Ok so they don't want organizations to buy iPads for people!? Why?

You found some 2.6 compliant hardware?! Amazing! You mean like an HID mouse? You're probably right 2.6.40 probably doesn't HID devices anymore.

I was expecting something amazing for 3.0.0 like hard real-time and a micro-kernel. Never did I expect this crap from Linus.

Changing numbers just to change numbers is a waste of time. The reasoning Linus gives for the change is absolutely worthless. He can't count to 40. what!? Where I work you would get fired for something like this.

This wastes everyones time and causes unnecessary confusion. If at least he said something like "It makes people talk about Linux" or "We wanted to celebrate our good work by tagging 3.0" I might have accepted the reasoning. I think the features between 2.6.40 and 3.0.0 have not earned the 3.0.0 badge.

Vector clocks can prevent causality violations in concurrent systems.

What makes parallel programming hard is computer languages.

Most languages today are actually not designed for parallelism or concurrency simply because most computers for a very long time had only one core. This is why we have threading and locks everywhere. Threads have huge overhead from hundreds of kilobytes to megabytes. That may seem like nothing but ideally for parallelism and concurrency to work you need to be able to create thousands of processes at nearly no cost (hundreds of bytes each). And locks, don't even get me started with that!

Shared mutable state is also a major problem it makes parallelism very hard, again current languages make heavy use of it (Singletons).

Anyway, this problem has been solved ages ago just look into the Actor Model and Erlang to get started that should pretty much cover it.

Honestly, I think this is the worst reasoning I have ever heard. Calling it 2.8.0 instead of 2.6.41 because 41 is too big a number? Seriously!? In my mind 2.8.0 would mean a major redesign, a bit like the transition from 2.4 to 2.6. It sounds to me like this would simply be a 2.6.41 in disguise. Not worth changing the version unless major changes are made. How about a micro-kernel or some hard real-time Linus instead of wasting your time renaming things?

Eric

That is not the whole story.Telomeres control how many times a cell can divide. The more times a cell the divides the more likely it is to contain an accumulation of defects eventually leading to either the death of the cell triggered by MDM2 and P53 or if this fails an increased likelihood of cancer.

Simply increasing the counter of the number of times the cell can divide does not prevent cancer. In fact it could increase it! I would imagine that cells with lots of defect will survive for longer instead of being replaced by cells that have not divided as many times leading to an overall increase in occurrences of cancer.

The ideal solution in my opinion would be to have a better control over this counter. P53 triggers cellular apoptosis (cell death) when telomeres run out. MDM2 triggers cellular apoptosis if P53 stops functioning. However if both mechanisms fail there is a high likelihood of cancer since these damaged cells can divide indefinitely. What would be more interesting is adding a new monitor X what would monitor MDM2 or P53 and add extra redundancy. Effectively changing the likelihood of getting cancer. Once this is done perhaps telomere extensions could make sense.

This is interesting. I wonder what the implications for the drake equation are.

If life evolved twice independently on earth I would think that life in the universe is quite common. Time will tell if this is indeed the case.

On the other hand if life did not evolve twice independently. Wouldn't this mean that if life branched at a very early stage theories like panspermia are less likely?

Going to the moon now seems just as impossible as in 1930.

Who on earth would want to save IPv4?

Carrier grade NAT is the dumbest idea yet. Just ditch the junk and move on.

Okay where do I signup to get a IPv6 address already?

Nobody seems ready and there is ~238 days to go...

Exactly! Plus you can only forward to a single machine for a given port number.

Oh, also NAT needs to keep a translation table meaning you can't establish large amounts of connections (think torrents).

Finally we will no longer have to use this IPv4 NAT garbage with all it's limitations!

Android will be more popular in the long run for one simple reason. Cost...