What are the best glasses to use with a Powerbook G4? I want to use the glasses for a molecular graphics visualization under the program Pymol, using OS X. Anybody have any expereince and recomendations?
ALL electrical generation plants emit heat. That'ts the law of thermodynamics. You cant decrease entropy (i.e. electricity) and not produce excess heat.
And in case you were worried about terrawatts of heat, I urge you to do the following calaculation : compute the total solar flux on planet earth (about 1KW/sq meter). Then imagine what would happen if the CO2, soot, and acid rain (deforestation) causes a few percent change in the earth's reflectivity. You will now be less worried about nuke heat waste.
As for water as a pollutant. well that has to be the funniest one i've ever heard. I'll remember that, and thank you for starting my day with a joke. (by the way in case you seriously were worried about that, consider that trees use evaporation to pump nutrient. there are huge upward water fluxes above any rain forest or field of crops. Also consider that the amount of water used to irrigate crops is several million fold greater than the amount of water consumed by cooling nuke plants. Since a large fraction of the water used in irrigation is evaporated the net effect of nuke plants is near zero.)
also people who work in those areas wear Dosimeters. SO they KNOW for sure that people are not being exposed. Even the town dump is ringed with dosimeters. What about your town. Got any dosimeters? Lots of industries produce rad waste. to name a few:
phosphate fertilizer plants, (old) ceramics, coleman laterns, glow in the dark exit signs, hospital isotope waste and manufacture.... For example, the dosimeters in our town have gone off lots of times. One time was a vet disposing of radioactive kitty litter (radioactive iodide is used as a medical treatment). Another time my neighbor set of the alarm because he was wearing pile (patagonia) jackets which if you did not know collect Radon gas that accumualtes in poorly vented closets in many parts of the country. Another time a load of radioactive steel manufactured in mexico drove through town on its way elsewhere. (the mexicans plant hat recycled and melted down a hospital cesium canister. Many steelworkers and truckers in the US and Mexico received high doses, something like a dozen people at the steel plant eventually died of exposre related illnesesses.
So the good news about living in los alamos is that we know we're no being irradiated cause we monitor it. You dont know and there are lots of ways you could be exposed. for example do you know where the steel rebar in you concrete walls came from? Are you breathing radon?
Coal plants emit airborne radioactivity. You'd be better off down wind of yucca mountain or a nuke plant than a coal plant.
Do you like acid rain, deforestation, and resperatory ailments. Then close down the nuke plants. Then you'll either have to switch to coal, hope for a miracle, or change your standard of living (sorry now 1000 watt Itaniums for you instead you can freeze in the dark.)
This is so NOT news to the people who live here in los alamos. YAWN. move on, nothing to see here.
any place where there was at some time in its history a possible outflow of radioactive material, the plants will be contaminated. At least its not like hanford where the Tumbleweeds are sometimes radioactive.
But these are all well known. The reason they issued the warning was because the western bark beetle killed something on the order of 80% of the trees in that canyon's mouth in a single season. (No that's not an exageration) . Given the horrific forest fires that burned about 4% of the homes in town, there is a great deal of preventative tree cutting going on. far more than in any other rear with lots of new loggers. An they are cutting trees in areas they traditionally would not have access too. Hence the public warning.
now give it a rest. Hey want to know the good bit about radioactive contamination? you know exactly where it is and how to find it. Unlike for example, chemical contamination. The main thing that is different about los alamos and say your neighbor hood is that we actually know where the contamination is. PLus when we do have a spill it gets cleaned up. I recall a photo in the news of two guys in moon suits cleaning up a chemical spill of ethylene glycol in a parking lot (bottle dropped from fork lift). Front page news. Mean while that same day probably 500 people in chicago city flushed their car radiotors and dump a few thousand gallons of ethylene glycol into the river.
new stories like this suck
Command line interface and real-time control gone?
on
MS-DOS 1981-2002 RIP
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
DOS was the oliver twist of OS'e and had a hard life. DOS was not Bill Gate's son. He was adopted from another company in seattle and renamed from CPM. Then Master Gates then forced him to infiltrate the stronghold of IBM trade Federation. Eventually he was forced to donn a cloke and helmet, and proclaim himself Darth Windows. He proved all to mortal revealing his DOS underpinings from time to time. Some say he died long ago when he joined the BORG
Maybe this is off topic but Is there a command line interface available to windows. Yeah I know you can run some comands from the start menu. But is there any sort of scripable command line interface that is analogous to the UNIX terminal prompt?
