ptenting DNA is silly these are naturally occuring things (squences) they where not created just discovered its all very silly
You're right, but then again your observation is pointless because no-one is patenting DNA sequences. They are however patenting drugs and therapies that are discovered as a result of studying the sequence. That's no different from patenting any other drug.
Now, you may not think that companies are justified in getting a return from their investments of hundreds of millions of dollars in research, but that's irrelevant here, because you have demonstrated that you simply do not understand the issue. Also note that without that investment of private money, the medicines would simply not exist.
Cuba and alot of africa are starting not to recognise these patents as they would like to build the drugs that help AIDS and HIV
Really? Please post an example of a modern medicine developed by Cuba or an African nation. Please also post, in USD or the currency of your choice, the amounts invested by Cuba and African nations in biotech research, and the numbers of researchers working in each of those countries. For further credit, you may compare and contrast those numbers with the West.
One major downside of UD is that they don't have non-Windows clients, so if that's an issue go with Folding.
One majr downside of Folding is that they only support Windows, Mac OSX and Linux (x86 only). Where's the IRIX, Solaris, BSD? How hard can it be to recompile, you would assume it was cleanly written from the fact that it already builds on two variants of Unix. Or why couldn't they have written their computation core to run within distributed.net's client and not only saved themselves some work, but benefitted from greater participation?
Folding's cool, and I run it on my Dell, but given that I'm simply not interested in the clients that are available, I have MIPS (etc) hardware with plenty of spare cycles.
What is the best way to create a standards team? Who should be included? How should it be governed? I have been asked by a vendor Cokinetic Systems to start an independent standards body for their presentation layer description language I3ML. I am interested, but I don't want to repeat mistakes already made by others. Any relevant experience?"
No, but this is Slashdot, so I'll stick my oar in anyway.
The usefulness of a standard is directly related to the prestige of the standards body. If the IEEE say something's a standard, then people sit up and take notice. If W3C or ECMA say something is a standard, then you can reasonably expect people to comply with it.
If the objective here is to be a genuine standard, then submit it to ECMA. If it's to be a marketing tool (sounds like it, since the sole vendor is the one that will control the body, even if it's nominally independant) then don't expect anyone to pay any attention.
ExtremeMhz.com has released an article on how they designed and built a PC containing dual systems. One system is a supercooled Intel and the other is a water chilled AMD.
For years, you've been able to mix a PC and a SPARC in one case, and you can mix AS/400 and PC too. There are many advantages to this kind of configuration. But why would you want to mix a PC and a PC?
A (non Concorde) flight from NY to Heathrow takes just about as long as a flight from NY to LA. The only really long flight out of the US is LA to Hawaii, but there's not enough demand on that route to make replacing 747s with A380s feasible.
There are some high volume Europe to US routes, tho', like London to NYC and back. Well, it was like that before 911, and I guess it will be again. That route was a real cash cow for people like Virgin and BA. The other European hubs like Amsterdam probably also see a similar amount of traffic.
And remember, just because it does carry almost 600 people, doesn't mean you have to configure it like that. What if you set it up for 400 passengers with plenty of leg room? That might turn out to be more lucrative than packing people in. Or 300 with shops and a casino on board.
There are LOTS of non-trivial problems to solve before we get a space elevator.
Yes, like "how exactly do we make them carbon nanotube things? And is it even possible anyway?". I get the impression that their $10B figure makes some assumptions like "carbon nanotube rope is as cheap as nylon rope".
I see your point. What this university was doing, therefore, is the equivalent of watching 10 minutes of EVERY film that enters that lab and passing judgements on everyone who does so.
Not quite. If the university was fingerprinting every CD you placed in the drive on your PC, that would be wrong, but they are fingerprinting after duplication has taken place, and during redistribution. I can guarantee that no university would permit students to reproduce unlimited copies of a commercial film they did not own on it's equipment!
And I don't think they were making anything more than a binary decision: this file is/is not being legally redistributed.
We were wondering if slashdotters could offer some advice on which state is the best to start an e-commerce business in.
