The previous argument that the European satellite navigation system Galileo would make Europeans independent from the US apparently starts to falter. As reported by the Tagesschau (German TV news, trans. note), US armed forces can jam or artificially deteriorate the Galileo signal without consulting the Europeans, just as it is being done nowadays with GPS signals in times of crises.
But that is not sufficient for the Americans. They further demand that the unencrypted Galileo signal, which the system broadcasts during normal operation, should be artificially degraded or dampened, as well. Should the US come through with this demand, one of the major arguments for the European navigation system would fall, namely its higher precision compared to GPS. The pivotal round of negotiations for this is planned to take place in the American capital, Washington DC, in January.
The Galileo project is estimated to cost four billion Euro, and is supposed to become operational in 2008. Approximately 30 satellites are needed for the system. Recently, China and India have agreed to participate in the financing of the project with 500 million Euro combined. (uma/c't)
In Basel, Switzerland, pretty much what you describe has happened a few years ago. A local TV station with only a few hours programming per day had put up a camera on the main square, and the images of people passing by were broadcast when there was no programming. The camera was about 2-3m up in the air, but resolution was fairly good.
For the first couple of months, you'd occasionally see people waving or grimacing to the camera. A few months later, they had to take it down, apparently because people in prison get that channel, too, on their TV, and organized crime used this one-way communication channel, by signaling in front of the camera...
for what it's worth... sounds a bit like a PR release to me
Open air videoconferencing
Tholos Systems aim to build a virtual bridge between London and Vienna using "communication cylinders". These cylinders, about 3m high and with a 7m diameter feature a 360 projection surface. On these, an "encompassing panorama of the current scene" will be visible in highest picture quality, for one. On the other hand, people shall be able to instantaneously interact personally with each other. The two prototypes in London and Vienna are scheduled to go online in May 2004. Until 2008, the operators want to weave a "virtual net" between all european capitals.
A single cylinder will cost about 2 million Euro. Tholos Systems plan to amortize these costs through advertising: On the plan are a maximum of 13% commercial time, for a "broadcast time" of 24 hours. These 192 minutes will be offered as packages to "exclusive content partners", so as to neither endanger the "concept of THOLOS" nor water down the message by additional programming.
Inside of the cylinders, there are six HDTV projectors, 22 microphones, 22 loudspeakers and three cameras. The colums shall be interconnected using 100MBit lines. In order to protect against vandalism, the glass walls will be coated with a special nano-structured anti-graffiti layer. Moreover, the operators want to hire a security service that will watch the expensive hardware around the clock. (wst/ct)
Just saw that there are two manual translations (excellent ones, nonetheless) have already been posted. Well, whatever, now you have a little variety;-)
SCO Germany has to pay a fine of 10'000 Euro. The basis for this ruling of the district court Munich I is an injunction (trans: a rather loose translation of "einstweilige Verfgung", a German legal term, and IANAL) of both the Tarent company and the LinuxTag exposition. According to this injunction, SCO may not allege that Linux contains illegally acquired intellectual property of SCO. SCO apparently violated this injuction on their home page, and for this reason, Tarent filed for legal court proceedings.
According to a press release of Tarent GmbH, the court blamed SCO to have behaved negligently in the operation of their company home page. Even after the injunction, the accusation that "end users who use the software Linux, can be held accountable for violations of intellectual rights held by SCO" could be read on the home page.
Till Jaeger, the lawyer representing Tarent, sees the court ruling as a confirmation that SCO's claims have to be considered as "massively damaging to business", and that they concern a "very sensitive area". At the expense of other parties, Unproven allegations are used to make money out of fear. Nobody at SCO Germany was available for comment at present; regarding the filing of legal court proceedings, Hans Bayer, CEO of SCO Germany, told c't already in the beginning of June: "Our intention was to comply with the ruling." He claimed that the violation against the injunction had not been deliberate. (anw/c't)
Once more, a manual translation rather than the fishy fish stuff... I hope it is more readable than the machine-generated semi-sense.
SCO vs. Linux: The era of conspiracy theories
In the twisted and contorted story about SCO and the source code that possibly has been transferred to Linux from SCO's assets, new turns can be announced. The conspiracy theory that Microsoft is behind SCO is joined by a theory that the denial of SCO's claims is a single, well masked campaign by IBM. Infoworld reported that SCO's CEO Darl McBride sees IBM as the author of the smear campaign. IBM has instigated Novell to turn against SCO, said McBride, who has been working at Novell for many years as head of NEST, the Netware Embedded Division. IBM has made Red Hat to sue against SCO, he said moreover. In addition, Eric Raimond of the Open Source Initiative is alleged to be on IBM's payroll, who moreover finance the Free Software Foundation and with that the lawyer Eben Moglen, according to Darl McBride.