And what about a real-time interface for controling equipment? Is that now all gone from windows now? Unix was never much good at it (you had to use special pseudo-unix things like vmworks to get true real time interfaces, regular unix just was not built with that in mind)
This method is innefectual unless you lock down the whole internet
Dont be silly. Of course its effective. A system does not have to be 100% perfect to be effective. I can try to supervise my kids at other times or ask other parents to help. But I like the idea of having a place where its safe but kids can explore a bit and find the naughty but not the nasty.
Do you drive a car? Did you know that was dangerous and you could have an accident? but you drive right. But you probably might think again if there were no road rules at all. A system does not have to be 100% perfect to be effective.
Netnanny like softwares may flubb. but I think really this is like google-wacking: it's fun to see where they flubb because it is so rare. And these can only get better with time. Do we need netNanny's for kids. Absolutely. THere is no reason why kids should have unfettered internet access. There's plenty I want to keep away from my kids while they are kids.
However supervision or trust is not the answer either.
What I remeber most about the public library as a kid was it was a place for me to explore. ANd more specificall explore on my own without hovering supervision. freedom for me in a place my parents knew was safe. See what I could find that was new and interested me. Sometime it was a way to find out about things I'd hear about. Even with a very guilty feeling, try to look up a book about sexual reproduction.
I think having a benign (i.e. safe) place for children to roam a bit and explore things at the fringes of their limits is a great idea. Libraries already fill this role well. They are a well controlled but very open environment.
the problem is the internet lets in a less well regulated world. A world without curation or librarians. And that is something for parents to fear. I dont want to curb adults but I certainly do want to curb my children and to protect them from the evils of the world. THis is common sense.
multi-cpu Transmeta wins watts-per-clock-cycle war
on
Transmeta Astro Processor
·
· Score: 5, Informative
If you plot the trensd line of normalized CPU speed (mflops) versus wattage (or cost) you will see that the last two generation of chips from intel (and amd) have left the formere linear trend line. they are getting hotter faster than they are getting faster. Meanwhile transmeta is actually getting faster and using LESS power. (negative slope on line).
Consequently, it multi-processor transmeta systems will outperform single processor Intels dissipating the same amount of heat. This also translates to higher reliability. If the memory busses are done correctly, having inexpensive multi-processors may alos provide significant performance enhancements over a single CPU. (for example, if memory bottlenecks dominate then multiple simple processors that are stalled witing on memory will ustilize every memeory fetch perfectly, whereas a pipelined single processor will waste a large fraction of the memory fetches making it slower).
A schematic of the current trends look something like this.
|...........i.t..
|..........i.t..
|..........it...
H.........it....
E........it.....
A........i......
T.......i...... .......ioo......
|.....io..o.....
|....io.........
|___i____________
Speed--->
o = Transmeta
i = pentium
t = former trendline
I posted a related response to your BIG SPECULATION issue here
that I think will interest you. It may at least amuse you if not answer the issue and point to simmilar past specualtions by David Wolpert (per review published) about how life should scale in organization.
I once took a crack at that. I colaborated with David Wolpert on "self dissimilarity", which is a concept Wolpert cooked up as a way of measuring organizations inicative of life. Lots of people study self similarity (like sand piles that mainitaina constant shape more sand is added). Wolper realized that Life was not organization. For example a diamond lattice has very low entropy but is dead. At theother end of the scale Air (gas) is disorganized as possible, but its dead too. So life is not a matter of organization or even dynamic self organization (growing sand piles are dead too).
the concept of self dissimilarity is also the opposite of fractals. As You change scales (a microscope zooming out for example) what you should see is that at some scale and scales near it, things have a particular organizational structure (say liver cells making up some smallsection of the liver) then at some scale the organization shifts radically (many organs, then skelton, then skin, then outside the body, then many bodies, then a planet, etc...)
