3) The webserver they are running isn't Apache, at least, according to Netcraft, which says it's running "inetd in realloc(): warning, junk pointer too low to make sense"
Netcraft is probably broken. Both www.redhat.com, slashdot.org, linux.lanshark.com, and a number of other apache sites bring back the same response.
The Motley Fool has a saying on their website concerning P/E and growth:
"In a fully and fairly valued situation, a growth stock's price-to-earnings ratio should equal the percentage of the growth rate of its company's earnings per share."
I don't believe that the market always accurately specifies the value of future earnings, for exactly the reason outlined in the quote above. Those who buy at low PEG ratios and who short at higher PEG ratios are making their stock moves on more than intuition. This is more than I can say for the people buying and selling RHAT like its going out of style. =)
...because I would hate to think that such a definitive statement regarding the legality of Corel's practices is coming from a "hotheaded"/. reader.
Of all the things that you could possibly refer to as "little," this is not one of them. Yes, Corel has supported Linux in the past. Yes, they've chosen to release their own software on Linux. However, I have no reason to believe that their motives are different from any other profit-motivated software vendor. Do you? They want to release a Linux distro because they see $$, and I don't blame them. But when they RELICENSE someone else's code without permission, they violate the spirit and intent of the GPL, if not the letter.
You (and Corel) may claim that the beta testers are now "internal" members of Corel, and therefore the software has not been publicly released. If you truly believe this, however, you shouldn't be suprised when a less-than-admirable company comes along and licenses its "beta" version of Linux only to "internal users" where internal is defined as "those who have paid a subscription fee" or other such scenario. This is a serious problem facing the GPL, IMO.
I'm not a GPL fanatic, nor am I staunch defender of all that involves RMS. Nevertheless, Corel's actions are intolerable, not only when taking the GPL at its word, but when considering the GPL at an *intellectual* level. Corel is not taking a defensible stance on this issue, as they seem to be knowingly trouncing the very principles the GPL stands for. If Corel doesn't soon obey the letter and spirit of the GPL, I will never use their distribution, and I will encourage others to ignore them as well. This is ridiculous.
Given the amount of work that one has to put into coding/encapsulating KDE-specific and GNOME-specific routines for multi-environment applications, what future do you see in the development of multi-environment frameworks like wxWindows? In your opinion, are these frameworks the best way to create KDE-enabled *and* Gnome-enabled applications for the forseeable future?
Well, its official. Slashdot has worked its way into the realm of the net cliche with its annointing by the Media Wise as an Official Internet Community (tm) (accept no substitute).
Seriously, though...the reporters who are so intently discussing this latest classification are ultimately the pawns of the marketing forces that sweep the web today like ocean currents. Unable to win big with the concept of the "portal," the marketroids have transformed (read: renamed) their sites into "communities", thus providing the ever-so-important weekly buzzword (and warm fuzzy feeling) that keeps speculative internet stocks inflated to their astronomically high levels.
Perhaps at one point I would have bought into the idea of/. as a real, honest-to-goodness community. But that was back when I could identify 80% of the posters on the site, and I could predict the quality of a post solely on the nick attached to it. Back when a circle of 10 or 15 people were submitting the majority of the stories on the site. Those days are gone. Thousands of users and millions of hits after its advent,/. has lost all claim to community. It's still a very cool website, but it is not a community any more than the millions who read USA Today are a community.
I am community member 686 of 50,000. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
This is a really nice piece of Linux propaganda, which is ESR produces at an impressive rate. However, his assertions seem to be a bit premature, considering that only one Linux-centric public company exists to date. How can one assert that the *nix industry is converging on Linux, when Linux hasn't even begun to experience the level of commercial pressures felt by its cousins?
Yes, it seems that several big Unix players have come out with modest support of Linux. Don't forget, however, that these companies are still massive entities, and the support that most have flung in the Linux direction is so token (for them) that they can hardly be credited with anything but protecting their own potential interests.