It depends what you mean by "in". Delaware is probably the most company-friendly state. There are plenty of companies that are physically headquartered in Manhattan but legally based in Delaware, physically existing there only as one of hundreds of brass plaques on the front of lawyer's offices.
The beauty of the internet is that when location becomes irrelevant to where you do business, it also becomes the most important thing - because now you can choose anywhere. So, head for somwhere that the taxes are low and the people are friendly, like New Hampshire, or where there's a nascent nigh-tech hub, like out in Western Mass.
Not sure about the telecom industry, but the USPS already *does* have regulations about what can and cannot be sent through the mail.
Yes, but if the regulations are breached, the sender is liable, not the carrier. The carrier isn't supposed to know or care what's in packages in most cases. That's the difference in this case, the new law proposes to make the ISP responsible for the traffic it merely carries, not originates.
The university network is there primarily for learning, but there should be a reasonable amount of respect for personal growth and exploration. I'm not sure I want to argue that pirating friends episodes and pornography are aiding that pursuit, but maybe they are.
I'd like to point out that the students weren't sharing music they'd composed themselves, or movies they'd made themselves. What they were doing was no different from using the university's Film Studies (or Media Studies or whatever it's called) department's equipment to run off a thousand copies of a video fom Blockbuster.
Slashdot is doing itself no favors by condoning this kind of activity. It's obsessing on trivial freedoms and missing the "big picture".
Thank you for pointing out the exact fallacy in your logic. It makes debate so much easier when you opponent strikes themselves down.
The slipperly slope in this case is that ISPs will be made ever more responsible for the content they carry. But the phone company and the post office aren't responsible for what their infrastructure is used to deliver. Why should the web be a special case?
IBM. IBM has been banging the server consolidation drum for some time and has been getting some good wins. Got a bunch of exchange servers? Replace them with Domino on one iSeries. Got a bunch of Unix boxes? Replace them with LPARs on a pSeries. Racks of web servers at a hosting provider? zSeries running 100s of Linux instances will clean up that nightmare. Still need a legacy Win server? Jail it up in an iSeries IXS card.
As for IBM, I think it was Microsoft that dropped the ball on PPC support--NT for PPC had no applications to speak of and was essentially useless. And Intel didn't fail with the i860 to screw Microsoft, they just screwed up.
You've hit the nail on the head there. Microsoft have come to realize (or at least, believe) that they can't rely on any third parties. That's why they do operating systems, programming languages, end-user applications, back office servers, etc.
Microsoft simply aren't willing to risk anymore that they will create an OS and find no third party apps for it. Look at NT on Alpha, it was supported for years, but MS gave up when they realized that all the developers were developing for NT on x86. Even tho' for many applications porting would have been very straightforward (in some cases, just a recompile) the ISVs just didn't do it.
I've been playing with User-Mode Linux a bit recently; it's a port of Linux to run on Linux:-) (instead of running on real hardware, it does hardware-ish things via Linux syscalls). It runs as an unpriviledged user, but has its own internal users, permissions, even a root user.
It's a nifty idea, but it's not suitable for servier virtualization in the data centre, at least not yet. The problem is that the host Linux kernel lacks resource allocation and accounting capabilities - other than say nice there's no way to really manage the CPU, and you can't quota the network bandwidth in and out of the VMs, you can't limit the working set size of each VM, and so on. A process misbehaving in one UML VM can still affect others on the machine.
The real use for UML is in development environments, it allows you to very quickly set up test systems. Start 5 VMs and now you can test your distributed app for race conditions without having to buy and spend time configuring physical kit.
Now you can hide those duplicate servers in one box! Yeah, scalable and 7/24/365.25 reliability and your support budget will be really small. I can see the press releases coming out of eWeak and C/Net now.
The reality is that if it's scalable, reliable and cheap, no-one will actually care how it works under the hood. Remember that no-one cares about OS reliability and hardware reliability just for the sake of it; what matters is that the application - a database, a web site, whatever - is available to the end user. If it's cheaper to spread it across 5 cheap PCs and reboot them one at a time every day than it is to buy one expensive Sun, then that's what businesses will do.
'The technology will be integrated into the Windows code, sources said.' Will Microsoft be able to pull this one off? Will their virtual machines run operating systems other than Microsoft's?
