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"The estimate for the number of genomes in human genetic code has been savagely revised downwards. The new estimate, of between 20,000 to 25,000 genomes..."

Only 20,000 to 25,000 genomes? I was sure that the number of genomes in human genetic code was closer to 6,500,000,000.

Are you sure it wasn't a .. squirrel?

His dorkiness surpasses that of any movie-theater-camping-while-wearing-a-homemade-sta r-wars-costume dork in the world.

What about the guy who made his own Tron costume? That was my "high dork" metric.

gpsd: serve up realtime GPS data

here

gpstrans: download/upload Garmin data here

gpsbabel: up/download & convert GPS data here

v.in.garmin + GRASS GIS 5.7: download GPS directly into serious mapping & analysis software here here

gpsd: serve up realtime GPS data

here

gpstrans: download/upload Garmin data here

gpsbabel: up/download & convert GPS data here

v.in.garmin + GRASS GIS 5.7: download GPS directly into serious mapping & analysis software here here

I believe the connection between the Past (Baroque Cycle), the Present (and recent past) in Cryptonomicon, and the Future (yet to be written?) will be made -- we're just in the middle of it. Enoch Root *is* the same character in the Baroque books and Crypto -- that's what makes them all sci-fi. My guess is that he's a time traveler, though others have their opinions.

The intricate family connections also lead me to believe that the story will continue in the future, not only with the Shaftoes and Waterhouses, but the Kivistiks, von Hacklhebers, and the owners of the Bomb and Grapnel as well. In all, Enoch is the key.

So, my question to Mr. Stephenson: Neal, can you confirm or deny?

Someone thought of using Jojoba seeds for biofuel. However, after giving the Jojoba plant enough water to grow fast, the resulting product was too expensive and too slow-growing.

So, I was skeptical about this plant until I read more. This plant is different. It's a tropical plant, where presumably there is enough water.

See the Jatropha curcas description and cost and photo. The Jatropha System explains the advantages.

--
U.S. Gov.: Borrowing money to kill Iraqis. 140 billion borrowed. With interest, you pay 200 Billion.

Mod parent down. This is the most unscientific nonsense I've ever read on /. In comparison to the overall energy stored in the atmosphere the energy taken out of it by windmills is negligible.

I refer you to a paper like this one to confirm for yourself that if you talk about heat and energy transport in the atmosphere you are talking in terms of PW that is Petawatt i.e. 10^15 Watt. The energy stored in the atmosphere is many magnitudes larger than the current 0.013 PW of global human power consumption (the average power consumption is about 2000 W per person i.e. given there are about 6.5x10^9 people on this planet you get the 0.013 PW number).

If you take into consideration that the mass off our atmosphere is 5.1 x 10^18 Kg and the heat coefficient of our air is about 1.005 kJ/(kg K) you can easily verify that an increase in atmosphere temperature by one degree Celsius stores about an additional 5125500 PJ in the atmosphere.

That means even if all of the given the current world power consumption was to be drawn out of the atmospheres it'll take more than 12 years to just get the equivalent of one degree change. Given the current inverse trend in global warming that'll be actually quite welcome.

This is of course just a quick and simple back of the envelope calculation but it should give you an understanding of the magnitudes involved and lay any doubt at rest that some windmills could potentially affect the world climate.

Really don't know what to make of the parent post. Suspect for a second that this was just astroturfing but then the posting history doesn't support this. Wass even claims an undergrad degree in physics. He really should know better.

Do you mean, for instance, using eminent domain to take away private holdings and getting the state to tax the people in order to fund a private venture? Such as President Bush did with the Texas Rangers Stadium?

article 1
article 2
article 3

Truly cool, but the "retro" feel of the design is marred by the joysticks. i would prefer something like a double-contact knife switch or some such...

I like the musing of one of the open source community's finest: Eric S. Raymond's Blog. Although I don't necessarily agree on all of his politics, he does give an interesting read...