To cook up a reasonable single valued measure of self-dissimiarity you ask the question how much additional information is need to predict the probabilty distribution of some quantity (say cell density) at the next higher scale given knowledge of what it is at this scale. this function if plotted as a function of scall will have plateaus then abrupt jumps in a living system.
Note by this defintion, the the work performed in a say a large corporation is a sign the corporation is alive. If you think about it you might even agree that an alien entity from another planet who did not even know what humans were or looked like, might by studying the activity inside a building come to conclusion it was alive.
many dyanmical systems (sand piles, waterfalls, streams,) dont qualify as life under this definition. But the distribution of fish in the ocean does (single fish, then school, then large distances between schools, then schools confinded to costal regions, then deep water open ocean schools...) so maybe the ocean is alive.
Oviously a single parameter defintion of life is not going to satisfy anyone. but it is an interesting start to trying to quanitify life in a mathematical sense.
fractals are of course not a sign of life by this defintion. I once tried to look at the pattern of predictibitily of dna sequences using this definition. But was unable to find clear discontinuities. On the otherhand shakespears collected works showed some signs of life and well that is dead but was composed by a living person.
What part of the word Primereludes your understanding. A primer is an entre into a subject to a definitive discourse. I challenge you to write an essay that short that 1) is coherent and an gives introductory analogies, 2) addresses the question asked 3) is as comprehensive. 4) is not just jargon
furthermore the discussin I gave does offerto long range interaction possibilies, for example the mention of histones and the mention of cross-over oligeriazation (I avoided the jargon).
I do however apologize for the bad spelling. The whole thing was written very quickly to aid the discussion. perhaps I can be excused if I omitted a few points.
Starting with the caveat that science reporters tend to miss present sceintists ideas let me try to heap some ridicule on this article.
first it's well known that DNA is not merely a double helix but this ribbon also coils on itself (super coiling) and can be would in complex patterens around the biological equivalent of tape reals (called histones). And that there even larger hierarchies of organization like chromosomes.
When a gene is "expresses" (read) from the DNA, that portion of the DNA has to be exposed, thus from square one the mobility and ease of exposure of a structure regulates its expression. Additionally, in order for some of the portien moelcules that trigger expression as well as those that do the expressing to bind to the DNA the DNA often has to have a characterisitic kink or lack of a kink. Binding in biology is --unlink the interaction of simpler molecules--inherently recognition of another structure.
so point 1 is that whoop-tee-do structure of DNA organization is important to expression. We all knew that already.
The second point is that as far as binding goes these specific events are almost excusively local. that is proteins and other molecules that bind to DNA are small (relative to the size of DNA), sort of like a fly landing on an aircraft carrier. At the scale of the dimensions of binding we are takling about atomic interactions and as the word "atomic" suggests, there is no notion of fractal subdivsion of space available. In other words patterns that exist distantly elsewhere in the DNA have no relevance to a binding event.
The third point to make is that the are many useful properties of "useless" sections of DNA. For example, at various times in its lfe DNA breaks the double helic and becomes two complimentary strands over sections of the DNA. Sometimes the one strand from won pair will go bind with a strand from another pair. This mainly happens when the two strand-swapping sections of DNA have nearly comlimentary chemical (base or nucleotide) patterns. At this chemical interaction level, whether or not the DNA section in question is "codeing" (and exon) or non-coding (an intron) is moot. DNA is DNA. thus non-coding regions can facilitate strand pairing and strand swapping activity. In other words useless DNA has a purpose of structure-structure interaction. TO the extent that this is already known this patent issue is silly.
Now What about those introns are they really useless DNA? some may be, some are not. Its a little tricky to exaplain in a few words but you have to imagine DNA like a hard disk with streams of consecutive bits. the word size of reading this is 3 bits. however, one has a slight problem when you go to read it, where do you start reading? if you are off by one bit then each word contains 2 bits from one word and one bit from the next word. this is called a frame shift, and obviously there are three possible frames on could read words in. Amazingly enough, not only can the cell figure out which frame to read, but sometimes all three frames contain a valid message!!! its a lot like the winnowing and chaffing encryption scheme. (indeed sometimes the messages can be read backwards and in a different frame to make sense too, much like a palindromic sentence, except that the reverse sentence may be different but still make sense). One purpose of introns is to create frame buffers and other signals to guide the readin mechaism to get into the proper frame.
