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Of course, people actually downloading the whole human genome probable wouldn't worry about this, but couldn't they use a better compression format than .zip? I bet using bzip2 or rar would shave a couple of hundred MBs off of that 753MB file. Also, the differences in compression techniques would be interesting to see on a large group of files mainly consisting of G, A, C, and T. -- demiurge You find a file that appears important and obliterate it from memory!!! Score one for the downtrodden hacker!

• G -- 00
• A -- 01
• T -- 10
• C -- 11

This would only work for the .fa files, but .fa files can contain "N"s also. If you just want to browse the Genome, look through the pieces directory. .

His homepage can be found here: Linux 2.0 Penguins

Unfortunately he has allowed all use for everyone:

Feel free to do whatever you see fit with the images, you are encouraged to integrate them into other designs that fit your need. Comments suggestions are also welcome, so please tell me what you think of these. I suggest that you look at some of the other images available with integrated text.

So all the companies can do with them as they please. They could stick Tux symbols on washingmachines if they wanted to.

At the Linux Metapage (http://stommel.tamu.edu/~baum/linux-meta.html) there's pointers to a lot of different types of software for Linux.

In particular, there's a pointers to to SAL (http://SAL.KachinaTech.COM/index.shtml) and LinuxApps (http://www.linuxapps.com/) and other software lists that might interest scientific Linux users.

As far as I understand ("scriptable from python") they want to be able to run it from python.

What I am more surprised about is to see Chris DiBona on the referee board.

He worked on the "Open Sources" book and is the leading PR guy of VA Linux (for a bad example of his advocacy style listen to this interview). But there it ends. He is certainly not picked because he is an expert of tool design.

Anyone knows about the other referees?

There is another problem. The killer bee problem in the Americas was started when scientists tried to make honey bees more reilient to warm climates. They crossbred American honeybees, a rather benign form of bee that doesn't mind human presence, with African bees, which do. The bees seem to have picked up the wrong part of the mix, they became slightly more resistive to climatic change, and they became extremely fierce. Though not the result of Genetics, they illustrate some of the unexpected outcomes that breeding of non-native species can have with the local population. These hybrid bees have driven out local bees and proved to be more than just a nuisance to some people.

More info:
Killer bee attack in Mexico
AgNews on Killer Bees
Desertusa Attack of the "Killer Bees"
Fleming's Bee page

Sure, this tux may have a pixelized, robotic stare; but have you ever noticed the one-true-tux has a disoriented (perhaps substance induced) look in his eyes?

Note: Posting anonymously for obvious reasons...


Yup.. Sounds like the admins at WTAMU. They once shut off the network connection of one of the student web servers because it was "running an illegal service".. (which turned out to be a student doing an "nslookup -d" which resulted in a zone transfer that their monitoring program detected as a tcp connection to port 53...)..

They also shut down several ethernet ports for having smb shares on (even passworded ones)... Their excuse was that they did not want items on the network with "possible improper names"...

Thing is... the admins are (were) clueless (they had a mail server running Sendmail SMV-8.6 till recently... It was only shut down when it was severly abused, and the parent school TAMU (who in comparison are actually exremely knowledgable) got complaints about it and threatened to shut off network connectivity for the whole WTAMU campus (which would have affected another local college and other enteties that get their connectivity through WTAMU)

PS... WTAMU still has LOTS of other security holes... which they HAVE been informed about....

The LinuXML Project is "devoted to changing the UNIX de facto standard for inter-process communication (IPC) and storage from line-based ASCII records to XML."

ORGANIZATIONS/PEOPLE INVOLVED

Larry Mulloy - challenged the engineers' decision not to launch
Morton Thiokol - Contracted by NASA to build the Solid Rocket Booster
Alan McDonald - Director of the Solid Rocket Motors Project
Bob Lund - Engineering Vice President
Robert Ebeling - Engineer who worked under McDonald
Roger Boisjoly - Engineer who worked under McDonald
Joe Kilminster - Engineer in a management position
Jerald Mason - Senior executive who encouraged Lund to reassess his decision not to launch.

KEY DATES

1974 - Morton-Thiokol awarded contract to build solid rocket boosters.
1976 - NASA accepts Morton-Thiokol's booster design.
1977 - Morton-Thiokol discovers joint rotation problem.
November 1981 - O-ring erosion discovered after second shuttle flight.
January 24, 1985 - shuttle flight that exhibited the worst O-ring blowby.
July 1985 - Thiokol orders new steel billets for new field joint design.
August 19, 1985 - NASA Level I management briefed on booster problem.
January 27, 1986 - night teleconference to discuss effects of cold temperature on booster performance.
January 28, 1986 - Challenger explodes 72 seconds after liftoff.

Help the CrystalSpace project out, that way this project gets something, and any other 3D games that want to use the CS engine.

Mazed, the CS map editor, needs help, to make it comparable to quake or better yet unreal level editors. I am guessing the unreal editor would be closer to what they wan't, since CS and unreal seem to use mostly portals for their engine, then again, I have never done any level editing for unreal, so I wouldn't know.

And, a good engine for the future games needs better model support. Right now, CrystalSpace just uses model sprites(like Quake*), not dynamic models(like Half-Life or fighting games). And for these models, you need something to make them. So help make a decent open source 3D model animator, like Extreme Wave. I say Extreme Wave becuase it apears to be the only OSS modeler that focuses on animation. Better than starting your own.

There is no way you can control every box on a university network. Texas A&M uses their firewall to block all incoming connections on everything but port 80 and allows all outbound connections to go through. The goal is to limit outside access without imposing too many limitations on the users behind the firewall. If a system has a need for other connections the to be let through then it must meet university security requirements and be certified by a sysadmin.

Texas A&M uses the drawbridge firewall package. It can be found at http://drawbridge.tamu.edu

I've installed drawbridge as a firewall for a company, and this is exactly what they were looking for. You simply put two network cards in a computer, one connected to the net, the other to the internal network, and the machine will block off access from the inside or from the outside, depending on tables you load.

No matter how big the tables are, the bridging is lightning fast. It's been running here for a while with no problems.

It runs on FreeBSD (needs kernel modifications), and it's freely available.

I believe the URL is http://drawbridge.tamu.edu

Ben

If anyone is interested in working on a free 3d modeling / rendering project, I would reccomend working on one of the many existing projects. Each project seems to have a slightly different slant on what it intends to be good at so I don't think diversity is a problem.

I have been writing a modeller named Extreme Wave which is based on some of my grad school work, but there are a number of other fine projects that have made some significant progress including MOPS, Moonlight Creator, 3DOM, and MindsEye. No Maya killers in the bunch yet.

Just to completely beat this dead horse, yes, there is a read/only ext2 driver. It's on my web page here. I am currently working on a read/write version of the driver, and it's coming fairly quickly. I don't really consider it beta anymore, too.

Also, I have a crude NTFS read/only driver on the same page.

Anyway, I figured I'd chime in and set the info straight on my drivers.

Travis Geiselbrecht

BeOS uses its own file system, called bfs. It's a 64-bit journaled fs, with a cool attribute and resource structure. As far as I know, it can't be read outside of BeOS, but that is probably not far out. According to Be's BeWare section this filesystem driver is available for ext2 read-only. The driver also has a homepage. There are several other filesystem drivers available in the BeWare section. The facility for creating plug-ins and add-ons both for an application and the operating system is *very* cool. Read up on the Be Book for more.