The irony is that BeOS was designed specifically to take advantage of modern computer hardware of the day and cared nothing for binary compatibility with other OSes, and today Haiku is clinging to an ancient compiler and a dead x86 architecture... in the name of compatibility with BeOS apps, no less. BeOS itself moved from Hobbit to PowerPC to Intel x86 with little care for compatibility.

What made BeOS exciting 20 years ago was it promised to give users better multimedia support and responsiveness. Other OSes have caught up with the innovations and surpassed them. (Multithreading, multiprocessing, multitasking, journaling file systems, etc.) Some users liked the GUI and lauded it as a clean and a great interface. I hated the yellow tabs. Still, that's just personal preference -- Mac OS X has a clean and polished interface that suits that purpose today. In fact, the death knell of BeOS was when Apple declined to purchase BeOS and bought NeXTSTEP instead... because it was superior and led to today's OS X.

Point being that BeOS offered new, cutting edge features and better functionality on the same hardware than other OSes at the time. It seems that Haiku is the last of the BeOS clones and it's not progressing at a rate that will ever offer users significant benefits over modern OSes today.

What does Haiku have to offer? I mean - when it's finally released in a few decades or centuries at this rate and our ancestors get to enjoy it on their x86 or even AMD64 emulators?

There's a nice bit of fluff at : https://www.haiku-os.org/about , but that doesn't really answer the question. The key strength compared to Linux seems to be that a single team is developing and integrating everything with a common goal. Why couldn't that same team (or one as dedicated) simply fork a Linux distribution and all software it uses to customize and integrate towards the same common goal?

Seems a waste to re-invent the wheel creating new drivers and struggling to build on the Haiku platform for backwards compatibility without any clear, solid, user-recognizable benefit.

I get that it's interesting as a project and great practice for coders, and I truly wish Haiku well in its continued development... I just don't see the point if the development will never release outside of Beta with support for modern hardware. If Linux still struggles to get decent drivers, I can't imagine Haiku ever getting proper support.

Haiku seems like another stagnant AmigaOS, Syllable Desktop, or other relic. ReactOS at least has some benefit to Linux and potentially former Windows users by furthering WINE development even if it never makes it out of alpha (going on 17 years now btw.)

I'm looking forward to seeing how well it works on a Core 2 Duo laptop. Thanks to some updates to VLC, I'm actually able to play 1080p movies on the old laptop connected to the TV. It taxes the system - mostly b/c of an old GPU, though. It's ever on the threshold of being taken to the recycling center should it fail to perform its duties.

If Win10 is slower, then the machine is done for -- unless I give it new life with Linux Mint or Cubuntu.

I already recycled a Pentium IV machine because it couldn't handle 720p. It's a sad day when I can't find a use for a perfectly working (more or less) machine.

The war on drugs never worked. What makes you think government can stop people from getting their hands on even more addictive things like fat and sugar?!?!?

Sure, ban the sale of the Big Mac and 44oz soda... People will just buy two 22oz sodas and two cheeseburgers instead. Portion control doesn't work when one can just double a regular order.

If you ban sodas and burgers entirely, well... I'll be outside grilling burgers from fresh ground beef and making my own sodas from seltzer water, sugar, and flavoring and selling them to the highest bidders ;)

Good luck calling the cops on me when they'll likely be my best customers, too. haha!

If you thought bootleg alcohol was easy to find during prohibition... just wait for bootleg candy bars, sodas, and red meat. Oh, and fries... man. Potatoes are easy to grow, and peanut oil is cheap. Salt is basically free. You'll never stop the fries!

What, like this movie?

The Returned: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt20...

Zombies that are completely normal people unless they don't take their retroviral injections!!!

Zombie babysitters are just fine until they forget their meds and eat the baby! ;)

I sympathize, but there is no cure for damaged kidneys. The damage can't be repaired and must be replaced. Until we can find a way to regenerate organs or create better artificial ones, your best shot is a kidney donor -- and I urge you to find a way to ask for a donor. A friend of mine donated his kidney to a young guy he didn't even know well -- a friend's daughter's husband, I think. He figured he was in his late 40s and could do fine with just one kidney while it would make a world of difference to the younger man and his family.