While IBM and Red Hat succinctly called the accusation ludicrous, and Novell issued no comment, Eric Raymond found the energy to send an open letter to Darl McBride. In the letter, he denied being paid by IBM, but did not dispute to have helped IBM. All in all, Raymond appealed to the common sense of the head of SCO with an allusion to Darth Vader's capacity to understand: "The choice is yours. Take off the dark helmet and talk with us like a human being or continue on the path that makes us fear bad times, but which will certainly bring ruin to you and to the whole top management of SCO."
Apart from the booming Star-Wars rhetoric, Eric Raymond used the open letter to draw attention to a petition of the Linux community, which was read on the SCOForum. In it, the SCO group is asked to give up the confrontational course and to name all incriminating parts of the source code. In return, the Linux programmers affirm that they will revise all questionable parts: "If there is code in the Linux kernel that breaches rights, we will remove it, since our community doesn't want to have any part of that kernel."
The polite request may remain unanswered, because SCO's first evidence shown on the SCOForum was not convincing. Apart from the problem of "greek" code, the Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) that was presented by SCO is now in the center of interest. SCO's example is from the file/sys/net/bpf.c, which is available here (link removed). In the part shown by SCO, the BSD terms of license are missing, which should always be named here: "Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer." Because they are absent, code experts like Bruce Perens and Greg Lehey assume that SCO has shown with this example that the license terms have been removed against the agreements.
This could constitute a classical own goal, since other possibilities are ruled out. While Jay Schulist, the programmer of the BSF version used in Linux, was employed by Caldera, he wrote the clean room variant of BSF before his time with Caldera. Among former Caldera employees, several remember that in the SCO trees, the copyright notice were missing in many places in the BSD code. The practice of cutting "redundant" licenses seems to have been in use in other companies as well. For instance, Heise Online was contacted by developers who had seen the same "technique" in use at Siemens-Nixdorf. If worst comes to worst, the code hunters have found evidence that proves the exact inverse of what SCO claims. At least in the case of BPF, SCO would have to present not only the powerpoint presentation, but the whole code to allay suspicions.
Don't know if this is good old Karma whoring, but I don't like the fishy fish tranlations, and since I speak german...
SCO: We keep our options open for further law suits
The dispute on whether parts of code from Unix development have possibly entered into Linux, and therefore whether rights held by SCO have been violated, has gained momentum again. At the SCOForum in Las Vegas, the SCO group has for the first time publicly presented parts of code and comments, which are supposed to prove the allegation of the company against IBM and the Linux community. Pictures of the code, which were published on Heise online, led to a first analysis by open source developers. Further investigations led to the assumption that the code shown in greek letters in SCOs evidence for code theft may point towards a transfer. Greg Lehey, for one, thinks so. Bruce Perens, however, merely concludes that none of the evidence brought forward by SCO would be sufficient to prove SCO Group's rights in court. SCO, in turn, argues that the code is protected by a licence with SGI.
c't spoke to Chris Sontag, Vice President Intellectual Property SCO, and Darl McBride, head of SCO, about the origins of the purported stolen code, the further directions of the legal dispute and the situation of SCO as a company.
c't: Mr. Sontag, the code sequences shown by you on the forum have been analyzed by experts. Result: Silicon graphics inserted them into Linux, not IBM
Chris Sontag: That is right. This example is not from IBM, but another of our licensees. At the moment, I cannot comment on who it is.
c't: The copy is supposed to go much further back than your rights on Unix. Moreover, it is said to have already been distributed by AT&T under the BSD licence, therefore freely accessible, and could have entered into Linux that way.
Sontag: That's completely wrong. We posess all files of this code with the complete source tree (lit: pedigree) in all version, up to the origin in 1969. We have looked through all tapes and all versions of the code. The code in question dates from exactly the version of Unix System V which we have delivered to SGI and licenced with a signed contract. This version was at the disposal of the licensee, and it was never in BSD or other releases. And the letter-by-letter copy of this version is found in Linux. We want to point out such flagrant breaches.
c't: But this evidence is useless in the dispute with IBM?
Sontag: Correct.
c't: Why then are you demonstrating exactly this code publicly as evidence? You are sueing IBM.
Sontag: We found several kinds of breaches of copyright and of contracts. Literal copying of code was the most obvious kind, and we wanted to prove this as well. Therefore, we have shown it in the public talk, and demonstrate the example also unter terms of an NDA. In the case of IBM, we have not yet found such cases of verbatim copying, but we have not examined everything yet. With IBM, this is above all about a different kind of breach of contract, namely the transfer of derived results on a very large scale. The licensing agreement provides that all changes and derived products remain within the originally licensed body of work.
c't: Your interpretation of copyright law -- concerning direct copies, as well as derived works -- was said to make no sense and not to be admissible at court by Egen Moglen, Professor of Law at Columbia University.
Sontag: Moglen is not exactly known as an expert for intellectual property (IP) law. I spoke with IP experts - and they think Moglen's interpretation makes no sense.
c't: Your lawyer David Boies is no IP specialist either.