• http://www.polipundit.com/
• http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/
• http://www.powerlineblog.com/
• http://oxblog.blogspot.com/
• http://www.instapundit.com/
• and of course, http://drudgereport.com/

Be sure to check out the analog computer museum, among others

And don't forget about relay logic

March 10, 1956, Over the Mediterranean Sea

July 28, 1957, Over the Atlantic Ocean - somewhere between Dover Air Force Base (Delaware) and Atlantic City, New Jersey

February 5, 1958, Savannah River, Georgia (this story)

September 25, 1959, Off Whidbey Island, Washington. Since this is slashdot, I feel obligated to point out that this is about 30 miles from Redmond.

January 24, 1961, Goldsboro, North Carolina

December 5, 1965, Aboard the USS Ticonderoga (CVA-14) in the Pacific Ocean (only miles from the Japanese island chain of Ryukyu)

Spring 1968, Aboard the USS Scorpion (SSN-589) in the Atlantic Ocean - 400-500 miles southwest of the Azores.

Any slashdotters have a geiger counter, a boat, and some free time?

I found this fascinating account of a hydrogen bomb accidently dropped in 1961 and still buried on a North Carolina farm. Although major portions were recovered, the uranium never was.

you can see a bit at the o'reilly site in the subject but you can also read quite a bit about Make on the various blog reports of FOO Camp.
At that time, I thought that Make == Popular Mechanics/Electronic + Wired (when Wired wasn't tired). Think of Make as a Mook or a Bagazine.
Here's my blog entry of the presentation at FOO:
The Real Paul Jones - Make = Mook/Bagazine

I've skimmed over the Stateless Linux HOWTO, and it doesn't seem to be all that different from NFSRoot.

Stateless Linux might be a bit broader -- NFSRoot as I have seen it deployed seems to match only the case of, as the HOWTO puts it, "caching clients, which boot from a copy of a snapshot, cached locally on a hard drive", rather than the other three scenarios described under "stateless Linux clients" in the HOWTO -- but that's splitting hairs over what seems to be, in most ways, the same basic idea.

So -- how is Stateless Linux a radically new thing? There are documents for NFSRoot going back to 1997 and maybe earlier, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if people were doing things like this on platforms like Sun & SGI well over a decade ago. So -- what exactly is it that's new here ?

Open Source Cookbook

I would recommend How to Think Like a Computer Scientist for an absolute beginner. I've used it myself and it explains concepts really well.

Python's a great language. Good luck!

For all of you who still haven't seen it, I strongly recommend this 'propaganda' gem from the Python community:

Video: Introducing Python

Features GvR, ESR, etc.

It's so bad it hurts. You'll want to show it to all your friends.

Remember to wear a cup.

Yea, but then I saw this guy and it ruined the whole thing for me :)
http://www.ibiblio.org/jmaynard/TRONcostume/

I find it extremely interesting that you concealed both the fact that those remarks were made by Clinton, and the fact that they were made in 1995. The whole speach can be found here.

Because the former president said so:

Anyone remember this incident?

I can't find the bloody article, but I'm almost positive that this is not the first Olympics where the organizers decided sponsors had to be protected from the threat of a competing brand coming into the view of a camera or a visitor's eyes. I even think it was covered here on /., relating to either Sydney 2000 or Salt Lake City 2002. Someone with better search engine-wrangling skills than me want to help?

GRASS GIS version 5.3-cvs + gpstrans:

The s.in.garmin and v.in.garmin modules make importing and reprojecting really easy.

The USGS supplies all the free maps you need for underlay.

anyone that has worked with GPS and GIS data know the real hard part is fixing and processing all the data. Getting the data into a database in a normalized format is perhaps one of the most challenging parts of building a gps/gis application.

http://www.ibiblio.org/esrblog/index.php?m=200401# 149

Or traditional compiler as opposed to JVM, as I pointed out. Neither is necessarily written in C++, BTW.

