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Cows' bad breath will be the death of us all.

As I understand it's not what's coming out of that end of the cow that's the problem.

If vast amounts of methane were released, the highly explosive gas would be ignited by lightning, scorching huge area in a fiery hell-on-earth."

We'd better start putting corks in the millions of cattle all over the world then.

One thing that interests me...

We went over PCR recently in a Biochemical Genetics lab. Apparently, the primer oligonucleotides can only be up to 3000 base pairs apart or so for the process to work effectively.

If this is the case, replicating the millions/billions of bases you'd have to recover to reconstruct the organism would surely be a daunting task.

Or are there any other PCR techniques more powerful than the standard 2nd year University ones we study? Would some Celera style shotgun approaches be applicable here?

• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
• Common Lisp HyperSpec
• Common Lisp the Language, 2. ed
• Common Lisp - A gentle Introduction to symbolic computation
• The Scheme Programming language, 2. ed
• Reflections on trusting trust
• Lisp: Good News, Bad News. How to Win Big
• John McCarthy's homepage
• Dennis Ritchie's homepage
• Various classic papers it's a shame ACM never bothered to continue adding to
• Another list of classic papers (this time related mostly to programming language design)
• GTK-Gnome Application Development (not a classic, though, as the field is too young)
• KDE 2.0 Development (not a classic though, as the field is too young)
• Eric Weissteins Mathworld
• Compilers and compiler generators - an introduction with C++ (although I'm not too sure if it deserves being called a classic...)
• Parsing techniques - A practical guide
• Art of assembly language programming (never was a dead tree, but good anyway)
• Paul Carters 386 assembly book (same comment as above)
• An Introduction to Scheme and its Implementation (see comment above)
• How to design programs - An introduction to programming and computing (not a classic, yet!)
• The Gutenberg archives contains much non-copyrighted classic fiction in ASCII format
• Sacred texts has copies of or links to many religious text for various major (or minor) religions

>Put Windows 2000 on the machine and run netmeeting.

You may not want to limit yourself so dramatically...

Note that MS netmeeting has explicitly stopped support for all open standard codec protocols. This is another attempt to lock out compatibility with Open Source software. MS has done their best to hide that they ever supported any open standard protocols, but you can still get support for an open standard netmeeting codec (if you need to interoperate with folks using netmeeting).

The project mentioned in this article sounds like it's trying to solve a specific videoconferencing problem, and not be a generic desktop solution. In that case, you definitely don't want the excess MS baggage: you're getting the whole elephant when all you need is the tail; linux is much easier to tailor to suit a specific need. Compound that with the high pricetag of W2K and the limited budget, and Windows becomes very unattractive.

WebBriefing is a closed source project for Linux. I have found that it complements GnomeMeeting very well in that each has functionality missing in the other. WebBriefing seems to have dropped off the face of the earth , but I could still find the RPM .

Also, realize that GnomeMeeting relies on PWLib. It's V4L compatibility stems from this. I remember going through the source once and seeing the limited compatibility... you might want to do the same. I don't know what project is in control of this library, but that might be a good place to ask about compatibility. The V4L mailing list is also a good resource.

• First, here are lecture notes from a college course on operating system design.
• Second, some more meterial from another university (it's not clear to me that this is from a course).
• Third, a terse document detailing broad set of features common to operating systems of different periods (also part of an operating sytems course).
• Fourth, another page, which seems to be part of college course, with a section on the history of operating systems.
• Fifth, a web-slideshow on the topic.
• And Finally, a smattering of other links to the same topic by even more authors: another lecture from a college course, chapter 3, section 1 from the book Introductory Information Protection by Fred Cohen & Associates, Operating Systems - Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, and Evolution of Operating Systems User Interface Design

• First, here are lecture notes from a college course on operating system design.
• Second, some more meterial from another university (it's not clear to me that this is from a course).
• Third, a terse document detailing broad set of features common to operating systems of different periods (also part of an operating sytems course).
• Fourth, another page, which seems to be part of college course, with a section on the history of operating systems.
• Fifth, a web-slideshow on the topic.
• And Finally, a smattering of other links to the same topic by even more authors: another lecture from a college course, chapter 3, section 1 from the book Introductory Information Protection by Fred Cohen & Associates, Operating Systems - Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, and Evolution of Operating Systems User Interface Design

CP/M-86 was available for the Aug 81 roll-out of the PC, but the period we're discussing is late '80. What is the date on your 8" CP/M-86?

The "mythological" version of the story is that MS told IBM to go to DR becase "we don't do OS's". MS only came up with MS-DOS (aka SB-86, AKA QDOS 0.1, etc) when IBM was unable to negotiate a pre-release deal with DR.

When you say "several years" before Aug 81, that would imply 1978 or so.

While the 8086 was out in 1978, I don't believe your claim that the OS for it was out so early.