Sontag: Correct, but his expertise is in contract law, and that will be the decisive weapon.
c't: You really didn't chose him for his highly publicised role in the Microsoft case?
Sontag: Let's say that aspect won't harm us at least.
Actually, as shown on the spec sheet pdf which somebody else in this thread linked to, the box uses a "No-Fan Power Supply" employing "MPPT technology and the HSC method"... in brief, heat from the PSU seems to be transferred to the case shell, which acts as heat sink.
OK, this is the complete text translated (and I have to add, this guy gets *pretty* emotional about this case, and uses a lot of colloquialisms).
Zalman fan-less PC
Preamble:
Finally, never-ending silence in the box. It took a long time for a product like this to be produced for the mass market. The manufacturer likely will be swamped by the large number of pre-orders. While its technical specs already convince us on paper, we are waiting for the first samples and pricing information. But one thing should be clear right away: The price will be way below any self-made constructions, since Zalman is known to specialize on uncompromising mass production. 6 heat pipes for the CPU and two more for the graphics card, as well as 10 for the hard disk should keep the system optimally cool. Let's look forward to it, and start saying good-bye to all these fans and noise makers right now. I hope it's christmas soon:-)
Well, what more can I say, the cream of the crop. It brings tears to my eyes. More heat pipes (18 of them!!) and cooling elements than you ever wanted.
Silence in its perfected form, since this is a completely closed case. The first PC case where also optical drives can be de-coupled and their noise dampened.
More is not technically feasible!
More silent is not possible!
From october on, this case will be available at www.alternate.de
So, start saving now!
And of course, I'll keep at it. (I guess the author means he'll post updates)
Okay, as much as I like Stephenson's books, I guess it's always at least a little dangerous to gleam scientific knowledge from fiction books.
Actually, you are quoting things from Stephenson that are about two very different processes. The first one is the electrolysis of salt water, by which you can gain elementary (non-ionic) chlorine. That is certainly true.
The next part then discusses certain applications of this clorine gas, and one of them for sure is the generation of halogenated aromatic compounds, as for instance PCB. However, while this compound really is a mean bitch, toxic and gets stored in your fat tissues, per se it has not a lot to do with clorine, only that this is one of the basic chemicals needed to make it.
No halfway modern geneticist nowadays believes that there is a single gene responsible for more than the most simple of traits. And I had the impression that the Nature article linked from this story expresses that view quite clearly with statements like: Finding one gene is like finding one part of a car. It looks useful, as though it's part of a larger mechanism. But we don't know what it does, what other parts it interacts with, or what the whole vehicle looks like. "It's an unbelievably complex system, and we've got one tiny glimpse," says Michael Tomasello, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
A very nice explanation on the limited usefulness of trying to assign "the" function for a particular gene was proposed in the book The "Collapse of Chaos : Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World" by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, a molecular biologist and a mathematician, respectively.
In general, it is easy to remove one part from a network of interacting parts, and observe the mechanism breaking down. Naively, these parts are then called the "key regulators" of this or that phenomenon, be it speech or whatever. Only lengthy experiments will then reveal the whole underlying mechanism maybe.
The stance that you attribute to geneticists, that they expect simplistic, monogenetic solutions to complex problems is actually more caused by the press (not only laymen's journals, btw), which always go for a snappy headline without "maybe" or "can be a part of a complex mechanism".
Hmm, well, looking at it my first impression was "really nice", but then, looking more closely, some things are off...
1) The "handles" are not handles, but rather ugly protrusions. What a pity!
2) as some ppl before me mentioned, as soon as you put your standard-beige drives in the drive trays, it will look a lot crappier than now. Do they plan to provide some way to cover the beige ugliness?
3) and most important: You can't swing open the side door. That feature alone (and only that one, maybe) would convince me to go for such a case, despite the price tag. Because that is just a plain good idea. But no, not in this case.
This makes me wonder: Is there a technical reason (I am no big hardware tweaker myself, so I am asking) that an assembly as seen with the G3/G4 macs can't be done in the PC world? Mount the motherboard on a swing-out side panel and leave enough room for the connectors so that it can be opened even when the box is running, and nothing snags or breaks? Why isn't this the standard way of mounting a PC?
questions, questions, but I am sure the/. crowd has some answers:-)
Hmmm... I know the point is somewhat controversial, but (speaking for myself and my point of view here) viruses are NOT alive.
They are just a set of instructions (on how to make more viruses) packaged in a protein coat, sort-of like a shrink-wrapped piece of software.
Viruses absolutely rely on the cellular machinery of the host cell in order to procreate. If there is no host, the virus just lies there, doing nothing.
Therefore, a virus does not fulfil the definition of life form for me. The best, workable definition of what life is, to me is that metabolism is required. Thus, viruses != alive, and no life was created "from scratch".