This is most likely Microsoft's response to Solaris Containers which are expected to be shipping in Solaris 10. Of course, both of these are simply implementations of ideas pioneered by IBM with VM/CMS.
The VM approach makes a lot of sense even if you only plan to use it to run multiple copies of the native OS within them. The advantages are twofold. Firstly, it prevents one malfunctioning application from impacting other applications - even on Unix this is a serious problem, since one process can devour the CPU, memory, disk space, etc. Secondly, it allows resources to be redistributed or added on the fly, especially if your VM is seamless enough to span nodes.
You have this inverted. It would've been rather more insightful if you'd asked why people dont want to work with Micro$oft. Think stacker patent, DOS, Sendo, utility apps, etc etc etc etc. People who do joint ventures with MS wind up getting f**ked up the arse by them. This is why phone and embedded device manufacturers have the often expressed attitude "we'll work with anyone but M$".
Nowadays, yes, but remember this was all happening a decade or more ago. Novell weren't even really interested in clients. And it doesn't explain Intel's and IBM's failures to get the i860 and PPC ready in time - both these companies could have benefitted enormously from MS, we could be running on PPC (or MIPS) instead of x86 on the average desktop if it had played out a little differently.
It's really interesting to see how Microsoft actually relate to their competitors. They wanted to run on PPC, but IBM messed them around. They wanted to work with Novell, but Novell weren't interested. Even Intel failed to deliver on the promise of i860.
Given that, is it any wonder that MS would rather do things "in house" than rely on third parties?
Slashdot Mirror
Who is Berman Bill? And why should I care if he drowned?
He's the scriptwriter on Star Trek, and if drowns the next movie won't suck quite so bad...
So if the air is denser, then it should have more thermal mass, and should provide better cooling. Anybody tried OC'ing in one of those chambers?
With all that extra oxygen, won't your Pentium just catch fire quicker?
ptenting DNA is silly these are naturally occuring things (squences) they where not created just discovered its all very silly
You're right, but then again your observation is pointless because no-one is patenting DNA sequences. They are however patenting drugs and therapies that are discovered as a result of studying the sequence. That's no different from patenting any other drug.
Now, you may not think that companies are justified in getting a return from their investments of hundreds of millions of dollars in research, but that's irrelevant here, because you have demonstrated that you simply do not understand the issue. Also note that without that investment of private money, the medicines would simply not exist.
Cuba and alot of africa are starting not to recognise these patents as they would like to build the drugs that help AIDS and HIV
Really? Please post an example of a modern medicine developed by Cuba or an African nation. Please also post, in USD or the currency of your choice, the amounts invested by Cuba and African nations in biotech research, and the numbers of researchers working in each of those countries. For further credit, you may compare and contrast those numbers with the West.
One major downside of UD is that they don't have non-Windows clients, so if that's an issue go with Folding.
One majr downside of Folding is that they only support Windows, Mac OSX and Linux (x86 only). Where's the IRIX, Solaris, BSD? How hard can it be to recompile, you would assume it was cleanly written from the fact that it already builds on two variants of Unix. Or why couldn't they have written their computation core to run within distributed.net's client and not only saved themselves some work, but benefitted from greater participation?
Folding's cool, and I run it on my Dell, but given that I'm simply not interested in the clients that are available, I have MIPS (etc) hardware with plenty of spare cycles.
It's much more of a philosophical thing. If everything was "free" then we wouldn't need the GPL.
Yes, and if everything was free, we wouldn't need copyright. Things like food, housing, clothes, cars, electricity, computers...
It's much more of a practical thing.
What is the best way to create a standards team? Who should be included? How should it be governed? I have been asked by a vendor Cokinetic Systems to start an independent standards body for their presentation layer description language I3ML. I am interested, but I don't want to repeat mistakes already made by others. Any relevant experience?"
No, but this is Slashdot, so I'll stick my oar in anyway.
The usefulness of a standard is directly related to the prestige of the standards body. If the IEEE say something's a standard, then people sit up and take notice. If W3C or ECMA say something is a standard, then you can reasonably expect people to comply with it.