Another purpose of introns is what is known as alternate splicing. Sometimes as (or after) a message is read off, sections of the dna get skipped over, like jumping a track on a vinyl record, and discontiguous portions of a the message are joined together. The decision to skip or not to skip can be regulated. Thus he same nominal section of DNA can produce slightly different edited messages. Thus introns sort of multiply the number of gene variations.
Finally, because of the way DNA makes mistakes when it copies it self or repairs damage, what offen happens is that a chunk of DNA gets copied to a new place on the DNA and the old one is not completely erased. This is infact exactly like a fragmented hard disk. Image a hard disk in which you have copied the smae files many times, and deleted the ones. At this point the FAT table fets lost and you have to use norton disk recover to try to find files. Wll you find lots of complete files and also fragments that look like old versions of parts of other files. This is what DNA looks like. So these self-similar patterns actually emerge accidentally. Since the chunk size varies the sel-similar patterns can be multi-scale and hence are fractal like. This is all accidental!
Now its possile to imagine that what was once accidental is now being exploited by the body for a new puprose. For example, recombination plays a role in the immune system. But I doubt that the fractal nature of this is important. One reason to doubt it is that it is simpler to imagine that this happens beacuse there is no penalty for it happening. In higher organisms having wad's of extra DNA does not harm the cell since higher orgnaism have lots and lots of error correcting mechanisms to deal with DNA damage, dealing with extra DNA is small potatoes. Conversely, single cell organisms have a preimum on efficiency and thus minimize the saize of their DNA. Bacteria for example dont have introns, and have very little junk DNA. Viruses almost never have any junk dna at all bacause space is at a premium. Thus biology shows that when there is a reaosn to do so organisms chuck extra DNA.
so in conclusion I think this idea is cute but really nothing new or special, and is probably mostly hokum.
From what I have read.NET has a similar design flaw. Where java uses rigorous theorem proving approach to making sure that code cannot exceed its authority,.NET once again trusts code that has been signed rather than attempting to check it. The reason for this apporach I believe is 1) the potential for speed by distirbuting compiled binary rather then VM code 2) the ability to take quick shortcuts, call undumented APIS and the litiny of other very handy but bad programming ideas that make MS what it is.
So this is news because it blows the doors off the signed executable philosphy and makes the sandbox philosohy of the java VM look like the only viable approach. Notice that the JAVA approach would have avoided both problems. first it would have avoided the buffer overrun problem in the first place since that would be caught by the VM when it examined the code, and second there would be no signed app trustworthyness issue.
I have a rack of Xserves and I need to be able connect to them in a graphical mode to access the desktop environment. I tried using OSX VNC, but the problem is that OSX VNC WILL NOT FUNCTION UNLESS A PHYSICAL MONITOR IS ATTATCHED TO THE GRAPHICS CARD.
I find this surprising because ordinary X windows VNC servers can use virtual screens. I'm sure there must be some way of creating a virutal screen for the macs too because you can buy KVM switches that use the USB port rather than the Graphics adapter for the video display. Also I have found that if I plug a screen in to the graphics card, launch osxvnc and then unplug the screen that OSX VNC functions fine until the next reboot.
Does anyone know how to permenantly fool or otherwise use aqua VNC on a mac without a graphics card attached. I contacted the folks maintaining OSX VNC and they would like to know of a solution too.
in a large rack is sure would be nice not to have to attatch any keyboards or screens yet still have access to the aqua desktop on each machine.
Well okay that's a nice trick. But this does not really have much to do with tweaking config files, setting permissions of firewalls, creating aliases, fstabs , exports, aliases, password length enforcement, and so on. Then there are all those other sorts of packages like perl CPAN, or netscape plugins that need to be installed or removes (like AIM). all of which users as well as various installed programs and possibly installed in a particular order.
everytime I install an RPM I feel like someone is saying to me "close your eyes and open your mouth and you will get a big surprise". Then with root access the RPM sprays files in all sorts of directories, overwites system/bin files like "make" and inserts various conficuration scripts in dark places I've never visted in my unix life. Geeze its totally out of control.
mandrake and a few others give you a gui package view that sort of says what's oging to be affected but it's not like you can remeber what happened a week or a year later.
for my money the only system I am remotely at ease with is FINK for mac ( and linux). which rarely goes outside of its own directory to mess with basic system stuff.
but you are right in wishing there was some sort of keystroke file for anytime you did an install or a tweak so you could re-do it later after a re-install or an upgrade.