Also, on another note, "without the chain of other life back to the primordial soup" is not quite true, either. The scientists did not create a new species or a completely new virus, all they did was to re-create an exact copy of a polio virus, which very much has that chain attached.
I remember that at least four years back, they held a very similar competition at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland (of course, sponsored by Yamaha). During the festival, you could enter the competition by playing an original composition or a known piece on one of the Disklaviers they had standing in the lobby of the main festival hall. Your performance would be recorded on a disk and later, all entries were judged by a jury that heard the pieces being reproduced by a Disklavier. So that technology is far from new, really. It's just once more that Yamaha is promoting their Disklavier.
No, that was not their purpose, it was their means. If it had been the sole purpose, I bet that could have been arranged more easily. They have an issue/agenda to push, and killing these people was their way of getting attention. Or to get revenge, whatever. But the killing itself was not the purpose.
Okay, I see that could work... but gosh, dialyzing stuff in and out? What a nightmare!
It's good that we have a reliable, fast and efficient technology for this now (even though, reliable and efficient are sort-of relative, as probably anyone who tried to do some more exotic PCR variants like inverse PCR (never worked for me) or homology cloning with degenerated primers (works, but isn't easy) can tell many tales about:-) )
now you made me curious, what enzyme do you propose for strand separation?
and furthermore, if you add this denaturing enzyme, it will keep denaturing your DNA during cycling, whereas with heat, you can denature just at the beginning of the cycle and then let the primers anneal by cooling the reaction down, a prerequisite for subsequent elongation
(sorry if I am nitpicking... but I must have run at least 1'000 PCR reactions up to now, and as you know, it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks, erm experiments:)
"Holed up in his California cocoon, Lucas seemed to fall out of touch with post-9/11 America. "
Oh gosh, I can't believe it! So far, I had a problem understanding all those who hate Katz's contributions to/. But this time, he really made a parody of the parody of him, as it is portrayed by many of the/. users.
I always thought the comments on Katz's writing were unjust, but now I think they may have a point... Please, give me a break! The reason why Episode 2 doesn't sell well is that it is a bad and boring movie. Full stop. That's it. Nothing more.
And no, I am not post-9/11 traumatized, since I am not US american, unlike the moviegoers he apparently thinks about. I am not belittling the tragendy of 9/11, I am just getting sort of fed up of this being the end-all reason for just about everything. The movie would have sucked last year, too, just as Episode 1 was not exactly a good movie, and that was before 9/11, mind you...
Polymerase is the enzyme that makes DNA strands from single nucleotides. And theoretically, you could use human polymerase or dog or whatever.
The thing is this, though. PCR works in three steps: 1) denaturation: At 94C, your template DNA separates into two single strands 2) annealing: ~50-60C: The short primer sequences basepair with the single strands, providing a starting point for the polymerase 3) Elongation ~68-72C: The polymerase elongates the primer by inserting free bases, according to the template DNA. After this single round of PCR, you've made 2 copies from one, now, repeat for 30 cycles or so.
The problem is the denaturation step. If you do this, a normal polymerase is cooked. A thermostable polymerase survives this brief 94C shock, saving you the trouble of adding fresh polymerase every cycle and making PCR practical and efficient.
You're right... the polymerase chain reaction is anything but new... It was invented over 15 years ago.
The absolutely ingenious step in the development of this technique was the idea to use thermostable enzymes to do it. Similar things were done before, but after each round of amplifying the DNA, you had to cook your samples (well, 94C anyways) to separate the double-stranded DNA into single strands. That usually killed off the enzyme, so fresh enzyme had to be added after each cycle. But using a polymerase taken from a thermophilic bacterium (Thermus aquaticus), you could heat your samples as required without finishing off the enzyme, since it tolerates high temperatures. Thus, you could repeat cycle after cycle, and with each cycle, you get twice as much product as you had before.
I believe that's how it was done, back when PCR was invented (back in 1985 or so) but nowadays, no one uses RNA as primers without a very good reason to do so. Why? RNA is unstable, and you have RNAses (enzymes that break up RNA) on your hands, in your spit, everywhere...
What's used today is short oligonucleotides as primers. These are short, single-stranded DNA stretches that are synthesized by a chemical process and subsequently purified. They are available from commercial suppliers at something like 50 cent a base.
IIRC from my history lessons, the Maginot line was not penetrated but circumvented. It was pretty solidly built but based on wrong assumptions.
Kinda like having that big-ass custom firewall set up on your box and then allowing telnet access to its root account, figuring nobody would ever guess the username root...
Slashdot Mirror
Galileo under US control
The previous argument that the European satellite navigation system Galileo would make Europeans independent from the US apparently starts to falter. As reported by the Tagesschau (German TV news, trans. note), US armed forces can jam or artificially deteriorate the Galileo signal without consulting the Europeans, just as it is being done nowadays with GPS signals in times of crises.
