DNA Aging, DNA Rejuvenating?
on
Goodbye, Dolly
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· Score: 5, Insightful
If mature animals have "old" DNA, how do their offspring get "young" DNA?
I think of DNA aging as a process of random decay over time, but somehow my old DNA and my wife's old DNA can produce a baby with young DNA.
Does the combination of DNA during sexual reproduction clean up the strands from the parents? Or is something going on in their gonads to clean up their old DNA before packing it into gametes?
There's a biological process here that I haven't heard anyone describe, or even identify. And yes, I want to patent it.
Both Westlaw and Lexis-Nexis are subsidiaries of foreign corporations. Westlaw belongs to Thomson Corporation, which is Canadian. Lexis-Nexis belongs to Reed Elsevier, a UK-Netherlands corporation.
You'd think this would make it easier for legislators to loosen the grip these companies have on public law. But who would lobby for that? The lawyers who have to pay for subscriptions? Hah! Lawyers support any obstacle keeping citizens away from direct contact with the law. The price of a database subscription is, to them, a small price for their exclusive access to the law, and for the dependence upon them by their fellow citizens (if I can so loosely use the honorific, "citizen," to include persons without ready recourse to law).
And by the way, I AM a lawyer, but I don't practice anymore. I prefer writing software, because software systems, unlike legal systems, can be improved with ease and satisfying success.
Fox News showed a magnified view, and you could see from the spiraling contrail that the craft was spinning rapidly before it disintegrated. I'd say it was spinning about 10 revs/sec. around its long axis. Not a tumble, definitely a steady spin. The exact spin rate will be helpful for NASA to determine exactly what the craft's aerodynamic configuration was at that point. To me, it looked like what I'd expect to see if a shuttle lost a wing at Mach 15.
MySQL is faster for simple reads, and therefore a better match for the read-mostly databases that back most websites. PostgreSQL uses versioning for concurrency control, so it scales better with write-often databases. PostgreSQL also has more programming features (triggers, stored procedures, etc.).
But if you're looking for something to replace Microsoft SQL Server on Windows servers, PostgreSQL is probably not your best bet, because it's really a Unix database and still runs on Windows through a Unix-emulation layer.
It's nice to see another veteran here who appreciates TurboPower's tradition of great service, culminating now in open sourcing an unprecedented portfolio of code.
TurboPower has been the class of Delphi's (and BCB's and Kylix's) celebrated aftermarket. But Borland has chosen to sell fewer copies of its products at higher prices, which seems to be working well for Borland but not so well for TurboPower and other aftermarket vendors who are now selling to a smaller market. And with Borland Delphi following Microsoft into.Net, the aftermarket vendors are faced with a difficult transition to a new market with different competitors and different niche needs.
TurboPower's last product is a.Net bar code library, finished but never commercially released, which is going straight to open source. It was written in C#! How will other Delphi component vendors survive when TurboPower couldn't, especially if they have to compete against TurboPower's free products?
I don't see how Delphi can do well if its aftermarket can't thrive. I guess Borland can fall back on its Java products, but it's a shame that the Windows market, which is still the bulk of desktop computing, seems to be capitulating to Microsoft.
I read that many ATMs (automated teller machines, not asynchronous transfer mode) use(d) OS/2 as their software.
I can verify that, as I saw the OS/2 boot screen once after the ATM crashed, eating my card. As a Teamer (Team OS/2 member, for those of you who don't remember the OS Wars before Linux), I was bummed.
More accurately, OS/2 was better than DOS. Lots better. It made a great foundation for my Windows 3.1 and DOS apps during 1993-95, when Microsoft was talking 32-bit but still selling 16-bit. But Microsoft's talk kept the application vendors on the Windows platform, and OS/2's lack of support for 32-bit Winapps was the anchor around its neck.
As a DOS replacement it was awesome. You could have multiple DOS windows open, each with its own CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT. You could use the same clipboard to move data among DOS, Windows, and OS/2 applications. And Presentation Manager's graphical interface was far ahead of Windows 3.1, and superior in some ways to Windows 95.
OS/2 had such great compatibility with DOS and Windows 3.1 that I didn't realize I was looking at OS/2 the first time I saw it. A rep from WordPerfect visited our PC user group and demoed WPWin, and at the end of the demo he said, by the way, we've been running Windows on OS/2, and the crowd of a couple hundred gasped and erupted in applause. Lots of user group members switched to OS/2 after that.