I am pretty sure it is implemented in C++,

Fine. However, the code that is running (machine code from the JIT, or natively compiled code from an ahead-of-time compiler) is not compiled C++ - it is compiled Java. Important distinction.

and as a simple consequence, also possible in C++.

In the sense that you could write stream of bytes to memory and then execute them from C++, true. In the sense of compiling C++ with an optimizing compiler to get the same performance, no.

That JAVA makes it easy to do is nice when you need this, but has zero to do with the performance argument.

Incorrect (and in fact you have yet to understand my point). Here are some references:

• COMPARISON OF FORTRAN AND C [note the parts about optimization]
• Performance of Java versus C++ [note 1) Pointers make optimization hard]

Time to burn some Karma!!

<rant>
Why does it matter what clothes he was wearing?

It matters because by dressing smartly he could reduce his sentance. If he's stubborn^H^H^H^H^Hpid enough to dress the way he wants then he's going to have to face the consequences of the way people interpret that look.

What a world to live in when people judge you by the clothes you wear.

I sympathise with the sentiment... actually scratch that, no I don't. Of course people judge other people by the way they look. Are you trying to tell me that you can't get clues from a person's appearance? If I see a skinhead wearing a football strip with many tattoos of their football club and a few scars then I DO NOT stop them to ask directions.
You use your eyes to guide your judgements about life and people. Complaining when other people do the same is at best childish and at worst ignorant.

Who are you going to ask for directions?
This guy or this guy?

Who would you rather date?
Her or her?

Him, him or him?

Sorry. Had to throw that last one in.

If you have a problem with your appearance then A) dress well and B) stay fit. That's all you need to do.
</rant>

Which countless studies would these be? Considering that the first one I can recall reading back when I was working with traffic engineers was this one, from which I quote:

"# Accidents at the 58 experimental sites where speed limits were lowered increased by 5.4 percent. The level of confidence of this estimate is 44 percent. The 95 percent confidence limits for this estimate ranges from a reduction in accidents of 11 percent to an increase of 26 percent.

"Accidents at the 41 experimental sites where speed limits were raised decreased by 6.7 percent. The level of confidence of this estimate in 59 percent. The 95 percent confidence limits for this estimate ranges from a reduction in accidents of 21 percent to an increase of 10 percent."

In other words, their best guess shows that raised speed limits provided for a safer drive than lowered ones. This is because most speed limits are set too low for the flow of traffic, which has next to nothing to do with the actual speed limit (many, many sources for that statement).

...with the exception of the "write the serial modem code" argument, which would be reasonable if the code hadn't already been written for Linux (including emulators), none of your arguments hold water.

You can write and run your software on an ordinary Linux desktop, without even the need for a simulator module for the most part. The same Linux which runs your desktop can also run your 'plane, and for a considerably smaller performance and resource hit than XP (although in real life you'd go to the trouble of having a highly modular kernel and not load very much for the instance on the 'plane).

I have no idea why you'd bother with Atmel chips.

Linux runs natively on the Crusoe, another performance gain.

So you used MS-FS for testing algorithms? Then FlightGear would have given you even more control and oversight over what you were testing.

Reading between the lines, you didn't even look.

It involves five methods currently (all of which are outlined in the article):

• Wobble Detection
• Radial Velocity
• Transit Photometry
• Direct Imaging
• Coronography

Unfortunatly, the massive cost of liscencing the MVS (OS/390, zOS) operating systems means there is no way that a normal user can run a PC based mainframe. IBM employees can do it, of course.

You can't run the current version of the OS without paying big money (or having the right connections and agreements), but you can run older versions, fortunately.

For instance, you can get MVS 3.8J for free. There's even a prebuilt distribution of it for use with Hercules available. The main page is here, and the ISO image can be downloaded from Jay Maynard's PD software page (the turnkey site's links to downloadable images no longer work).

There are other operating systems, e.g. VM/370, which are also freely available.