But that is not sufficient for the Americans. They further demand that the unencrypted Galileo signal, which the system broadcasts during normal operation, should be artificially degraded or dampened, as well. Should the US come through with this demand, one of the major arguments for the European navigation system would fall, namely its higher precision compared to GPS. The pivotal round of negotiations for this is planned to take place in the American capital, Washington DC, in January.
The Galileo project is estimated to cost four billion Euro, and is supposed to become operational in 2008. Approximately 30 satellites are needed for the system. Recently, China and India have agreed to participate in the financing of the project with 500 million Euro combined. (uma/c't)
In Basel, Switzerland, pretty much what you describe has happened a few years ago.
A local TV station with only a few hours programming per day had put up a camera on the main square, and the images of people passing by were broadcast when there was no programming. The camera was about 2-3m up in the air, but resolution was fairly good.
For the first couple of months, you'd occasionally see people waving or grimacing to the camera. A few months later, they had to take it down, apparently because people in prison get that channel, too, on their TV, and organized crime used this one-way communication channel, by signaling in front of the camera...
for what it's worth ... sounds a bit like a PR release to me
Open air videoconferencing
Tholos Systems aim to build a virtual bridge between London and Vienna using "communication cylinders".
These cylinders, about 3m high and with a 7m diameter feature a 360 projection surface. On these, an "encompassing panorama
of the current scene" will be visible in highest picture quality, for one. On the other hand, people shall be able to instantaneously
interact personally with each other. The two prototypes in London and Vienna are scheduled to go online in May 2004. Until
2008, the operators want to weave a "virtual net" between all european capitals.
A single cylinder will cost about 2 million Euro. Tholos Systems plan to amortize these costs through advertising:
On the plan are a maximum of 13% commercial time, for a "broadcast time" of 24 hours. These 192 minutes will be offered as packages
to "exclusive content partners", so as to neither endanger the "concept of THOLOS" nor water down the message by additional programming.
Inside of the cylinders, there are six HDTV projectors, 22 microphones, 22 loudspeakers and three cameras. The colums shall be interconnected
using 100MBit lines. In order to protect against vandalism, the glass walls will be coated with a special nano-structured anti-graffiti layer.
Moreover, the operators want to hire a security service that will watch the expensive hardware around the clock. (wst/ct)
Just saw that there are two manual translations (excellent ones, nonetheless) have already been posted. Well, whatever, now you have a little variety ;-)
Hope I did better than the fish ...
SCO must pay a monetary fine
SCO Germany has to pay a fine of 10'000 Euro. The basis for this ruling of the district court Munich I is an injunction (trans: a rather loose translation of "einstweilige Verfgung", a German legal term, and IANAL) of both the Tarent company and the LinuxTag exposition. According to this injunction, SCO may not allege that Linux contains illegally acquired intellectual property of SCO. SCO apparently violated this injuction on their home page, and for this reason, Tarent filed for legal court proceedings.
According to a press release of Tarent GmbH, the court blamed SCO to have behaved negligently in the operation of their company home page. Even after the injunction, the accusation that "end users who use the software Linux, can be held accountable for violations of intellectual rights held by SCO" could be read on the home page.
Till Jaeger, the lawyer representing Tarent, sees the court ruling as a confirmation that SCO's claims have to be considered as "massively damaging to business", and that they concern a "very sensitive area". At the expense of other parties, Unproven allegations are used to make money out of fear. Nobody at SCO Germany was available for comment at present; regarding the filing of legal court proceedings, Hans Bayer, CEO of SCO Germany, told c't already in the beginning of June: "Our intention was to comply with the ruling." He claimed that the violation against the injunction had not been deliberate. (anw/c't)
Once more, a manual translation rather than the fishy fish stuff ... I hope it is more readable than the machine-generated semi-sense.
/sys/net/bpf.c, which is available here (link removed). In the part shown by SCO, the BSD terms of license are missing, which should always be named here: "Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer." Because they are absent, code experts like Bruce Perens and Greg Lehey assume that SCO has shown with this example that the license terms have been removed against the agreements.
SCO vs. Linux: The era of conspiracy theories
In the twisted and contorted story about SCO and the source code that possibly has been transferred to Linux from SCO's assets, new turns can be announced. The conspiracy theory that Microsoft is behind SCO is joined by a theory that the denial of SCO's claims is a single, well masked campaign by IBM. Infoworld reported that SCO's CEO Darl McBride sees IBM as the author of the smear campaign. IBM has instigated Novell to turn against SCO, said McBride, who has been working at Novell for many years as head of NEST, the Netware Embedded Division. IBM has made Red Hat to sue against SCO, he said moreover. In addition, Eric Raimond of the Open Source Initiative is alleged to be on IBM's payroll, who moreover finance the Free Software Foundation and with that the lawyer Eben Moglen, according to Darl McBride.