Of course, even a new kidney would come with issues - anti-rejection meds and their side-effects. Thankfully, we have been making progress in using donor organ scaffolding with recipient stem cells. I know we've had success with rodent hearts in labs and other organs, but I don't know if they can use the same techniques with kidneys or even on humans. Scientists are working on bio-engineered kidneys, too https://pharm.ucsf.edu/kidney . There's hope. I think within your lifetime, we'll be printing organs using stem cells from bio-printers.

Beyond restoring your system with new kidneys, I guess the question becomes - what damaged your kidneys to begin with? Is that well understood, and can that be prevented in the future for yourself or others?

I think you're conflating "tailoring treatments based on known DNA markers,antigens, and drugs" with "identifying new markers from tumor cell biopsies and creating new treatments based on those markers." We can do both, but tailoring is the faster of the two. Your statement is a gross oversimplification and overstatement of what current technology can do for cancer treatment (to say nothing of what's available to the general public vs what we can do in a lab or a test tube).

You make it sound as if a new genetic marker can be discovered and constructed from a single sample of a tumor vs a healthy cell from one individual. That's extremely unlikely. Also, the time scale involved from finding a new genetic marker to developing a treatment for that patient with the new genetic marker would likely be decades. The FDA requires about 8 to 10 years of testing before it approves a new treatment. That's after the years of lab work required to develop new drugs and prove their efficacy enough to even bother getting FDA approval.... and that's after years of research proving you've found an actual new genetic marker and many more years finding a viable target to attack the cancer produced by the new marker.

Scientists would not do a biopsy of a single patient and "construct a genetic marker" for their tumor. They might take biopsies of hundreds or thousands of patients with a particular type of cancer to find some correlation between them and find one or more significant markers when compared against the general population who do not have that type of cancer.

A doctor MIGHT subject the biopsy to various KNOWN treatments for the type of cancer and see which works best in the lab before prescribing one or more of those treatments. This is not something regularly done - it's expensive to grow tissue in labs and difficult to control for various factors outside of the body. It's also unwise as it would take time to get results, and even then, what works in vitro does not necessarily work in vivo. Usually, when a biopsy is done, it's simply to look at the cells under a microscope to determine if the mass is malignant or benign, though it may be sent off for testing for antigens, known DNA markers, etc.

Most doctors simply do bloodwork and urine tests to look for antigens and do quick DNA tests to look for specific KNOWN mutations to help them tailor a treatment, but there is no wizard sampling a tumor and producing a magic potion to cure it. Doctors immediately prescribe one of many known treatments based on what information they have because waiting for a better solution is often worse. No one wants to let a tumor grow for weeks or months (much less years or decades) while waiting for a tailored solution. Unfortunately, not everyone responds well to the initial treatment and those patients are often switched to another treatment.

No one is going to do full DNA sequencing on your tumor and a healthy cell to determine the difference -- that would take weeks at best just to find the mutations (and it may find nothing as your "healthy" DNA may have natural mutations -known or unknown- that predispose you to some cancers), then more time to discern which are known mutations and then figure out which - if any - of the rest are benign mutations or cancerous... then months to engineer one or more treatments followed by years or decades of testing before they let a human subject take that new treatment. By that time, you'd have possibly died of cancer... or even old age.

We can look at blood, urine, and a biopsy and see what known antigens and DNA markers are present to help tailor a therapy for an individual's cancer. "Tailoring" is really a strong word for it, as often it's just one of many tools to help a doctor select the proper medication. A type of cancer might only have a handful of drugs to prescribe to begin with, and this information may or may not help an oncologist pick the best one(s).

We can also grow and treat tumors in vitro with various treatments to help discern which might work best, but that's rarely done and isn't always helpful.

Creating and administering NEW treatments to cancer patients based off of their tumor biopsies is not even close to being within the realm of possibility for the near future.