One of IBM's smartest marketing moves was OS/2 for Windows, which replaced your DOS with OS/2 while leaving your Windows configuration intact. It was a painless, beneficial upgrade. But OS/2's fortunes dimmed when it couldn't keep up with the new API that Windows 95 brought along.
Some good, smart people wrote native OS/2 applications, especially for communications. And OS/2 itself was Internet-enabled, with IBM's own web browser, before Windows had any Internet support.
I still have an OS/2 partition that I have to clear off one of these days, after I either figure out how to export the e-mails and faxes in my OS/2 apps, or decide they're no longer relevant. On the other hand, I have enough disk space, so I might just leave that partition as a souvenir. I boot OS/2 every few months and remember how cool it used to be.
AMD will put compatibility ahead of sheer speed. The press release mentions embedded devices, but also demos of 64-bit game and database software. AMD is emphasizing that its 64-bit processor has better backward compatibility than Intel's with 32-bit software, even though its 64-bit mode is slower. This looks to me like a bid for industry support for its x86-64 architecture, hardly a concession of the PC market.
Kernel threads are going to mean more than any other feature to FreeBSD 5. Benchmark performance may not increase that much because of kernel threads, but they'll allow many applications to be ported to FreeBSD. Now, a lot of programs that run on Linux, Solaris, and Windows, can't be ported to FreeBSD because of its inferior threading. Thread-intensive languages (most notoriously, Java) and database servers should be much more comfortable on FreeBSD 5, after it shakes down.
Programs were different then because they had to work around the limitations of the hardware, especially the storage hardware. With a tiny amount of relatively fast RAM, and several very slow tape drives, you had to process all your data sequentially. You'd use merge sorts, from one set of tapes to another, to order and group the raw data. A program never had an entire database accessible all at once. That's why nobody minded the file orientation of COBOL.
Today, a lot of databases fit entirely in RAM, and that trend will continue. When database servers measure their RAM in TBs, they may not even need disk storage except for archives (if they can't use NVRAM). There probably won't be a need to maintain server farms, except maybe to queue/dequeue the I/O for the database server. Something's always the bottleneck.
I honestly don't know why the law profession is still using it, other than the fact that the legal profession seems to stay behind the curve with technology anyways. It seems legal partners are not eager to blow money on IT. If someone could explain it to me, I'd appreciate it.
Reveal Codes. Legal pleadings are highly structured and stictly formatted to conform to court rules governing margins, type size, caption format, page numbering, everything. WordPerfect's Reveal Codes window makes it easier to see exactly how the document is formatted, and to change the formatting in fine detail. With Word, you have to create styles for each formatting rule, and when a document has many styles in it, perhaps copied and pasted from numerous other documents, a formatting problem can be hard to debug. When a pleading has to be filed in 30 minutes, and a footnote has italicized itself sua sponte, you do not want to start debugging styles by trial and error.
The more informed voters we have out there, the better.
And the fewer uninformed voters, the better. And I'm sorry, but anyone who didn't know today was Election Day is not an informed voter.
Saw this one coming
on
Indecision 2002
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· Score: 5, Interesting
The Washington Post reported in August that, while VNS management was blowing sunshine, VNS's programmers were quietly doubting they could finish the system by the non-negotiable deadline of election day. Although this was one of the most significant and closely contested congressional elections in decades, there was no option of falling back on the old system, which made two notoriously erroneous projections in the 2000 presidential election.
Now, if VNS were as good at predicting the outcome of software development projects, as they are at predicting election results... Hmmm, maybe the problem is, they are.
You can get multiple desktops on Windows 95/98/NT/2000 with Control Center from Stardock's Object Desktop suite. Stardock's "virtual desktops" were first available in Object Desktop for OS/2, circa 1995.
Politics in a single-representative district, decided by one-person-one-vote, evolves into head-to-head competition between two political parties. So any proposal for changing the system will be opposed by two interest groups: Democrats and Republicans. I wouldn't bet on change anytime soon.
Well, my cable modem says on the box that it has a max speed of 38 Mbit, well over the 10 Mbit NICs capability. Not very forward thinking...