While IBM and Red Hat succinctly called the accusation ludicrous, and Novell issued no comment, Eric Raymond found the energy to send an open letter to Darl McBride. In the letter, he denied being paid by IBM, but did not dispute to have helped IBM. All in all, Raymond appealed to the common sense of the head of SCO with an allusion to Darth Vader's capacity to understand: "The choice is yours. Take off the dark helmet and talk with us like a human being or continue on the path that makes us fear bad times, but which will certainly bring ruin to you and to the whole top management of SCO."
Apart from the booming Star-Wars rhetoric, Eric Raymond used the open letter to draw attention to a petition of the Linux community, which was read on the SCOForum. In it, the SCO group is asked to give up the confrontational course and to name all incriminating parts of the source code. In return, the Linux programmers affirm that they will revise all questionable parts: "If there is code in the Linux kernel that breaches rights, we will remove it, since our community doesn't want to have any part of that kernel."
The polite request may remain unanswered, because SCO's first evidence shown on the SCOForum was not convincing. Apart from the problem of "greek" code, the Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) that was presented by SCO is now in the center of interest. SCO's example is from the file
This could constitute a classical own goal, since other possibilities are ruled out. While Jay Schulist, the programmer of the BSF version used in Linux, was employed by Caldera, he wrote the clean room variant of BSF before his time with Caldera. Among former Caldera employees, several remember that in the SCO trees, the copyright notice were missing in many places in the BSD code. The practice of cutting "redundant" licenses seems to have been in use in other companies as well. For instance, Heise Online was contacted by developers who had seen the same "technique" in use at Siemens-Nixdorf. If worst comes to worst, the code hunters have found evidence that proves the exact inverse of what SCO claims. At least in the case of BPF, SCO would have to present not only the powerpoint presentation, but the whole code to allay suspicions.
Don't know if this is good old Karma whoring, but I don't like the fishy fish tranlations, and since I speak german...
SCO: We keep our options open for further law suits
The dispute on whether parts of code from Unix development have possibly entered into Linux, and therefore whether rights held by SCO have been violated, has gained momentum again. At the SCOForum in Las Vegas, the SCO group has for the first time publicly presented parts of code and comments, which are supposed to prove the allegation of the company against IBM and the Linux community. Pictures of the code, which were published on Heise online, led to a first analysis by open source developers. Further investigations led to the assumption that the code shown in greek letters in SCOs evidence for code theft may point towards a transfer. Greg Lehey, for one, thinks so. Bruce Perens, however, merely concludes that none of the evidence brought forward by SCO would be sufficient to prove SCO Group's rights in court. SCO, in turn, argues that the code is protected by a licence with SGI.
c't spoke to Chris Sontag, Vice President Intellectual Property SCO, and Darl McBride, head of SCO, about the origins of the purported stolen code, the further directions of the legal dispute and the situation of SCO as a company.
c't: Mr. Sontag, the code sequences shown by you on the forum have been analyzed by experts. Result: Silicon graphics inserted them into Linux, not IBM
Chris Sontag: That is right. This example is not from IBM, but another of our licensees. At the moment, I cannot comment on who it is.
c't: The copy is supposed to go much further back than your rights on Unix. Moreover, it is said to have already been distributed by AT&T under the BSD licence, therefore freely accessible, and could have entered into Linux that way.
Sontag: That's completely wrong. We posess all files of this code with the complete source tree (lit: pedigree) in all version, up to the origin in 1969. We have looked through all tapes and all versions of the code. The code in question dates from exactly the version of Unix System V which we have delivered to SGI and licenced with a signed contract. This version was at the disposal of the licensee, and it was never in BSD or other releases. And the letter-by-letter copy of this version is found in Linux. We want to point out such flagrant breaches.
c't: But this evidence is useless in the dispute with IBM?
Sontag: Correct.
c't: Why then are you demonstrating exactly this code publicly as evidence? You are sueing IBM.
Sontag: We found several kinds of breaches of copyright and of contracts. Literal copying of code was the most obvious kind, and we wanted to prove this as well. Therefore, we have shown it in the public talk, and demonstrate the example also unter terms of an NDA. In the case of IBM, we have not yet found such cases of verbatim copying, but we have not examined everything yet. With IBM, this is above all about a different kind of breach of contract, namely the transfer of derived results on a very large scale. The licensing agreement provides that all changes and derived products remain within the originally licensed body of work.
c't: Your interpretation of copyright law -- concerning direct copies, as well as derived works -- was said to make no sense and not to be admissible at court by Egen Moglen, Professor of Law at Columbia University.
Sontag: Moglen is not exactly known as an expert for intellectual property (IP) law. I spoke with IP experts - and they think Moglen's interpretation makes no sense.
c't: Your lawyer David Boies is no IP specialist either.
Sontag: Correct, but his expertise is in contract law, and that will be the decisive weapon.
c't: You really didn't chose him for his highly publicised role in the Microsoft case?