I dont get it. the JAVA vm runs in a secure sandbox. the only way out of the sandbox is if you grant the JAVA program permission, for example by accepting a security certificate.
Or am I missing somthing or is that exactly what is going on?
my experience and understanding with java is that insecure applets cant access URLS outside their source URL, they cant access other open windows (or atleast not anything that javascript cant access), and they cant access any system level communications or your files on disk. Thus they cant be spying on you. And if you leave the site they go poof. I suppose they could be playing frame games making you think you left the site.
can anyone tell me how they are getting around these restrictions?
Slash dot had an article on how to reverse the screen on your apple powerbook duo. The guy used a glue gun and gave step by step instructions on turning your apple into a picture frame.
Slashdot Mirror
What are the best glasses to use with a Powerbook G4? I want to use the glasses for a molecular graphics visualization under the program Pymol, using OS X. Anybody have any expereince and recomendations?
The Pen is Mightier
For $200 please.
And in case you were worried about terrawatts of heat, I urge you to do the following calaculation : compute the total solar flux on planet earth (about 1KW/sq meter). Then imagine what would happen if the CO2, soot, and acid rain (deforestation) causes a few percent change in the earth's reflectivity. You will now be less worried about nuke heat waste.
As for water as a pollutant. well that has to be the funniest one i've ever heard. I'll remember that, and thank you for starting my day with a joke. (by the way in case you seriously were worried about that, consider that trees use evaporation to pump nutrient. there are huge upward water fluxes above any rain forest or field of crops. Also consider that the amount of water used to irrigate crops is several million fold greater than the amount of water consumed by cooling nuke plants. Since a large fraction of the water used in irrigation is evaporated the net effect of nuke plants is near zero.)
also people who work in those areas wear Dosimeters. SO they KNOW for sure that people are not being exposed. Even the town dump is ringed with dosimeters. What about your town. Got any dosimeters? Lots of industries produce rad waste. to name a few: phosphate fertilizer plants, (old) ceramics, coleman laterns, glow in the dark exit signs, hospital isotope waste and manufacture.... For example, the dosimeters in our town have gone off lots of times. One time was a vet disposing of radioactive kitty litter (radioactive iodide is used as a medical treatment). Another time my neighbor set of the alarm because he was wearing pile (patagonia) jackets which if you did not know collect Radon gas that accumualtes in poorly vented closets in many parts of the country. Another time a load of radioactive steel manufactured in mexico drove through town on its way elsewhere. (the mexicans plant hat recycled and melted down a hospital cesium canister. Many steelworkers and truckers in the US and Mexico received high doses, something like a dozen people at the steel plant eventually died of exposre related illnesesses.
So the good news about living in los alamos is that we know we're no being irradiated cause we monitor it. You dont know and there are lots of ways you could be exposed. for example do you know where the steel rebar in you concrete walls came from? Are you breathing radon?
Do you like acid rain, deforestation, and resperatory ailments. Then close down the nuke plants. Then you'll either have to switch to coal, hope for a miracle, or change your standard of living (sorry now 1000 watt Itaniums for you instead you can freeze in the dark.)
any place where there was at some time in its history a possible outflow of radioactive material, the plants will be contaminated. At least its not like hanford where the Tumbleweeds are sometimes radioactive.
