For many of these coders, they have opportunities (job and otherwise) they may never have gotten by working in a corporate environment or by shrink-wrapping their software. Check out the recent Fortune write-up of the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) founders. Had any of these packages been closed $199 packages, we probably would never have heard of them, and Microsoft or Oracle would have abolished them all by now.
Also, consider Marcelo Tosatti, who is the maintainer of the 2.4 kernel series. This was a kid from Brazil who was given the reins of one of the most popular server kernels in the world at the age of 18, when he became the 2.4 maintainer. Talk about democratization of opportunity. It's hard to put a dollar value on this resume line item: "Chief Maintainer of Linux 2.4 Kernel, 2001-present". His years of "free" work means that he'll likely have some of the coolest jobs ever for the rest of his career, while most of us grind away at VB.Net and deal with corporate politics. Who's the schmo now?
Has anyone tried KnoppMyth, which is basically a customized Knoppix ISO that anchors to the hard drive with MythTV? I have MythTV installed to a RH9 box, and it wasn't too difficult to install, but for a newb I suspect a CD installer would be easier. I looked at Windows products, but I really wanted the Mame/Emu frontend more than the PVR functions, so Myth was a no-brainer.
Ok, responding to my own post, X already handles non-text items in the clipboard, which would presumably be available to all remote clients. The problem is that KDE/Gnome apparently do not use these facilities.
Actually, the X server should be the one to handle the clipboard, even for non-text items, unless you want to have problems with remote systems. For instance, if I have remote graphics editor running on system A, and my OpenOffice is on System B, and my X term on system C is displaying everything, if I copy a graphic on system A and try to paste it on System B, they would not have the same clipboard contents, unless they could query the X server. The problem with this is that very large clipboard items might not be allowed if the X server doesn't have the storage.
We have to get more home users and more small businesses on, and that means improving the desktop, getting the applications they need built and 'marketing' it to people.
I would argue that focusing on larger business desktops would be a quicker route to the home users. People will buy a home computer to match what they have at work, not the other way around. In an enterprise, computers are chosen carefully for consistency and hardware compliance, so the desktop will run well. With a home user, you have to support every little webcam widget sold at BestBuy or Walmart, or else you lose.
If we get millions of corporate desktops established, hardware manufacturers will start supporting it, and people will start buying Linux for their homes.
And while I don't think we need to standardize on a particular window manager or desktop environment, at a minimum the Gnome/KDE environments should share lots of standards, such as clipboards, stanadard dialogs, themes, etc. I think this is what OSDL is trying to do, which is similar to freedesktop.org. Having multiple GUI toolkits is not necessarily a weakness; the same condition exists on Windows and that hasn't seemed to affect it negatively.
I agree. I was hoping that Nintendo would release a really good 3D handheld that also offers built-in video out so it can be played as a console as well, and just merge the GameBoy and GameCube lines. The graphics only need to be about N64 quality to compete, if it has good titles. Having really good multiplayer games (as they already have on the GBA) would make this really interesting.
I use NFS under Linux for/home mounts and such and have found it to be extremely reliable in over five years of daily use, but NFS won't let go of removeable drives, so it doesn't work well for sharing automounted CD-ROM, floppy, or zip drives. For those, Samba is the way to go, and with pre/postexec settings, Samba will automatically mount/umount the drives so autofs is not needed on the server side.
Umm, the same thing that happened every year since CCD image sensors were introduced: accelerating improvements in the technology, and exponential growth in its market.
Well, video cameras have improved dramatically, and they revolutionized personal and profesional video, but for high-end work like movies film is still the preferred medium because of its look after processing. Video still looks "cheap" and can make a film look like a made-for-tv movie. I know Lucas was going to some all-digital format, but then again his whole set is CG, so it makes little difference to him.