Sontag: Let's say that aspect won't harm us at least.
c't: Will you sue this other licensee, as well?
Sontag: I can't comment
Actually, as shown on the spec sheet pdf which somebody else in this thread linked to, the box uses a "No-Fan Power Supply" employing "MPPT technology and the HSC method" ... in brief, heat from the PSU seems to be transferred to the case shell, which acts as heat sink.
OK, this is the complete text translated (and I have to add, this guy gets *pretty* emotional about this case, and uses a lot of colloquialisms).
:-)
Zalman fan-less PC
Preamble:
Finally, never-ending silence in the box. It took a long time for a product like this to be produced for the mass market. The manufacturer likely will be swamped by the large number of pre-orders. While its technical specs already convince us on paper, we are waiting for the first samples and pricing information. But one thing should be clear right away: The price will be way below any self-made constructions, since Zalman is known to specialize on uncompromising mass production. 6 heat pipes for the CPU and two more for the graphics card, as well as 10 for the hard disk should keep the system optimally cool. Let's look forward to it, and start saying good-bye to all these fans and noise makers right now. I hope it's christmas soon
Well, what more can I say, the cream of the crop. It brings tears to my eyes. More heat pipes (18 of them!!) and cooling elements than you ever wanted.
Silence in its perfected form, since this is a completely closed case. The first PC case where also optical drives can be de-coupled and their noise dampened.
More is not technically feasible!
More silent is not possible!
From october on, this case will be available at www.alternate.de
So, start saving now!
And of course, I'll keep at it. (I guess the author means he'll post updates)
Okay, as much as I like Stephenson's books, I guess it's always at least a little dangerous to gleam scientific knowledge from fiction books.
Actually, you are quoting things from Stephenson that are about two very different processes. The first one is the electrolysis of salt water, by which you can gain elementary (non-ionic) chlorine. That is certainly true.
The next part then discusses certain applications of this clorine gas, and one of them for sure is the generation of halogenated aromatic compounds, as for instance PCB. However, while this compound really is a mean bitch, toxic and gets stored in your fat tissues, per se it has not a lot to do with clorine, only that this is one of the basic chemicals needed to make it.
I hope that clarified that point.
IANAChemist, really, anyhow...
I wonder if you read the article?
:)
No halfway modern geneticist nowadays believes that there is a single gene responsible for more than the most simple of traits. And I had the impression that the Nature article linked from this story expresses that view quite clearly with statements like:
Finding one gene is like finding one part of a car. It looks useful, as though it's part of a larger mechanism. But we don't know what it does, what other parts it interacts with, or what the whole vehicle looks like. "It's an unbelievably complex system, and we've got one tiny glimpse," says Michael Tomasello, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
A very nice explanation on the limited usefulness of trying to assign "the" function for a particular gene was proposed in the book The "Collapse of Chaos : Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World" by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, a molecular biologist and a mathematician, respectively.
In general, it is easy to remove one part from a network of interacting parts, and observe the mechanism breaking down. Naively, these parts are then called the "key regulators" of this or that phenomenon, be it speech or whatever. Only lengthy experiments will then reveal the whole underlying mechanism maybe.
The stance that you attribute to geneticists, that they expect simplistic, monogenetic solutions to complex problems is actually more caused by the press (not only laymen's journals, btw), which always go for a snappy headline without "maybe" or "can be a part of a complex mechanism".
just my 2 centimorgans
- Airbus industries?
- Embraer?
just to name the two non-US companies successfully producing passenger planes that came to my mind first...Hmm, well, looking at it my first impression was "really nice", but then, looking more closely, some things are off ...
/. crowd has some answers :-)
1) The "handles" are not handles, but rather ugly protrusions. What a pity!
2) as some ppl before me mentioned, as soon as you put your standard-beige drives in the drive trays, it will look a lot crappier than now. Do they plan to provide some way to cover the beige ugliness?
3) and most important: You can't swing open the side door. That feature alone (and only that one, maybe) would convince me to go for such a case, despite the price tag. Because that is just a plain good idea. But no, not in this case.
This makes me wonder: Is there a technical reason (I am no big hardware tweaker myself, so I am asking) that an assembly as seen with the G3/G4 macs can't be done in the PC world? Mount the motherboard on a swing-out side panel and leave enough room for the connectors so that it can be opened even when the box is running, and nothing snags or breaks? Why isn't this the standard way of mounting a PC?
questions, questions, but I am sure the
Hmmm ...
I know the point is somewhat controversial, but (speaking for myself and my point of view here) viruses are NOT alive.
They are just a set of instructions (on how to make more viruses) packaged in a protein coat, sort-of like a shrink-wrapped piece of software.
Viruses absolutely rely on the cellular machinery of the host cell in order to procreate. If there is no host, the virus just lies there, doing nothing.