But these are all well known. The reason they issued the warning was because the western bark beetle killed something on the order of 80% of the trees in that canyon's mouth in a single season. (No that's not an exageration) . Given the horrific forest fires that burned about 4% of the homes in town, there is a great deal of preventative tree cutting going on. far more than in any other rear with lots of new loggers. An they are cutting trees in areas they traditionally would not have access too. Hence the public warning.
now give it a rest. Hey want to know the good bit about radioactive contamination? you know exactly where it is and how to find it. Unlike for example, chemical contamination. The main thing that is different about los alamos and say your neighbor hood is that we actually know where the contamination is. PLus when we do have a spill it gets cleaned up. I recall a photo in the news of two guys in moon suits cleaning up a chemical spill of ethylene glycol in a parking lot (bottle dropped from fork lift). Front page news. Mean while that same day probably 500 people in chicago city flushed their car radiotors and dump a few thousand gallons of ethylene glycol into the river.
new stories like this suck
Maybe this is off topic but Is there a command line interface available to windows. Yeah I know you can run some comands from the start menu. But is there any sort of scripable command line interface that is analogous to the UNIX terminal prompt?
And what about a real-time interface for controling equipment? Is that now all gone from windows now? Unix was never much good at it (you had to use special pseudo-unix things like vmworks to get true real time interfaces, regular unix just was not built with that in mind)
Dont be silly. Of course its effective. A system does not have to be 100% perfect to be effective. I can try to supervise my kids at other times or ask other parents to help. But I like the idea of having a place where its safe but kids can explore a bit and find the naughty but not the nasty.
Do you drive a car? Did you know that was dangerous and you could have an accident? but you drive right. But you probably might think again if there were no road rules at all. A system does not have to be 100% perfect to be effective.
However supervision or trust is not the answer either. What I remeber most about the public library as a kid was it was a place for me to explore. ANd more specificall explore on my own without hovering supervision. freedom for me in a place my parents knew was safe. See what I could find that was new and interested me. Sometime it was a way to find out about things I'd hear about. Even with a very guilty feeling, try to look up a book about sexual reproduction.
I think having a benign (i.e. safe) place for children to roam a bit and explore things at the fringes of their limits is a great idea. Libraries already fill this role well. They are a well controlled but very open environment.
the problem is the internet lets in a less well regulated world. A world without curation or librarians. And that is something for parents to fear. I dont want to curb adults but I certainly do want to curb my children and to protect them from the evils of the world. THis is common sense.
ivisa.com and myvisa.com
which are also registered on who-is
and where does it end?
bluevisa.com, redvisa.com...
Consequently, it multi-processor transmeta systems will outperform single processor Intels dissipating the same amount of heat. This also translates to higher reliability. If the memory busses are done correctly, having inexpensive multi-processors may alos provide significant performance enhancements over a single CPU. (for example, if memory bottlenecks dominate then multiple simple processors that are stalled witing on memory will ustilize every memeory fetch perfectly, whereas a pipelined single processor will waste a large fraction of the memory fetches making it slower).
A schematic of the current trends look something like this.
.......ioo......
|...........i.t..
|..........i.t..
|..........it...
H.........it....
E........it.....
A........i......
T.......i......
|.....io..o.....
|....io.........
|___i____________
Speed--->
o = Transmeta
i = pentium
t = former trendline
I posted a related response to your BIG SPECULATION issue here that I think will interest you. It may at least amuse you if not answer the issue and point to simmilar past specualtions by David Wolpert (per review published) about how life should scale in organization.
I once took a crack at that. I colaborated with David Wolpert on "self dissimilarity", which is a concept Wolpert cooked up as a way of measuring organizations inicative of life. Lots of people study self similarity (like sand piles that mainitaina constant shape more sand is added). Wolper realized that Life was not organization. For example a diamond lattice has very low entropy but is dead. At theother end of the scale Air (gas) is disorganized as possible, but its dead too. So life is not a matter of organization or even dynamic self organization (growing sand piles are dead too).
the concept of self dissimilarity is also the opposite of fractals. As You change scales (a microscope zooming out for example) what you should see is that at some scale and scales near it, things have a particular organizational structure (say liver cells making up some smallsection of the liver) then at some scale the organization shifts radically (many organs, then skelton, then skin, then outside the body, then many bodies, then a planet, etc...)
To cook up a reasonable single valued measure of self-dissimiarity you ask the question how much additional information is need to predict the probabilty distribution of some quantity (say cell density) at the next higher scale given knowledge of what it is at this scale. this function if plotted as a function of scall will have plateaus then abrupt jumps in a living system.
