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Hey Mods! I'm getting modded funny here, but I'm not kidding - I still can't check my email and this is frustrating, not funny at all. I didn't feel like gogling this for my original post, but to make this one worthwhile, I present Exhibit A: http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=392

http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project_details.cfm?id=672&index=672&domain
Search terms: remotest travel time week bbc - you find it on the second page. How do I receive my Google-Fu-points? ;)

Actually there is another factor to speed here. It has to do with the layers that must be traversed in a method call. The order, what they do, and how many are traversed are all going to affect speed.
Here is a picture of Apache on Linux serving a web page: http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/images/392_big01.jpg
And The same page being served on Windows in IIS: http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/images/392_big02.jpg
(Link to article: http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=392)
As you can see linux is far less complex, and that is also why it is faster in this instance. That also tends to be why people see speed increases by using another OS, such as linux. It's just simply that the OS doesn't have to work as hard.

Actually there is another factor to speed here. It has to do with the layers that must be traversed in a method call. The order, what they do, and how many are traversed are all going to affect speed.
Here is a picture of Apache on Linux serving a web page: http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/images/392_big01.jpg
And The same page being served on Windows in IIS: http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/images/392_big02.jpg
(Link to article: http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=392)
As you can see linux is far less complex, and that is also why it is faster in this instance. That also tends to be why people see speed increases by using another OS, such as linux. It's just simply that the OS doesn't have to work as hard.

Actually there is another factor to speed here. It has to do with the layers that must be traversed in a method call. The order, what they do, and how many are traversed are all going to affect speed.
Here is a picture of Apache on Linux serving a web page: http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/images/392_big01.jpg
And The same page being served on Windows in IIS: http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/images/392_big02.jpg
(Link to article: http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=392)
As you can see linux is far less complex, and that is also why it is faster in this instance. That also tends to be why people see speed increases by using another OS, such as linux. It's just simply that the OS doesn't have to work as hard.

You're right, it is hard to find that information on Windows. http://www.metasploit.com/users/opcode/syscalls.html is one resource, looks like 424 according to them. Admittedly not a whole lot more.

I believe this is the http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=392 link I was thinking of when I made my original statement.

You can do a lot by proper moularization and resuse... On the other hand, it is possible that MS is not large enough to develop a new operating system with the fature profile they wanted Vista to have. It may in fact be impossible today to write an integrated OS with these features, because of complexity.

That's exactly why Vista was such a cluster (and not the compute or failover kind). Microsoft can't modularize, strategically. They ran into trouble with Internet Explorer way back when, and ended up dispersing its functions across a bunch of unrelated modules so that it was impossible to remove and still have the OS boot.

They've been adding complexity while, at the same time, increasing the incestuous and promiscuous interrelations between their components. OSX & Linux and most other sane operating systems break things, insofar as possible, into unrelated modules with limited and defined interfaces. (See, e.g., here.) That's because humans can't manage a 50+ million line codebase without strict modularization. Microsoft discovered about halfway through Vista development that even their huge resources couldn't overcome exponential growth in complexity, so they had to throw out much of what they'd done and start from scratch with significantly more modest goals.

I've said before that Vista is Microsoft's "PS/2" moment. IBM discovered that they couldn't take back the PC market. They came out with the PS/2 and the Microchannel bus - and fenced it 'round with patents, and wanted to charge big bucks for others to play there. Third-party companies and consumers failed to beat a path to their door, and used alternatives like EISA until the roughly-as-good PCI came out. Microsoft figured they could just dictate where the PC market would go, too... but the alternatives are getting to be (frankly, have gotten) 'good enough' for the majority of purposes.

The hardware market changed out from under them, too... we picked up a $450 Dell desktop last year, because it was (or should have been) enough for my wife to run the MS Office she's hooked on. It came with Vista Home Basic and we could not believe what a pig it was. I dropped it back to XP at her demand and things are much nicer. People don't spend thousands on single computers anymore, and they badly misjudged the hardware requirements of Vista - it takes a $2000 computer to run well, from what I've seen.

Then there's the whole DRM fiasco... it's a 'perfect storm' for MS. They'll ride it out, like IBM did, but in ten years MS will be one option among many, not the colossus astride the PC market.

Not that I want to run them out of a patent (if they TRULY deserve it), but I think most decent programmers might be able to effect the same results with existing code and some head-banging on the wall.

Yes, I think so too. Get started :)

CC.

I'm quite surprised this is considered news - this work was published months ago, and has been on http://visualcomplexity.com/ for months aswell.

So, they gave each base-pair a color? What on earth is the point? 98% of that sequence doesn't do anything. And why is a virtually random sequence of pixels of 4 different colors "beautiful"?

I can understand if they took two different genomes from the same species and did some kind of comparison: different colors for matches, indels, translocations, silent/synonymous/non-synonymous SNPs, etc. Or translated the sequence and colored by hydrophobicity/charge/polarity/whatever. Or showed haplotype conservation between species.

At least that would tell you something, this is just a bunch of pixels with no meaning. A vaguely similar thing I've done was to plot plot SNP density (as color intensity) over the genome - but that was for a specific project, I didn't realize such things are "new visions".

There are definitely prettier visualizations out there too: http://acg.media.mit.edu/people/fry/genomevalence

Even this is a lot more informative (I think www.visualcomplexity.com was mentioned on slashdot a couple of years ago).

Yeah, here's how these gene homology/orthology maps tend to look:
http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project_details .cfm?id=143&index=15&domain=Biology
(I know the actual graph shows something different - just a visual example)

Yes, this is a beautiful site, and they also explain the purposes and goal of each figure or tool. My favorite is probably this one : http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project_details .cfm?id=5&index=5&domain= "Alice in Wonderland" as a visual graph that shows the interactions between characters, and when they appear through the book. Of course it will never replace the pleasure of reading it, but it's very nice for research purposes.

http://www.visualcomplexity.com/