Anyway, still film photography will probably be easier to replicate with CCD than motion picture film, since moving pictures add new variables to the problem. I've actually thought about making a magic image processor that cooks video to make it look like film. Just plug in the camcorder in the input side, and record on the output side. I just need to quantify the two or three main qualities about film that are so distinguishing from video. That and write the million lines of code necessary to perform the processing. I had a point in all this, but I completely lost it. Anyway, you will pull my digital camara away from my cold, dead fingers. But for pro artistic work, film will likely remain for quite a while.
Since you have 1.4.2 installed, try running the Java2D demo in $JAVA_HOME/demo/jfc/Java2D. The graphics are quite fast on a local machine, largely because (as you said) it uses back buffering to blast the pixels onto the screen. Unfortunately, this is horrible for remote X displays, but I found a workaround. Launch your java app with the option -Dsun.java2d.pmoffscreen=false, and this will disable the backbuffer and tremendously speed up remote X operation, at the expense of some flicker. On my remote machine, I renamed java to java.bin and created a wrapper script named java that always uses this option with the single line:
A local exploit is when a local user purposefully tries to crack the system they are currently working on. Most Windows machines are single-user and sitting right next to you, so generally you don't need or want to exploit your own machine. Even in university labs, the local machine is usually fairly stripped down, and the data is on a remote file server. In a multiuser environment that many Unix and Linux machines run, the physical machine you are logged into may be down the hall, in another building, or many miles away. There also may be dozens of other users running applications on the same physical machine, so getting root/admin privileges would give you a great deal of access over other users. Windows machines rarely are run in this configuration, Terminal Services/Citrix notwithstanding.
In other words, a rough equivalent to a local exploit in Windows would be launching an attack on the Quicken/MS Money Billpay reminder (assuming it runs as Administrator) to get its privilege level, or exploiting one of the local system services. Most Windows users have relatively high privilege levels by default, so generally a local exploit is not necessary to do damage, and again, it is most likely your own machine you would be cracking. The same applies to most Linux desktops, which is why local exploits are not a concern for most desktop Linux users.
Also, is Linux more secure than Windows, because I hear a fair amount of Linux security holes more than Windows, or maybe I'm just not perceptive enough.
All advanced operating systems can be insecure depending on configuration.
However, regarding your specific question, you see more security exploits for Linux probably because Linux has both remote and local exploits; the vast majority are local exploits. A local exploit is usually only a concern in a multiuser mainframe-style environment where you have "trusted" users who can log in to the machine. These users can log in and use a local exploit to elevate their priviliges on the machine. If the user doesn't have a login account, they do not have the opportunity to perform the exploit. Local exploits generally use buffer overflows or hijack split-second temp files to do their nastiness.
Windows generally does not operate in a multiuser fashion, so these exploits are not as pertinent. Having written Windows software for years, I can tell that if local exploits ever become a concern for Windows (e.g. if Windows ever goes multiuser in a big way, where a local user may want to exploit the machine), almost every Windows application will have big problems with local exploits, since they have been built assuming that the local system is single-user and temp files and registry entries are assumed to be safe.
Are we saying programmers in the US are more innovative than Indian, Russian or other off shore programmers?
No, they are (probably) saying that typically outsourcing firms are set up to do grunt work, and the parent company performs the high-level "thinking" work that gets handed off to the contractor. This ignores that fact that lots of great ideas are generated down in the trenches, and since there are now two barriers (geography and the contractor barrier) between the thinkers and the trenches, this source of new ideas could get lost.
Of course, eventually the outsourcing countries will probably develop the means and confidence to start doing their own design and high-level work and bootstrap themselves above just doing "grunt" work, but that takes years to build the level of infrastucture and reputation needed for that.
I know at least one of their servers (RAQ XTR) is x86 based. Besides, most of the frontend code appears to be scripting code or otherwise cpu-independent, so a recompile should solve that problem. Hopefully this will result in code for generic Linux/BSD machines.
A big wish of mine is for the Cobalt web/mail admin code to find its way as a plugin for the very excellent Webmin project. Webmin has a web frontend like Cobalt which covers lots of other functionality, but generally it tends to be thin wrapper around the config files. The cobalt GUI abstracts things quite a bit more for new users and for basic tasks, and Webmin would benefit from this.