Don't get me wrong. I really like Linux. I use Linux exclusively at home and at work. But the Great Linux Migration is still in its infancy, and there is a LOT of room for corruption and division.
"You're obviously not a coder and haven't followed linux much if you think that the community hasn't been filled with "serious competition" since its conception. The "serious competition" is one of the things that draws a lot of us to it. It's made a huge difference too, Linux is far better because of competition."
Really? If you consider HURD vs. Linux, or WM vs. Afterstep or TWIN vs. WINE competition, then perhaps there has always been serious competition in the Linux domain. But I am a coder, and I have followed Linux software development for a long time. What I saw in those projects was peaceful coexistence and even cooperation between differing products. Sure WM is a lot like AfterStep, but then again, it is a lot unlike AfterStep as well. One doesn't exist just to outdo the other. WINE and TWIN? Same thing. In fact, there has been a lot of cross-communication between those projects recently.
Contrast this to the GNOME/KDE wars. Do these developers communicate with each other as effectively? Why are there two disparate object models being developed? Why is there very little cooperation on the CORBA front? Why must every GNOME-positive article on/. have a KDE-positive counterpart posted immediately thereafter? (or vice versa)
How about the drafting of the GNOME WM compliance specification? As I recall there was/is a lot of dissention regarding how closely the spec was tied to E. Several WM authors decided not even to implement the spec because of this. Is this cooperation?
Perhaps we should create a distinction: community competition vs. corporate competition. Community competition leads to better products and common ideals. Corporate competition leads to lawsuits and fragmentation. And the Linux community seems to be moving from the former to the latter, IMO.
If you need one more piece of anecdotal evidence, reconsider for a moment the scuffle between LinuxCare and RedHat over a certain advertisement. This type of thing can't help but spill over into the code at some point.
That article was not only honest, but it was accurate, given the amount of complaints that the RH IPO fiasco generated from the *altruistic* linux developers on this site.
In the last month/. has witnessed more posts from people who believe that it is their Deity-given right to be financially compensated for writing free software--something that these same developers were patting themselves on the back for doing without compensation just a month before. I didn't think it would happen, but the aura surrounding Linux has notably shifted from one of community to one of serious competition, and while not all of this is due to $$ (witness the KDE/GNOME wars), it certainly hasn't helped. The RedHat IPO, as far as I can tell, has made the situation worse. Perhaps it won't affect the quality and reputation of the kernel, but the kind of corporate squabbling coming down the pipe can't help Linux's overall public image.
1) The DNA computing solution to the TSP didn't use nucleotides, but synthetic strands of DNA made with unique sequences to represent the nodes of the graph. The sample space is therefore full as long as a suitable # of copies of fragments are placed in solution (hence the parallelism of the solution).
2) Mixing is affected by the number of free DNA fragments, but only in the probability that two molecules will interact with DNA ligase in such a way as to ligate successfully. This, of course is more dependent on *concentration* of DNA and enzymes than the number of copies of DNA fragments considered in isolation.
3) As alluded in 2, "Increasing the vat" will not necessarily get you *faster* mixing. Biochem textbooks go into this in painful detail in their discussion of enzyme kinetics. Basically, at some reaction condition an enzyme reaches "maximum velocity" and will not catalyze a reaction any faster than that rate, no matter what you do. Substrate concentration plays a role, as does product concentration, so while increasing DNA conc. will increase the "mixing rate" to a point, this effect will ultimately plateau.
4) Given 3, you won't necessarily have more duplicates to check unless you allow the ligation reaction to run for a longer period of time. This is true if your ligase enzymes are already at their maximum velocity (which is commonly achieved).
4a) This is sort of a nit-pick, but the number of "wrong answers" that need to be checked is ultimately a non-issue. The standard DNA manipulations used in a bio lab would allow you to filter out all but the solutions to this problem in a single step (gel electrophoresis of DNA allows molecules to be separated by size at very fine resolutions).