So if they gave you a 100 Mbit NIC, I guess you'd complain that the 38 Mbit cable modem was "not very forward thinking." No matter what the modem's capacity, or the NIC's capacity, they're not too slow unless your cable Internet connection is saturating them. And it isn't.
From the project's inception on 8/1/01 to the last update on 10/15/02, they collected 64,346 CDs. At that rate of 4,438 CDs per month, they'll finish collecting 1,000,000 sometime in May of 2020.
people are saying they don't hear the shots, or don't hear very loud shots
I don't know where you read that. A witness near the school shooting heard a loud pow, and some people inside a restaurant heard the gunshot near a gas station tonight (if that was the sniper), and several other witnesses reported hearing loud bangs in other attacks. (The Washington Post website has been down for the last couple hours, or I'd find a source or two.)
He may be wearing a cloak of invisibility, but his rifle isn't silent.
Slashdot Mirror
If mature animals have "old" DNA, how do their offspring get "young" DNA?
I think of DNA aging as a process of random decay over time, but somehow my old DNA and my wife's old DNA can produce a baby with young DNA.
Does the combination of DNA during sexual reproduction clean up the strands from the parents? Or is something going on in their gonads to clean up their old DNA before packing it into gametes?
There's a biological process here that I haven't heard anyone describe, or even identify. And yes, I want to patent it.
Both Westlaw and Lexis-Nexis are subsidiaries of foreign corporations. Westlaw belongs to Thomson Corporation, which is Canadian. Lexis-Nexis belongs to Reed Elsevier, a UK-Netherlands corporation.
You'd think this would make it easier for legislators to loosen the grip these companies have on public law. But who would lobby for that? The lawyers who have to pay for subscriptions? Hah! Lawyers support any obstacle keeping citizens away from direct contact with the law. The price of a database subscription is, to them, a small price for their exclusive access to the law, and for the dependence upon them by their fellow citizens (if I can so loosely use the honorific, "citizen," to include persons without ready recourse to law).
And by the way, I AM a lawyer, but I don't practice anymore. I prefer writing software, because software systems, unlike legal systems, can be improved with ease and satisfying success.
The more realistic you make a war game, the less fun it is.
Fox News showed a magnified view, and you could see from the spiraling contrail that the craft was spinning rapidly before it disintegrated. I'd say it was spinning about 10 revs/sec. around its long axis. Not a tumble, definitely a steady spin. The exact spin rate will be helpful for NASA to determine exactly what the craft's aerodynamic configuration was at that point. To me, it looked like what I'd expect to see if a shuttle lost a wing at Mach 15.
MySQL is faster for simple reads, and therefore a better match for the read-mostly databases that back most websites. PostgreSQL uses versioning for concurrency control, so it scales better with write-often databases. PostgreSQL also has more programming features (triggers, stored procedures, etc.).
But if you're looking for something to replace Microsoft SQL Server on Windows servers, PostgreSQL is probably not your best bet, because it's really a Unix database and still runs on Windows through a Unix-emulation layer.
It's nice to see another veteran here who appreciates TurboPower's tradition of great service, culminating now in open sourcing an unprecedented portfolio of code.
.Net, the aftermarket vendors are faced with a difficult transition to a new market with different competitors and different niche needs.
.Net bar code library, finished but never commercially released, which is going straight to open source. It was written in C#! How will other Delphi component vendors survive when TurboPower couldn't, especially if they have to compete against TurboPower's free products?
TurboPower has been the class of Delphi's (and BCB's and Kylix's) celebrated aftermarket. But Borland has chosen to sell fewer copies of its products at higher prices, which seems to be working well for Borland but not so well for TurboPower and other aftermarket vendors who are now selling to a smaller market. And with Borland Delphi following Microsoft into
TurboPower's last product is a
I don't see how Delphi can do well if its aftermarket can't thrive. I guess Borland can fall back on its Java products, but it's a shame that the Windows market, which is still the bulk of desktop computing, seems to be capitulating to Microsoft.
More accurately, OS/2 was better than DOS. Lots better. It made a great foundation for my Windows 3.1 and DOS apps during 1993-95, when Microsoft was talking 32-bit but still selling 16-bit. But Microsoft's talk kept the application vendors on the Windows platform, and OS/2's lack of support for 32-bit Winapps was the anchor around its neck.