I imagine the purchase was fraught with internal struggles at Sun: those who wanted to purchase Cobalt to add to their low-end server line, and those who wanted to purchase Cobalt and kill it to remove a potentially dangerous competitor in the mid-range market, which is where Cobalt would probably have taken their product line next.
The Cobalt line essentially stagnated as soon as Sun purchased it. While they don't seem as innovative today, remember that 7-8 years ago this was really cool stuff. I've had great experiences with these machines. The machine owners can easily manage virtual hosts without my help, and I can always SSH in to do heavy lifting. I had hoped that Cobalt would push the appliance concept into the mainstream, but for whatever reasons the concept just never caught on. I've seen many small/medium businesses struggle with IIS/Exchange or smail/sendmail and waste thousands of dollars and many hours of work, when a $2000 cobalt would have been up and running in minutes and ready to add users. They aren't the best solution for every problem, but I've seen many places where it would have been a perfect fit. That's they way the industry works sometimes.
X doesn't work. I hate dragging a simple window and have a trail of tutti-fruity after it, or waiting 5 seconds for a menu to popup. Here's the part where you blame the window manager, or the graphics library, or the desktop environment.
Sounds like a serious config problem to me, or you're simply expecting too much from remote X over a slow network connection. I have a PII-266 at home with 128MB of ram pushing an ancient Matrox Millienium PCI card, and opaque moves are flawlessly smooth, even on this older install of KDE. Opaque resizes can be poor depending on the application, but that problem persists on any OS I've worked on because it's the application's duty to respond to the paint/resize event; if it decides to redraw the world, open and read some files, and recalculate everything during the paint event handler, that's the application's fault, not the underlying UI protocol's fault. The same rules apply when performing an opaque move over another application; if the invalidated application doesn't (or can't) update quickly, you will see artifacts.
If a menu takes 5 seconds to respond, then someone put way too much processing in the right-click handler at the application level (I'm assuming you're talking about context menus).
Please somebody tell me that there are DVD players with the ability to just play the movie without menus?!? I was a relative newcomer to DVD, and I thought it would be as convenient as a CD player. You know, load the disk, click the play button, and instantly start the movie. I takes longer to get a movie started on my DVD player (JVC) than it took on my VHS player, because you have to watch the FBI warnings and commentary disclaimers. Newer DVDs have annoying intro animations for every single menu (Simpsons Season 3 is a Worst Offender there).
As the parent poster said, I would glady pay extra for a player with instant-play capabilities. Otherwise, it is a flawed technology, as far as I'm concerned.
Actually, I believe there was a short and long version of _The Bicentennial Man_. The long book was called _The Positronic Man_ which Asimov co-wrote with Silverberg.
...I think you mean Call Isaac Asimov, who wrote _The Bicentennial Man_ upon which that movie was based. Asimov probably inspired a lot of roboticists and tackled a lot of these human/robot ethical delimas in his fiction, including the controversial Three Laws of Robotics, which I'll repeat here for completeness (if you don't know these, you should go to the library and read some Asimov. _I, Robot_, is a good start; it's a collection of his short stories about robots.
Three Laws of Robotics:
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Re:Anyone know how well it actually works?
on
Home DNA Sequencing
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
As a biochemist...
I've RTFA's for almost five years now about DNA sequencing, and how uber-clusters of Linux boxes have been used to help this process (a recent Linux Journal article talked about this). However, never have I seen an explanation of what DNA sequencing really is, and more importantly, what good does having a sequence do? What will we do with this new information? All the articles I see usually have a sidebar with some handwaving about "medical research" and the obligatory "hopefully find new cures for cancer". Usually it just seems to be used by the media and governments as a benchmark to display against the other guys, such as "We sequenced the [animal] gene in 2.37 days, much faster than the [other nationality] team who took three weeks. [our nationality] rules!"
I don't consider myself stupid, but I'm really ignorant about the topic. Can it be explained to a fellow techie in the length of a forum post? As an engineer at heart, I like to know what the final result will be (the "benefit" in the cost/benefit analysis).
