent release of a half dozen of the most popular Linux distros.
many Linux distributions and some have implemented different packaging models (including those implementing ones similar to OS X)
I've been looking for one like that. Haven't found one yet. URL?
That's more or less how the Sonnet G3 processor upgrade for the Powermac 7200 worked. They used the motherbord as an I/O coprocessor and did all the heavy lifting on what's basically a complete G3 on a PCI card.
No, really, could it?
The good programmers already have PLENTY of GOOD languages to choose from
Unfortunately, they also have plenty of bad languages to choose from, and they tend to choose the ones that suck the most.
Perl. C++. Java.
Good languages like Lisp and Smalltalk get no respect. Attempts to graft C/Pascal syntax on Lisp and Smalltalk get no respect.
I like to see new languages tried. Maybe one that doesn't actually suck will catch on.
If I could be bothered to read past TFA and look at the original paper
You could try reading for content.
There were some studies in the '70s. There have not been any other studies since then until now.
That doesn't mean they're extrapolating 3 years of data over 30 years, it means they're doing the first studies on the subject in 30 years.
Sheesh.
This isn't a drug, it's a naturally occurring mutation that's apparently common in parts of Europe.