As a DOS replacement it was awesome. You could have multiple DOS windows open, each with its own CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT. You could use the same clipboard to move data among DOS, Windows, and OS/2 applications. And Presentation Manager's graphical interface was far ahead of Windows 3.1, and superior in some ways to Windows 95.
OS/2 had such great compatibility with DOS and Windows 3.1 that I didn't realize I was looking at OS/2 the first time I saw it. A rep from WordPerfect visited our PC user group and demoed WPWin, and at the end of the demo he said, by the way, we've been running Windows on OS/2, and the crowd of a couple hundred gasped and erupted in applause. Lots of user group members switched to OS/2 after that.
One of IBM's smartest marketing moves was OS/2 for Windows, which replaced your DOS with OS/2 while leaving your Windows configuration intact. It was a painless, beneficial upgrade. But OS/2's fortunes dimmed when it couldn't keep up with the new API that Windows 95 brought along.
Some good, smart people wrote native OS/2 applications, especially for communications. And OS/2 itself was Internet-enabled, with IBM's own web browser, before Windows had any Internet support.
I still have an OS/2 partition that I have to clear off one of these days, after I either figure out how to export the e-mails and faxes in my OS/2 apps, or decide they're no longer relevant. On the other hand, I have enough disk space, so I might just leave that partition as a souvenir. I boot OS/2 every few months and remember how cool it used to be.
AMD will put compatibility ahead of sheer speed. The press release mentions embedded devices, but also demos of 64-bit game and database software. AMD is emphasizing that its 64-bit processor has better backward compatibility than Intel's with 32-bit software, even though its 64-bit mode is slower. This looks to me like a bid for industry support for its x86-64 architecture, hardly a concession of the PC market.
I'd feel better about this experiment if their starting point weren't a pathogen, especially one that causes urinary tract infections.
We'll know something went terribly wrong if the authors can't present their paper because they keep having to excuse themselves to go to the restroom.
Kernel threads are going to mean more than any other feature to FreeBSD 5. Benchmark performance may not increase that much because of kernel threads, but they'll allow many applications to be ported to FreeBSD. Now, a lot of programs that run on Linux, Solaris, and Windows, can't be ported to FreeBSD because of its inferior threading. Thread-intensive languages (most notoriously, Java) and database servers should be much more comfortable on FreeBSD 5, after it shakes down.
Programs were different then because they had to work around the limitations of the hardware, especially the storage hardware. With a tiny amount of relatively fast RAM, and several very slow tape drives, you had to process all your data sequentially. You'd use merge sorts, from one set of tapes to another, to order and group the raw data. A program never had an entire database accessible all at once. That's why nobody minded the file orientation of COBOL.
Today, a lot of databases fit entirely in RAM, and that trend will continue. When database servers measure their RAM in TBs, they may not even need disk storage except for archives (if they can't use NVRAM). There probably won't be a need to maintain server farms, except maybe to queue/dequeue the I/O for the database server. Something's always the bottleneck.
Now, if VNS were as good at predicting the outcome of software development projects, as they are at predicting election results... Hmmm, maybe the problem is, they are.
You can get multiple desktops on Windows 95/98/NT/2000 with Control Center from Stardock's Object Desktop suite. Stardock's "virtual desktops" were first available in Object Desktop for OS/2, circa 1995.
Politics in a single-representative district, decided by one-person-one-vote, evolves into head-to-head competition between two political parties. So any proposal for changing the system will be opposed by two interest groups: Democrats and Republicans. I wouldn't bet on change anytime soon.
There's a juicy class action waiting here for the right attorney. There are laws against making unauthorized changes to someone's computer system.
The 10 Mbit NICs are cheap, but they're plenty fast for DSL or cable Internet access.
From the project's inception on 8/1/01 to the last update on 10/15/02, they collected 64,346 CDs. At that rate of 4,438 CDs per month, they'll finish collecting 1,000,000 sometime in May of 2020.
I'll check back around then for the Slashback.
I say a regime change is necessary.
I don't know where you read that. A witness near the school shooting heard a loud pow, and some people inside a restaurant heard the gunshot near a gas station tonight (if that was the sniper), and several other witnesses reported hearing loud bangs in other attacks. (The Washington Post website has been down for the last couple hours, or I'd find a source or two.)
He may be wearing a cloak of invisibility, but his rifle isn't silent.