Hard to see how that would be useful, except perhaps as a gag of some sort.
I would expect that any method to slow/store light would be useful in networking. Essentially, one could then queue and route light as packets without converting them to electrons via a router, which is probably how it's done now.
I have four boxes running 24/7, and I'm looking at an electricity bill for $61.22 at $.09/kW/hr. I find it hard to believe that these machines are costing me almost $30/month (4 x $7) to run. Or, to put it another way, I find it hard to believe that a decent sized house could have a $35 power bill. Even I'm not that miserly.:) Perhaps these machines are fairly efficient, since two do not have hard drives.
I would like to replace my floppy P100 with a dedicated firewall, but none that I've found have a true DMZ, where the DMZ box cannot ping the internal LAN. The Linksys firewall that friend bought would allow this.
In the 25+ production X11 environment I've visited, I've never seen this happen.
X11 display traffic is data networking.
I was referring to non-X11 data. The previous post mentioned that I would saturate my network with X11 traffic and thus steal the bandwidth from non-X11 traffic, and I was explaining that one could (if necessary) split the network so that non-X11 traffic would not share the same pipe as X11 traffic.
If I had 20 XTerms connected to BigBox, and BigBox had/home mounted via NFS from NFSBox and also BigBox queried against SQLBox, I could alleviate bandwidth problems by splitting the network into three subnets (NFS, XTerms, SQL), and connect BigBox to each network with a separate NIC. I'm sure switches/routers could do this as well without using different subnets, but I've never tried this.
Keep in mind that I was using words like would and could. The network would not need to be configured like this.
Good description; I wasn't aware that hardware would handle the buffer flipping.
the tricky stuff all happens 'behind the scenes', usually implemented with a combination of interrupts, threads and code to handle 'surface locking'.
...thats the "complexity" I was talking about.:)
Actually, implementing this probably wouldn't be that difficult, but it would cause a decrease in performance, even for apps that don't need the benefit of double/triple-buffering.
Slashdot Mirror
For many of these coders, they have opportunities (job and otherwise) they may never have gotten by working in a corporate environment or by shrink-wrapping their software. Check out the recent Fortune write-up of the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) founders. Had any of these packages been closed $199 packages, we probably would never have heard of them, and Microsoft or Oracle would have abolished them all by now.
Also, consider Marcelo Tosatti, who is the maintainer of the 2.4 kernel series. This was a kid from Brazil who was given the reins of one of the most popular server kernels in the world at the age of 18, when he became the 2.4 maintainer. Talk about democratization of opportunity. It's hard to put a dollar value on this resume line item: "Chief Maintainer of Linux 2.4 Kernel, 2001-present". His years of "free" work means that he'll likely have some of the coolest jobs ever for the rest of his career, while most of us grind away at VB.Net and deal with corporate politics. Who's the schmo now?
Has anyone tried KnoppMyth, which is basically a customized Knoppix ISO that anchors to the hard drive with MythTV? I have MythTV installed to a RH9 box, and it wasn't too difficult to install, but for a newb I suspect a CD installer would be easier. I looked at Windows products, but I really wanted the Mame/Emu frontend more than the PVR functions, so Myth was a no-brainer.
Ok, responding to my own post, X already handles non-text items in the clipboard, which would presumably be available to all remote clients. The problem is that KDE/Gnome apparently do not use these facilities.
The link I found in a post below is here
Actually, the X server should be the one to handle the clipboard, even for non-text items, unless you want to have problems with remote systems. For instance, if I have remote graphics editor running on system A, and my OpenOffice is on System B, and my X term on system C is displaying everything, if I copy a graphic on system A and try to paste it on System B, they would not have the same clipboard contents, unless they could query the X server. The problem with this is that very large clipboard items might not be allowed if the X server doesn't have the storage.
We have to get more home users and more small businesses on, and that means improving the desktop, getting the applications they need built and 'marketing' it to people.