Therefore, a virus does not fulfil the definition of life form for me. The best, workable definition of what life is, to me is that metabolism is required. Thus, viruses != alive, and no life was created "from scratch".
Also, on another note, "without the chain of other life back to the primordial soup" is not quite true, either. The scientists did not create a new species or a completely new virus, all they did was to re-create an exact copy of a polio virus, which very much has that chain attached.
I remember that at least four years back, they held a very similar competition at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland (of course, sponsored by Yamaha).
During the festival, you could enter the competition by playing an original composition or a known piece on one of the Disklaviers they had standing in the lobby of the main festival hall.
Your performance would be recorded on a disk and later, all entries were judged by a jury that heard the pieces being reproduced by a Disklavier.
So that technology is far from new, really. It's just once more that Yamaha is promoting their Disklavier.
Actually their purpose was to kill people.
No, that was not their purpose, it was their means.
If it had been the sole purpose, I bet that could have been arranged more easily. They have an issue/agenda to push, and killing these people was their way of getting attention. Or to get revenge, whatever. But the killing itself was not the purpose.
Okay, I see that could work ... but gosh, dialyzing stuff in and out? What a nightmare!
:-) )
It's good that we have a reliable, fast and efficient technology for this now (even though, reliable and efficient are sort-of relative, as probably anyone who tried to do some more exotic PCR variants like inverse PCR (never worked for me) or homology cloning with degenerated primers (works, but isn't easy) can tell many tales about
now you made me curious, what enzyme do you propose for strand separation?
... but I must have run at least 1'000 PCR reactions up to now, and as you know, it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks, erm experiments :)
and furthermore, if you add this denaturing enzyme, it will keep denaturing your DNA during cycling, whereas with heat, you can denature just at the beginning of the cycle and then let the primers anneal by cooling the reaction down, a prerequisite for subsequent elongation
(sorry if I am nitpicking
"Holed up in his California cocoon, Lucas seemed to fall out of touch with post-9/11 America. "
/. But this time, he really made a parody of the parody of him, as it is portrayed by many of the /. users.
... Please, give me a break! The reason why Episode 2 doesn't sell well is that it is a bad and boring movie. Full stop. That's it. Nothing more.
...
Oh gosh, I can't believe it! So far, I had a problem understanding all those who hate Katz's contributions to
I always thought the comments on Katz's writing were unjust, but now I think they may have a point
And no, I am not post-9/11 traumatized, since I am not US american, unlike the moviegoers he apparently thinks about. I am not belittling the tragendy of 9/11, I am just getting sort of fed up of this being the end-all reason for just about everything. The movie would have sucked last year, too, just as Episode 1 was not exactly a good movie, and that was before 9/11, mind you
No, it hasn't got anything to do with speed ...
Polymerase is the enzyme that makes DNA strands from single nucleotides. And theoretically, you could use human polymerase or dog or whatever.
The thing is this, though. PCR works in three steps:
1) denaturation: At 94C, your template DNA separates into two single strands
2) annealing: ~50-60C: The short primer sequences basepair with the single strands, providing a starting point for the polymerase
3) Elongation ~68-72C: The polymerase elongates the primer by inserting free bases, according to the template DNA.
After this single round of PCR, you've made 2 copies from one, now, repeat for 30 cycles or so.
The problem is the denaturation step. If you do this, a normal polymerase is cooked. A thermostable polymerase survives this brief 94C shock, saving you the trouble of adding fresh polymerase every cycle and making PCR practical and efficient.
Hope that clarified it
You're right ... the polymerase chain reaction is anything but new ... It was invented over 15 years ago.
The absolutely ingenious step in the development of this technique was the idea to use thermostable enzymes to do it. Similar things were done before, but after each round of amplifying the DNA, you had to cook your samples (well, 94C anyways) to separate the double-stranded DNA into single strands. That usually killed off the enzyme, so fresh enzyme had to be added after each cycle. But using a polymerase taken from a thermophilic bacterium (Thermus aquaticus), you could heat your samples as required without finishing off the enzyme, since it tolerates high temperatures. Thus, you could repeat cycle after cycle, and with each cycle, you get twice as much product as you had before.
Where did you get this RNA primer stuff from?
...
I believe that's how it was done, back when PCR was invented (back in 1985 or so) but nowadays, no one uses RNA as primers without a very good reason to do so. Why? RNA is unstable, and you have RNAses (enzymes that break up RNA) on your hands, in your spit, everywhere
What's used today is short oligonucleotides as primers. These are short, single-stranded DNA stretches that are synthesized by a chemical process and subsequently purified. They are available from commercial suppliers at something like 50 cent a base.
The original publication by the authors describing their methods and partially also their motivation is available for free. You can get it here.
but now we brought it up, somehow, didn't we?
Kinda like having that big-ass custom firewall set up on your box and then allowing telnet access to its root account, figuring nobody would ever guess the username root...