Here are the latest pics of the new gear: http://www.ibiblio.org/jmaynard/TRONcostume/

From "The Complete Idiots Guide to Technical Writing" by Krista Van Laan and Catherine Julian

"The Open-Source Writers Group is a nonprofit organization whose primary goal is to improve the overall quality and quantity of free open-source and open-content documentation. Their web site at: http://www.ibiblio.org/oswg/index.html includes a page where you each register as a volunteer writer, editor, or proofreader for documentation related to open-source projects." - page 41

I have briefly skimmed this site and it appears to be a valuable resource.

In closing, I do agree with the parent. What good is a tool if no one knows how to use it?

From an urban-planning geek's perspective, it's one of the coolest local sites I know of. But serving 300,000 a month with what I assume to be an intensive GIS application can't be cheap.

UMN Mapserver
+ GRASS GIS
+ FreeGIS tools

The equivalent ArcWeb system ain't cheap. Like several county employees' salaries uncheap.

I tried to look at their GIS site to see what they were using, and got this error:
(Firefox on Debian/G/Linux)

http://www.maricopa.gov/Assessor/Error.aspx?type =b rowser
"This site is best viewed when using Internet Explorer.
Your using: Netscape5"
[not proceeding]

.. I'm guessing they are not using Free software.

Bonus chuckle [non-county residents only]:
Spot the apostrophe disaster in the error message.

There you go.

Instead of having a launcher that eats up more and more of your screen for every submenu you move into, try a launcher that doesn't use heirarchical menus in the first place.

Works faster, does more, looks better, and makes sense. :)

I have a little thing called Pogo that I built. I like to think of it as an alternative to GNOME and KDE's "panel"..the area in KDE and GNOME's design where things begin to go horribly, horribly wrong. :)

Pogo is a programmable application launcher. It has no menus. Instead of running your mouse up and down and around in circles going from menu to menu to find the program you're looking for, everything is right up front. If it's not, you use the mousewheel to rotate new launchers into view, You can color code them, move them around, and best of all, you can control each icon's appearance using shell scripts. It comes with a simple command you can use to send Pogo messages, like "flash this icon 3 times", or "move this one icon 3 spaces to the right, and change the color of this other one to blue", lotsa stuff..It's flexible enough that you can use it as a graphical front-end to shell scripts. Pogo comes with a nice looking clock, for example. All it is, is a bash script running in the background, extracting the hour and minute values from /bin/date, and then telling Pogo which icons to slap into place, depending. Neat stuff.

Here's a link to Pogo's Development Page.. Youll find screenshots and everything there.

For example, I have a co-lo out in New York. To keep an eye on it, I have a little shell script running in the background on that machine that sends my Pogo a message about once every second. Meanwhile, here in Arizona, one of my Pogo's icons flashes once per second, to indicate the server is alive and well. It will turn blue or yellow, depending upon how much CPU activity is taking place on the box. I could have another script running that could cause the same icon to flash red if there's something weird appearing in the system log. Clicking on the icon then brings up an ssh session with the box. It's not that hard, believe it or not. Pogo's build for that sort of thing.

Hopefully you'll find it useful. It's free.

Cheers,
Bowie

I have a little thing called Pogo that I built. I like to think of it as an alternative to GNOME and KDE's "panel"..the area in KDE and GNOME's design where things begin to go horribly, horribly wrong. :)

Pogo is a programmable application launcher. It has no menus. Instead of running your mouse up and down and around in circles going from menu to menu to find the program you're looking for, everything is right up front. If it's not, you use the mousewheel to rotate new launchers into view, You can color code them, move them around, and best of all, you can control each icon's appearance using shell scripts. It comes with a simple command you can use to send Pogo messages, like "flash this icon 3 times", or "move this one icon 3 spaces to the right, and change the color of this other one to blue", lotsa stuff..It's flexible enough that you can use it as a graphical front-end to shell scripts. Pogo comes with a nice looking clock, for example. All it is, is a bash script running in the background, extracting the hour and minute values from /bin/date, and then telling Pogo which icons to slap into place, depending. Neat stuff.

Here's a link to Pogo's Development Page.. Youll find screenshots and everything there.