I would argue that focusing on larger business desktops would be a quicker route to the home users. People will buy a home computer to match what they have at work, not the other way around. In an enterprise, computers are chosen carefully for consistency and hardware compliance, so the desktop will run well. With a home user, you have to support every little webcam widget sold at BestBuy or Walmart, or else you lose.
If we get millions of corporate desktops established, hardware manufacturers will start supporting it, and people will start buying Linux for their homes.
And while I don't think we need to standardize on a particular window manager or desktop environment, at a minimum the Gnome/KDE environments should share lots of standards, such as clipboards, stanadard dialogs, themes, etc. I think this is what OSDL is trying to do, which is similar to freedesktop.org. Having multiple GUI toolkits is not necessarily a weakness; the same condition exists on Windows and that hasn't seemed to affect it negatively.
I agree. I was hoping that Nintendo would release a really good 3D handheld that also offers built-in video out so it can be played as a console as well, and just merge the GameBoy and GameCube lines. The graphics only need to be about N64 quality to compete, if it has good titles. Having really good multiplayer games (as they already have on the GBA) would make this really interesting.
A2: There is no light bulb.
I use NFS under Linux for /home mounts and such and have found it to be extremely reliable in over five years of daily use, but NFS won't let go of removeable drives, so it doesn't work well for sharing automounted CD-ROM, floppy, or zip drives. For those, Samba is the way to go, and with pre/postexec settings, Samba will automatically mount/umount the drives so autofs is not needed on the server side.
wrong, "kilometers" is shorter than "1000 meters".
You had me worried until I realized you were talking about a string compare... For a second I thought I misunderstood the whole metric system.
Umm, the same thing that happened every year since CCD image sensors were introduced: accelerating improvements in the technology, and exponential growth in its market.
Well, video cameras have improved dramatically, and they revolutionized personal and profesional video, but for high-end work like movies film is still the preferred medium because of its look after processing. Video still looks "cheap" and can make a film look like a made-for-tv movie. I know Lucas was going to some all-digital format, but then again his whole set is CG, so it makes little difference to him.
Anyway, still film photography will probably be easier to replicate with CCD than motion picture film, since moving pictures add new variables to the problem. I've actually thought about making a magic image processor that cooks video to make it look like film. Just plug in the camcorder in the input side, and record on the output side. I just need to quantify the two or three main qualities about film that are so distinguishing from video. That and write the million lines of code necessary to perform the processing. I had a point in all this, but I completely lost it. Anyway, you will pull my digital camara away from my cold, dead fingers. But for pro artistic work, film will likely remain for quite a while.
Since you have 1.4.2 installed, try running the Java2D demo in $JAVA_HOME/demo/jfc/Java2D. The graphics are quite fast on a local machine, largely because (as you said) it uses back buffering to blast the pixels onto the screen. Unfortunately, this is horrible for remote X displays, but I found a workaround. Launch your java app with the option -Dsun.java2d.pmoffscreen=false, and this will disable the backbuffer and tremendously speed up remote X operation, at the expense of some flicker. On my remote machine, I renamed java to java.bin and created a wrapper script named java that always uses this option with the single line:
exec $JAVA_HOME/bin/java.bin -Dsun.java2d.pmoffscreen=false $*
That way any plugins or Web Start apps also get this treatment. Just make sure you also change the JRE copy of java, too.
A local exploit is when a local user purposefully tries to crack the system they are currently working on. Most Windows machines are single-user and sitting right next to you, so generally you don't need or want to exploit your own machine. Even in university labs, the local machine is usually fairly stripped down, and the data is on a remote file server. In a multiuser environment that many Unix and Linux machines run, the physical machine you are logged into may be down the hall, in another building, or many miles away. There also may be dozens of other users running applications on the same physical machine, so getting root/admin privileges would give you a great deal of access over other users. Windows machines rarely are run in this configuration, Terminal Services/Citrix notwithstanding.