If the objective here is to be a genuine standard, then submit it to ECMA. If it's to be a marketing tool (sounds like it, since the sole vendor is the one that will control the body, even if it's nominally independant) then don't expect anyone to pay any attention.
ExtremeMhz.com has released an article on how they designed and built a PC containing dual systems. One system is a supercooled Intel and the other is a water chilled AMD.
For years, you've been able to mix a PC and a SPARC in one case, and you can mix AS/400 and PC too. There are many advantages to this kind of configuration. But why would you want to mix a PC and a PC?
A (non Concorde) flight from NY to Heathrow takes just about as long as a flight from NY to LA. The only really long flight out of the US is LA to Hawaii, but there's not enough demand on that route to make replacing 747s with A380s feasible.
There are some high volume Europe to US routes, tho', like London to NYC and back. Well, it was like that before 911, and I guess it will be again. That route was a real cash cow for people like Virgin and BA. The other European hubs like Amsterdam probably also see a similar amount of traffic.
And remember, just because it does carry almost 600 people, doesn't mean you have to configure it like that. What if you set it up for 400 passengers with plenty of leg room? That might turn out to be more lucrative than packing people in. Or 300 with shops and a casino on board.
One: European governments are subsidizing Airbus development costs, which according to the U.S. violates WTO rules on subsidies.
I see your $11B European subsidy, and I raise you one $15B US bailout. What was your point again?
There are LOTS of non-trivial problems to solve before we get a space elevator.
Yes, like "how exactly do we make them carbon nanotube things? And is it even possible anyway?". I get the impression that their $10B figure makes some assumptions like "carbon nanotube rope is as cheap as nylon rope".
I see your point. What this university was doing, therefore, is the equivalent of watching 10 minutes of EVERY film that enters that lab and passing judgements on everyone who does so.
Not quite. If the university was fingerprinting every CD you placed in the drive on your PC, that would be wrong, but they are fingerprinting after duplication has taken place, and during redistribution. I can guarantee that no university would permit students to reproduce unlimited copies of a commercial film they did not own on it's equipment!
And I don't think they were making anything more than a binary decision: this file is/is not being legally redistributed.
We were wondering if slashdotters could offer some advice on which state is the best to start an e-commerce business in.
It depends what you mean by "in". Delaware is probably the most company-friendly state. There are plenty of companies that are physically headquartered in Manhattan but legally based in Delaware, physically existing there only as one of hundreds of brass plaques on the front of lawyer's offices.
The beauty of the internet is that when location becomes irrelevant to where you do business, it also becomes the most important thing - because now you can choose anywhere. So, head for somwhere that the taxes are low and the people are friendly, like New Hampshire, or where there's a nascent nigh-tech hub, like out in Western Mass.
Not sure about the telecom industry, but the USPS already *does* have regulations about what can and cannot be sent through the mail.
Yes, but if the regulations are breached, the sender is liable, not the carrier. The carrier isn't supposed to know or care what's in packages in most cases. That's the difference in this case, the new law proposes to make the ISP responsible for the traffic it merely carries, not originates.
The university network is there primarily for learning, but there should be a reasonable amount of respect for personal growth and exploration. I'm not sure I want to argue that pirating friends episodes and pornography are aiding that pursuit, but maybe they are.
I'd like to point out that the students weren't sharing music they'd composed themselves, or movies they'd made themselves. What they were doing was no different from using the university's Film Studies (or Media Studies or whatever it's called) department's equipment to run off a thousand copies of a video fom Blockbuster.
Slashdot is doing itself no favors by condoning this kind of activity. It's obsessing on trivial freedoms and missing the "big picture".
Where again is Sun's VM capability?
Here. Or at least, it will be.
the machines windows supports are mostly just too small to make any serious use of VMs.
You can buy a 32-Xeon Windows box today, if you want to, and they're only going to get bigger.
Thank you for pointing out the exact fallacy in your logic. It makes debate so much easier when you opponent strikes themselves down.
The slipperly slope in this case is that ISPs will be made ever more responsible for the content they carry. But the phone company and the post office aren't responsible for what their infrastructure is used to deliver. Why should the web be a special case?