For example, I have a co-lo out in New York. To keep an eye on it, I have a little shell script running in the background on that machine that sends my Pogo a message about once every second. Meanwhile, here in Arizona, one of my Pogo's icons flashes once per second, to indicate the server is alive and well. It will turn blue or yellow, depending upon how much CPU activity is taking place on the box. I could have another script running that could cause the same icon to flash red if there's something weird appearing in the system log. Clicking on the icon then brings up an ssh session with the box. It's not that hard, believe it or not. Pogo's build for that sort of thing.

Hopefully you'll find it useful. It's free.

Cheers,
Bowie

Parts of Gnome's GUI that need to be...Fixed? Try overhauled.

That's what you get when you blindly mimic Windows, without stopping and thinking whether or not it's a good idea.

The sheer fact that this project (GnoneME) exists is proof positive the Gnome team basically doesn't know what the hell it's doing when it comes to interface choices. They fell into the same trap alot of projects do---design by consensus..You end up with a completely inconsistant, schitzophrenic design that neither makes sense visually nor ergonomically. Their design rationale is basically insane---On the one hand, they proudly boast that Gnome is better than Windows......yet, on the other hand, if you call any bad UI designs of theirs into question, it's simply chalked up by the Gnome folks as "Well, thats how they do it in Windows, so, who are YOU to question it?", which is absolute horseshit.

There are plenty of projects, whitepapers, and ideas out there that have yet to be even given mainstream exposure. If you want to see where the magic things are, and the way things will be once somebody sits down and actually thinks about what is good design versus eureka, yaay it werkz!, then keep your eyes on this project.

Cheers,
Bowie

PS.. Here's a good example. With any luck, a design like this could finally drive a railroad spike into the head of whoever thought up heirarchical-menu-based launchers. The only problem is, nobody knows about it yet.

You think that's bad, here's another recent occurrence in the 'ways-to-skirt-the-GPL' campaign: Gibraltar is a Debian-based firewall-on-a-cd distribution with a particularly nasty Copyright notice attached:

The Gibraltar CD-ROM layout and the selection of packages are copyrightable work and are
copyrighted by Rene Mayrhofer as such.

It basically says "If you make a cdrom with the same selection of (GPLed) files on it, you're violating my copyright".

I also noticed that the latest version of Fedora includes similar language in their new click-through 'license agreement'.

You think that's bad, here's another recent occurrence in the 'ways-to-skirt-the-GPL' campaign: Gibraltar is a Debian-based firewall-on-a-cd distribution with a particularly nasty Copyright notice attached:

The Gibraltar CD-ROM layout and the selection of packages are copyrightable work and are
copyrighted by Rene Mayrhofer as such.

It basically says "If you make a cdrom with the same selection of (GPLed) files on it, you're violating my copyright".

I also noticed that the latest version of Fedora includes similar language in their new click-through 'license agreement'.

The media companies' solution.

For QOS on your gateway, just use a simple hub/switch and a small Linux machine. Then read the Linux Advanced Routing & Traffic Control HOWTO.

Take a look in this image and you will unsderstand ;)

'INVENTING INVENTED THE INTERNET! No one said Boo about Gore's remark. Then,
the RNC spin-points arrived:'
http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh120302.shtml

The Web is not the Internet,
http://www.webopedia.com/DidYouKnow/Internet/2002/ Web_vs_Internet.asp

'Al Gore and the Internet', By Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf
http://www.spectacle.org/1100/gore.html

Here's text of some of Gore's legislation...
'High-Performance Computing Act of 1991 '
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d102:s.002 72:

'Information Infrastructure and Technology Act of 1992'
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d102:s.029 37:

For example, Gore's '91 Act funded Marc Andreesen's group... they developed the NCSA Mosaic browser.
http://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/andreesen.html
http://www.totic.org/nscp/demodoc/demo.html

http://www.ibiblio.org/mc

Dear Tron Guy,

Please don't.

Thanks,

The Entire World