In other words, a rough equivalent to a local exploit in Windows would be launching an attack on the Quicken/MS Money Billpay reminder (assuming it runs as Administrator) to get its privilege level, or exploiting one of the local system services. Most Windows users have relatively high privilege levels by default, so generally a local exploit is not necessary to do damage, and again, it is most likely your own machine you would be cracking. The same applies to most Linux desktops, which is why local exploits are not a concern for most desktop Linux users.
Also, is Linux more secure than Windows, because I hear a fair amount of Linux security holes more than Windows, or maybe I'm just not perceptive enough.
All advanced operating systems can be insecure depending on configuration.
However, regarding your specific question, you see more security exploits for Linux probably because Linux has both remote and local exploits; the vast majority are local exploits. A local exploit is usually only a concern in a multiuser mainframe-style environment where you have "trusted" users who can log in to the machine. These users can log in and use a local exploit to elevate their priviliges on the machine. If the user doesn't have a login account, they do not have the opportunity to perform the exploit. Local exploits generally use buffer overflows or hijack split-second temp files to do their nastiness.
Windows generally does not operate in a multiuser fashion, so these exploits are not as pertinent. Having written Windows software for years, I can tell that if local exploits ever become a concern for Windows (e.g. if Windows ever goes multiuser in a big way, where a local user may want to exploit the machine), almost every Windows application will have big problems with local exploits, since they have been built assuming that the local system is single-user and temp files and registry entries are assumed to be safe.
Are we saying programmers in the US are more innovative than Indian, Russian or other off shore programmers?
No, they are (probably) saying that typically outsourcing firms are set up to do grunt work, and the parent company performs the high-level "thinking" work that gets handed off to the contractor. This ignores that fact that lots of great ideas are generated down in the trenches, and since there are now two barriers (geography and the contractor barrier) between the thinkers and the trenches, this source of new ideas could get lost.
Of course, eventually the outsourcing countries will probably develop the means and confidence to start doing their own design and high-level work and bootstrap themselves above just doing "grunt" work, but that takes years to build the level of infrastucture and reputation needed for that.
I know at least one of their servers (RAQ XTR) is x86 based. Besides, most of the frontend code appears to be scripting code or otherwise cpu-independent, so a recompile should solve that problem. Hopefully this will result in code for generic Linux/BSD machines.
A big wish of mine is for the Cobalt web/mail admin code to find its way as a plugin for the very excellent Webmin project. Webmin has a web frontend like Cobalt which covers lots of other functionality, but generally it tends to be thin wrapper around the config files. The cobalt GUI abstracts things quite a bit more for new users and for basic tasks, and Webmin would benefit from this.
I imagine the purchase was fraught with internal struggles at Sun: those who wanted to purchase Cobalt to add to their low-end server line, and those who wanted to purchase Cobalt and kill it to remove a potentially dangerous competitor in the mid-range market, which is where Cobalt would probably have taken their product line next.
The Cobalt line essentially stagnated as soon as Sun purchased it. While they don't seem as innovative today, remember that 7-8 years ago this was really cool stuff. I've had great experiences with these machines. The machine owners can easily manage virtual hosts without my help, and I can always SSH in to do heavy lifting. I had hoped that Cobalt would push the appliance concept into the mainstream, but for whatever reasons the concept just never caught on. I've seen many small/medium businesses struggle with IIS/Exchange or smail/sendmail and waste thousands of dollars and many hours of work, when a $2000 cobalt would have been up and running in minutes and ready to add users. They aren't the best solution for every problem, but I've seen many places where it would have been a perfect fit. That's they way the industry works sometimes.
X doesn't work. I hate dragging a simple window and have a trail of tutti-fruity after it, or waiting 5 seconds for a menu to popup. Here's the part where you blame the window manager, or the graphics library, or the desktop environment.
Sounds like a serious config problem to me, or you're simply expecting too much from remote X over a slow network connection. I have a PII-266 at home with 128MB of ram pushing an ancient Matrox Millienium PCI card, and opaque moves are flawlessly smooth, even on this older install of KDE. Opaque resizes can be poor depending on the application, but that problem persists on any OS I've worked on because it's the application's duty to respond to the paint/resize event; if it decides to redraw the world, open and read some files, and recalculate everything during the paint event handler, that's the application's fault, not the underlying UI protocol's fault. The same rules apply when performing an opaque move over another application; if the invalidated application doesn't (or can't) update quickly, you will see artifacts.