IBM. IBM has been banging the server consolidation drum for some time and has been getting some good wins. Got a bunch of exchange servers? Replace them with Domino on one iSeries. Got a bunch of Unix boxes? Replace them with LPARs on a pSeries. Racks of web servers at a hosting provider? zSeries running 100s of Linux instances will clean up that nightmare. Still need a legacy Win server? Jail it up in an iSeries IXS card.
All true, so let's say Sun and IBM.
As for IBM, I think it was Microsoft that dropped the ball on PPC support--NT for PPC had no applications to speak of and was essentially useless. And Intel didn't fail with the i860 to screw Microsoft, they just screwed up.
You've hit the nail on the head there. Microsoft have come to realize (or at least, believe) that they can't rely on any third parties. That's why they do operating systems, programming languages, end-user applications, back office servers, etc.
Microsoft simply aren't willing to risk anymore that they will create an OS and find no third party apps for it. Look at NT on Alpha, it was supported for years, but MS gave up when they realized that all the developers were developing for NT on x86. Even tho' for many applications porting would have been very straightforward (in some cases, just a recompile) the ISVs just didn't do it.
I've been playing with User-Mode Linux a bit recently; it's a port of Linux to run on Linux :-) (instead of running on real hardware, it does hardware-ish things via Linux syscalls). It runs as an unpriviledged user, but has its own internal users, permissions, even a root user.
It's a nifty idea, but it's not suitable for servier virtualization in the data centre, at least not yet. The problem is that the host Linux kernel lacks resource allocation and accounting capabilities - other than say nice there's no way to really manage the CPU, and you can't quota the network bandwidth in and out of the VMs, you can't limit the working set size of each VM, and so on. A process misbehaving in one UML VM can still affect others on the machine.
The real use for UML is in development environments, it allows you to very quickly set up test systems. Start 5 VMs and now you can test your distributed app for race conditions without having to buy and spend time configuring physical kit.
Now you can hide those duplicate servers in one box! Yeah, scalable and 7/24/365.25 reliability and your support budget will be really small. I can see the press releases coming out of eWeak and C/Net now.
The reality is that if it's scalable, reliable and cheap, no-one will actually care how it works under the hood. Remember that no-one cares about OS reliability and hardware reliability just for the sake of it; what matters is that the application - a database, a web site, whatever - is available to the end user. If it's cheaper to spread it across 5 cheap PCs and reboot them one at a time every day than it is to buy one expensive Sun, then that's what businesses will do.
'The technology will be integrated into the Windows code, sources said.' Will Microsoft be able to pull this one off? Will their virtual machines run operating systems other than Microsoft's?
This is most likely Microsoft's response to Solaris Containers which are expected to be shipping in Solaris 10. Of course, both of these are simply implementations of ideas pioneered by IBM with VM/CMS.
The VM approach makes a lot of sense even if you only plan to use it to run multiple copies of the native OS within them. The advantages are twofold. Firstly, it prevents one malfunctioning application from impacting other applications - even on Unix this is a serious problem, since one process can devour the CPU, memory, disk space, etc. Secondly, it allows resources to be redistributed or added on the fly, especially if your VM is seamless enough to span nodes.
You have this inverted. It would've been rather more insightful if you'd asked why people dont want to work with Micro$oft. Think stacker patent, DOS, Sendo, utility apps, etc etc etc etc. People who do joint ventures with MS wind up getting f**ked up the arse by them. This is why phone and embedded device manufacturers have the often expressed attitude "we'll work with anyone but M$".
Nowadays, yes, but remember this was all happening a decade or more ago. Novell weren't even really interested in clients. And it doesn't explain Intel's and IBM's failures to get the i860 and PPC ready in time - both these companies could have benefitted enormously from MS, we could be running on PPC (or MIPS) instead of x86 on the average desktop if it had played out a little differently.
It's really interesting to see how Microsoft actually relate to their competitors. They wanted to run on PPC, but IBM messed them around. They wanted to work with Novell, but Novell weren't interested. Even Intel failed to deliver on the promise of i860.
Given that, is it any wonder that MS would rather do things "in house" than rely on third parties?
... TPS reports put a cover sheet on YOU!