I've also enjoyed Mint, but it's had its issues. I had it on a laptop years ago and it would randomly freeze. I had Mint 17.1 for months, but had to update the kernel to support Zram for snappier response times and use other tweaks to update Mint to work properly.

Cinnamon would often completely freeze after playing a video with VLC. SMplayer would play vids on top of the menus and other windows. All sorts of issues -- none of which happened under Ubuntu with Gnome or KDE on the same machine, though it did have newer versions of VLC and possibly drivers, codecs, etc.

Last month, I switched to Cubuntu -- It's basically Ubuntu with Cinnamon, but much more polished than a straight install of Cinnamon over Ubuntu. It also disables some of Ubuntu's crapware and makes spyware like zeitgeist easy to remove without issues.

(tried to uninstall zeitgeist from a fresh Gnome-Ubuntu install with Cinnamon installed and it wanted to uninstall Cinnamon with it!)

Mint has awesome features beyond Cinnamon - like the ability to change the colors of individual folders... but, it's grounded in older software and repositories making it difficult to upgrade to the latest versions of VLC, etc. Cubuntu comes with the 3.9 Kernel and works with Ubuntu Vivid repositories, so it was the right choice for me.

He who controls the franchise controls its universe!

So, yeah... generally the new owners get to retcon whatever they choose as they produce new canon content.

It's not without precedent. Heck, even the Catholics decided to retcon their religion on multiple occasions by declaring previously canon books as heretical.

I wish there were an easy way to do that. No one seems to have a workable solution.

My proposal would be to build a reflective artificial ring around the planet to divert the sunlight away and help Venus cool off enough to where we can work on the chemistry issue. The ring would be a sort of shield -- one we could even expand and contract to regulate the cooling and stabilize at a comfortable temperature.

Venus's atmosphere has a lot of CO2 and sulfuric acid we'd have to find a way to chemically alter and/or store.

The other thing people forget about Venus is that it rotates retrograde -- a year on Venus is 225 days ( no big deal), but a day on Venus is almost 117 Earth days. Any base would have to take into account the lack of sunlight for months at a time - so, something to augment solar panels and any crops need to adjust to the odd seasonality or be grown indoors. I suppose the same reflective ring could be used to reflect some light to the dark side of the planet to help with that issue.

Eh, it's nice to think about, but we'll never approve the resources to build a planet-wide ring around Venus. We barely support a tiny international space station as it is.

No, "Ape" is a very specific term used to specify members of Hominoidea. It is unfortunate many are ignorant of the meaning of the term and use it improperly to include monkeys.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Humans are apes - specifically, great apes. (aka Hominidae aka "hominids"). "Hominids" simply means human-like. It used to mean only humans, then it included other extinct human-like creatures and now it generally includes all hominidae. While "hominid" (or alternatively "great ape") is a more specific term, it is certainly NOT a more correct term, merely the Family of the SuperFamily.

One could say that humans are mammals and it would be no less correct. Humans are animals, chordates, mammals, primates, apes, and also great apes.

It's unfortunate that the Google facial recognition software was not aware that humans don't like being reminded that they are indeed very closely related to other great apes and could easily be confused with gorillas by a non-human intelligence. Our indignance at the notion we're apes that look a lot like gorillas is rather silly -- like zebras being offended at being miscategorized as ordinary horses.

Granted, I understand the racist implication that those flagged erroneously as gorillas are somehow less human than others. Thankfully, the computer isn't racist. It merely wasn't sophisticated enough to discern the difference given the input, the algorithm, and its training.

I'm impressed it figured out the object in the photo was a living thing and got the kingdom, phylum, class, order, superfamily, family and sub-family correct. If it had chosen chimp or bonobo, it would have been even closer.

Heck, check out this comparison of a gorilla baby and a human baby -- no one would have blinked an eye if the software said the gorilla was a human baby.
http://intentblog.com/wp-conte...

Another cute gorilla baby -- a bit older:
http://www.ctvnews.ca/polopoly...