If a menu takes 5 seconds to respond, then someone put way too much processing in the right-click handler at the application level (I'm assuming you're talking about context menus).
Please somebody tell me that there are DVD players with the ability to just play the movie without menus?!? I was a relative newcomer to DVD, and I thought it would be as convenient as a CD player. You know, load the disk, click the play button, and instantly start the movie. I takes longer to get a movie started on my DVD player (JVC) than it took on my VHS player, because you have to watch the FBI warnings and commentary disclaimers. Newer DVDs have annoying intro animations for every single menu (Simpsons Season 3 is a Worst Offender there).
As the parent poster said, I would glady pay extra for a player with instant-play capabilities. Otherwise, it is a flawed technology, as far as I'm concerned.
Actually, I believe there was a short and long version of _The Bicentennial Man_. The long book was called _The Positronic Man_ which Asimov co-wrote with Silverberg.
Three Laws of Robotics:
As a biochemist...
I've RTFA's for almost five years now about DNA sequencing, and how uber-clusters of Linux boxes have been used to help this process (a recent Linux Journal article talked about this). However, never have I seen an explanation of what DNA sequencing really is, and more importantly, what good does having a sequence do? What will we do with this new information? All the articles I see usually have a sidebar with some handwaving about "medical research" and the obligatory "hopefully find new cures for cancer". Usually it just seems to be used by the media and governments as a benchmark to display against the other guys, such as "We sequenced the [animal] gene in 2.37 days, much faster than the [other nationality] team who took three weeks. [our nationality] rules!"
I don't consider myself stupid, but I'm really ignorant about the topic. Can it be explained to a fellow techie in the length of a forum post? As an engineer at heart, I like to know what the final result will be (the "benefit" in the cost/benefit analysis).
Hard to see how that would be useful, except perhaps as a gag of some sort.
I would expect that any method to slow/store light would be useful in networking. Essentially, one could then queue and route light as packets without converting them to electrons via a router, which is probably how it's done now.
I have four boxes running 24/7, and I'm looking at an electricity bill for $61.22 at $.09/kW/hr. I find it hard to believe that these machines are costing me almost $30/month (4 x $7) to run. Or, to put it another way, I find it hard to believe that a decent sized house could have a $35 power bill. Even I'm not that miserly. :) Perhaps these machines are fairly efficient, since two do not have hard drives.
I would like to replace my floppy P100 with a dedicated firewall, but none that I've found have a true DMZ, where the DMZ box cannot ping the internal LAN. The Linksys firewall that friend bought would allow this.
In the 25+ production X11 environment I've visited, I've never seen this happen.
/home mounted via NFS from NFSBox and also BigBox queried against SQLBox, I could alleviate bandwidth problems by splitting the network into three subnets (NFS, XTerms, SQL), and connect BigBox to each network with a separate NIC. I'm sure switches/routers could do this as well without using different subnets, but I've never tried this.
X11 display traffic is data networking.
I was referring to non-X11 data. The previous post mentioned that I would saturate my network with X11 traffic and thus steal the bandwidth from non-X11 traffic, and I was explaining that one could (if necessary) split the network so that non-X11 traffic would not share the same pipe as X11 traffic.
If I had 20 XTerms connected to BigBox, and BigBox had
Keep in mind that I was using words like would and could. The network would not need to be configured like this.
Good description; I wasn't aware that hardware would handle the buffer flipping.
...thats the "complexity" I was talking about. :)
the tricky stuff all happens 'behind the scenes', usually implemented with a combination of interrupts, threads and code to handle 'surface locking'.
Actually, implementing this probably wouldn't be that difficult, but it would cause a decrease in performance, even for apps that don't need the benefit of double/triple-buffering.