I've been running a Linux software RAID1 on my boot partition and a RAID 5 array for root off of 3 30GB ATA drives. Worked great for ~4 months. While I was away on business (In Australia, no less, I live in the US) I kept getting an error message in my systems logs. I checked it out in/proc/mdstat and one of my drives was down. With one drive down the system ran for the better part of a month while I sat 7000 miles away. When I came back, I powered down the system, replaced the hard drive, booted it back up and synced the array. No problems. The system was a little slow while it ran on 2 drives, but I got no complaints from users. One of the great things about software raid, is that you can set up different RAID types and arrays from different partitions on the same set of drives. I run ext2 for boot and reiserfs for root. Love it and I'll continue to use it until something better and cheaper comes along.
"Junk" DNA is the most wrongfully used term in biology today. "Junk" DNA is what makes up centromeres (Bio 101: constrictions in the chromosome). Seeing as the centromere is fundamental to chromosome function and you don't get proper cell division/distribution of genetic material without them...I just don't understand how people call it junk. Take a look at any modern biology journal (take Nature for example) and you will find at least one article on how the "junk" DNA is critical to an organism. They called it junk DNA cuz most of it is repetitive and the human genome project didn't sequence through those regions because it was repetitive...basically we don't have a clue, but we know that they are important. FYI: there are organisms that have managed to eliminate "huge amounts of useless cruft" from their genomes, like fruit flies, and those that have excessive amounts, like plants which often have 4 sets of chromosomes. Random genetic evolution over billions of years is not just random...there are all kinds of non-random factors involved. The best analogy to describe a genome is a Rube Goldberg Machine.
Although I'm not a CS person, I am in biology and what most people don't know/forget to mention is that cutting-edge research is discovering that more and more information resides in the shape of the chromosome, methylation patterns, and other epigenetic markers. The key word there is epi- i.e. information that is above the DNA level. So...to get around to the point, the relationship of DNA to protein is not as clear as you have made it out to be. Sure, there are classic examples that depict that relationship, but what is appearing in journals today are example of how mutable and interchangeable these classic systems are when you change the epigenetic information in which they are found. For this reason I don't think you can make any computer to biology analogy that is accurate. Sconce is just scratching the surface of biology and the complexity of the systems involved in even the most basic events are almost impossible to comprehend.
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I've been running a Linux software RAID1 on my boot partition and a RAID 5 array for root off of 3 30GB ATA drives. Worked great for ~4 months. While I was away on business (In Australia, no less, I live in the US) I kept getting an error message in my systems logs. I checked it out in /proc/mdstat and one of my drives was down. With one drive down the system ran for the better part of a month while I sat 7000 miles away. When I came back, I powered down the system, replaced the hard drive, booted it back up and synced the array. No problems. The system was a little slow while it ran on 2 drives, but I got no complaints from users. One of the great things about software raid, is that you can set up different RAID types and arrays from different partitions on the same set of drives. I run ext2 for boot and reiserfs for root. Love it and I'll continue to use it until something better and cheaper comes along.
"Junk" DNA is the most wrongfully used term in biology today. "Junk" DNA is what makes up centromeres (Bio 101: constrictions in the chromosome). Seeing as the centromere is fundamental to chromosome function and you don't get proper cell division/distribution of genetic material without them...I just don't understand how people call it junk. Take a look at any modern biology journal (take Nature for example) and you will find at least one article on how the "junk" DNA is critical to an organism. They called it junk DNA cuz most of it is repetitive and the human genome project didn't sequence through those regions because it was repetitive...basically we don't have a clue, but we know that they are important. FYI: there are organisms that have managed to eliminate "huge amounts of useless cruft" from their genomes, like fruit flies, and those that have excessive amounts, like plants which often have 4 sets of chromosomes. Random genetic evolution over billions of years is not just random...there are all kinds of non-random factors involved. The best analogy to describe a genome is a Rube Goldberg Machine.
Although I'm not a CS person, I am in biology and what most people don't know/forget to mention is that cutting-edge research is discovering that more and more information resides in the shape of the chromosome, methylation patterns, and other epigenetic markers. The key word there is epi- i.e. information that is above the DNA level. So...to get around to the point, the relationship of DNA to protein is not as clear as you have made it out to be. Sure, there are classic examples that depict that relationship, but what is appearing in journals today are example of how mutable and interchangeable these classic systems are when you change the epigenetic information in which they are found. For this reason I don't think you can make any computer to biology analogy that is accurate. Sconce is just scratching the surface of biology and the complexity of the systems involved in even the most basic events are almost impossible to comprehend.