Note by this defintion, the the work performed in a say a large corporation is a sign the corporation is alive. If you think about it you might even agree that an alien entity from another planet who did not even know what humans were or looked like, might by studying the activity inside a building come to conclusion it was alive.
many dyanmical systems (sand piles, waterfalls, streams,) dont qualify as life under this definition. But the distribution of fish in the ocean does (single fish, then school, then large distances between schools, then schools confinded to costal regions, then deep water open ocean schools...) so maybe the ocean is alive.
Oviously a single parameter defintion of life is not going to satisfy anyone. but it is an interesting start to trying to quanitify life in a mathematical sense.
fractals are of course not a sign of life by this defintion. I once tried to look at the pattern of predictibitily of dna sequences using this definition. But was unable to find clear discontinuities. On the otherhand shakespears collected works showed some signs of life and well that is dead but was composed by a living person.
What part of the word Primer eludes your understanding. A primer is an entre into a subject to a definitive discourse. I challenge you to write an essay that short that 1) is coherent and an gives introductory analogies, 2) addresses the question asked 3) is as comprehensive. 4) is not just jargon
furthermore the discussin I gave does offerto long range interaction possibilies, for example the mention of histones and the mention of cross-over oligeriazation (I avoided the jargon).
I do however apologize for the bad spelling. The whole thing was written very quickly to aid the discussion. perhaps I can be excused if I omitted a few points.
they mate just fine. your strands dont pair with your mates. you just swap whole chomosomes.
first it's well known that DNA is not merely a double helix but this ribbon also coils on itself (super coiling) and can be would in complex patterens around the biological equivalent of tape reals (called histones). And that there even larger hierarchies of organization like chromosomes.
When a gene is "expresses" (read) from the DNA, that portion of the DNA has to be exposed, thus from square one the mobility and ease of exposure of a structure regulates its expression. Additionally, in order for some of the portien moelcules that trigger expression as well as those that do the expressing to bind to the DNA the DNA often has to have a characterisitic kink or lack of a kink. Binding in biology is --unlink the interaction of simpler molecules--inherently recognition of another structure.
so point 1 is that whoop-tee-do structure of DNA organization is important to expression. We all knew that already.
The second point is that as far as binding goes these specific events are almost excusively local. that is proteins and other molecules that bind to DNA are small (relative to the size of DNA), sort of like a fly landing on an aircraft carrier. At the scale of the dimensions of binding we are takling about atomic interactions and as the word "atomic" suggests, there is no notion of fractal subdivsion of space available. In other words patterns that exist distantly elsewhere in the DNA have no relevance to a binding event.
The third point to make is that the are many useful properties of "useless" sections of DNA. For example, at various times in its lfe DNA breaks the double helic and becomes two complimentary strands over sections of the DNA. Sometimes the one strand from won pair will go bind with a strand from another pair. This mainly happens when the two strand-swapping sections of DNA have nearly comlimentary chemical (base or nucleotide) patterns. At this chemical interaction level, whether or not the DNA section in question is "codeing" (and exon) or non-coding (an intron) is moot. DNA is DNA. thus non-coding regions can facilitate strand pairing and strand swapping activity. In other words useless DNA has a purpose of structure-structure interaction. TO the extent that this is already known this patent issue is silly.
Now What about those introns are they really useless DNA? some may be, some are not. Its a little tricky to exaplain in a few words but you have to imagine DNA like a hard disk with streams of consecutive bits. the word size of reading this is 3 bits. however, one has a slight problem when you go to read it, where do you start reading? if you are off by one bit then each word contains 2 bits from one word and one bit from the next word. this is called a frame shift, and obviously there are three possible frames on could read words in. Amazingly enough, not only can the cell figure out which frame to read, but sometimes all three frames contain a valid message!!! its a lot like the winnowing and chaffing encryption scheme. (indeed sometimes the messages can be read backwards and in a different frame to make sense too, much like a palindromic sentence, except that the reverse sentence may be different but still make sense). One purpose of introns is to create frame buffers and other signals to guide the readin mechaism to get into the proper frame.
Another purpose of introns is what is known as alternate splicing. Sometimes as (or after) a message is read off, sections of the dna get skipped over, like jumping a track on a vinyl record, and discontiguous portions of a the message are joined together. The decision to skip or not to skip can be regulated. Thus he same nominal section of DNA can produce slightly different edited messages. Thus introns sort of multiply the number of gene variations.
Finally, because of the way DNA makes mistakes when it copies it self or repairs damage, what offen happens is that a chunk of DNA gets copied to a new place on the DNA and the old one is not completely erased. This is infact exactly like a fragmented hard disk. Image a hard disk in which you have copied the smae files many times, and deleted the ones. At this point the FAT table fets lost and you have to use norton disk recover to try to find files. Wll you find lots of complete files and also fragments that look like old versions of parts of other files. This is what DNA looks like. So these self-similar patterns actually emerge accidentally. Since the chunk size varies the sel-similar patterns can be multi-scale and hence are fractal like. This is all accidental! Now its possile to imagine that what was once accidental is now being exploited by the body for a new puprose. For example, recombination plays a role in the immune system. But I doubt that the fractal nature of this is important. One reason to doubt it is that it is simpler to imagine that this happens beacuse there is no penalty for it happening. In higher organisms having wad's of extra DNA does not harm the cell since higher orgnaism have lots and lots of error correcting mechanisms to deal with DNA damage, dealing with extra DNA is small potatoes. Conversely, single cell organisms have a preimum on efficiency and thus minimize the saize of their DNA. Bacteria for example dont have introns, and have very little junk DNA. Viruses almost never have any junk dna at all bacause space is at a premium. Thus biology shows that when there is a reaosn to do so organisms chuck extra DNA.
so in conclusion I think this idea is cute but really nothing new or special, and is probably mostly hokum.
So this is news because it blows the doors off the signed executable philosphy and makes the sandbox philosohy of the java VM look like the only viable approach. Notice that the JAVA approach would have avoided both problems. first it would have avoided the buffer overrun problem in the first place since that would be caught by the VM when it examined the code, and second there would be no signed app trustworthyness issue.
perhaps as a last resort.. though that is really a pretty sad solution isn't it. there has to be some software setting.
I find this surprising because ordinary X windows VNC servers can use virtual screens. I'm sure there must be some way of creating a virutal screen for the macs too because you can buy KVM switches that use the USB port rather than the Graphics adapter for the video display. Also I have found that if I plug a screen in to the graphics card, launch osxvnc and then unplug the screen that OSX VNC functions fine until the next reboot.
Does anyone know how to permenantly fool or otherwise use aqua VNC on a mac without a graphics card attached. I contacted the folks maintaining OSX VNC and they would like to know of a solution too.
in a large rack is sure would be nice not to have to attatch any keyboards or screens yet still have access to the aqua desktop on each machine.
Well okay that's a nice trick. But this does not really have much to do with tweaking config files, setting permissions of firewalls, creating aliases, fstabs , exports, aliases, password length enforcement, and so on. Then there are all those other sorts of packages like perl CPAN, or netscape plugins that need to be installed or removes (like AIM). all of which users as well as various installed programs and possibly installed in a particular order.
cool, can I get your scripts?
everytime I install an RPM I feel like someone is saying to me "close your eyes and open your mouth and you will get a big surprise". Then with root access the RPM sprays files in all sorts of directories, overwites system /bin files like "make" and inserts various conficuration scripts in dark places I've never visted in my unix life. Geeze its totally out of control.
mandrake and a few others give you a gui package view that sort of says what's oging to be affected but it's not like you can remeber what happened a week or a year later.
for my money the only system I am remotely at ease with is FINK for mac ( and linux). which rarely goes outside of its own directory to mess with basic system stuff.
but you are right in wishing there was some sort of keystroke file for anytime you did an install or a tweak so you could re-do it later after a re-install or an upgrade.
Or am I missing somthing or is that exactly what is going on?
my experience and understanding with java is that insecure applets cant access URLS outside their source URL, they cant access other open windows (or atleast not anything that javascript cant access), and they cant access any system level communications or your files on disk. Thus they cant be spying on you. And if you leave the site they go poof. I suppose they could be playing frame games making you think you left the site.
can anyone tell me how they are getting around these restrictions?
Slash dot had an article on how to reverse the screen on your apple powerbook duo. The guy used a glue gun and gave step by step instructions on turning your apple into a picture frame.