5) As the problem domain is made more complicated, there are longer fragments of DNA to screen. However, DNA breakage is not a practical concern, given that living organisms have DNA strands that are many kilobases, if not megabases long. We're talking about concatamers of N*20 bases here, where N is the number of nodes in the TSP. You're problem domain would have to be *huge* for this to be a real problem. Even then, the number of broken strands would be vastly outnumbered by intact strands.
6) As someone else noted P or NP is irrelevant to this type of solution to the TSP. The DNA solution is fundamentally parallel, but to measure it with a problem set defined for Turing machines is like comparing apples to oranges. The DNA approach makes Turing NP-complete problems tractable in "real" linear time (linear because it ultimately take linear time to sequence DNA fragments). But as so many others have noted, the solution space for this problem is not linear, since the real work is done by enzymes in a massively-parallel fashion. It just happens to be a cheap massively parallel computer =)
If anyone wants to debate this further, I'm game. Contact me at trobertsNO_SPAM@du.NO_SPAMedu
This is de facto compensation of Open Source coders, thus providing an alternate incentive to write GPLed code (as opposed to those motives which have driven the movement for years now). The only problem with this type of incentive is that not everyone has millions to throw around at programmers. Red Hat gains a rather perverse advantage in the marketplace, because it can now hire coders w/o really hiring people. Plus they can suck coders away from other projects because, after all, they decide who gets shares.
If there is a way to turn Red Hat into Microsoft, this proposal is it.
I am leaving for San Jose tonight for a business trip not related to LWE. I won't get there until 9:30 PM, and I likely won't be able to attend the expo due to work. =(
I [always] enjoy seeing [well written] articles on technologies and [operating systems] that I [use]. Linus is certainly [inspirational] in that he can [work full time] and [maintain Linux]. I [hope that] he [will continue to devote] himself [to Linux]. Incidentally my new [e-business] [Paraphrase.com] is applying for [patents] on the [extensive] use of [[]] in [electronic documents].
...when a company that has talked internally of starvinng/squelching/destrroying competition through price gouging AND who posesses >95% of a product market is not restrained as a monopolist?
It seems that our anti-trust laws punish only after the damage of a monopoly, rather than preventing the damage in the first place. In essence, the gov't may lose this case because it didn't wait long enough to file it (had they waitted until netscape was dead in the water, the case would have been much stronger.) If this is tuly what the laws say, then the laws need to be ammeded IMHO.
My $0.02 American, worth only $0.0134 after internet tax.
I've been worried about the same thing since Red Hat's IPO became common knowledge to the media. After all, it is NOT in Red Hat's best interests, financially, to mention other distros near the time of their IPO (or to correct media blurbs to do so). As Bob Young is so proud of saying (I paraphrase) "All Red Hat really owns is a brand." It just doesn't make good business sense to mention other brands when you're trying to make money off of your own, so I don't really expect this situation to change.
However, I don't believe Linux has to become synonymous with Red Hat, because:
1) Linux distributions for other platforms make it hard for the mediia to accuse other brands of borrowing "Red Hat's" code. LinuxPPC, YellowDog, etc. are becoming more of a presence now, and the media is too thick to understand that a Mac operating system could use the same code as an Intel OS.
2) Caldera, at the very least, has a good business presence--they've targeted the office, so their name still makes rounds in the business world. If they IPO, they will likely carry a buzz as a "competitor to Red Hat."
3) All of us know better, and if history is any indication, we'll scream bloody murder if "Red Hat's Linux" is bantered around too casually. =)
As I see it, the purpose of opening the lines to competition is to keep the lines from being a source of profit in and of themselves.
Why should a company have to let others use the network it paid for? Because years of government-granted monopoly have allowed said companies to lay the wire...Because it is inefficient and wasteful to rebuild a huge infrastructure over and over again just to allow market economics to take place...Because the idea of profiting from the *wire* is as silly and anachronistic as toll roads are today.
We may bitch and moan that current open-access resources (like roads) are poorly maintained and managed, but almost all of us would prefer to hop in our cars and drive from A to B over having to pay a new toll/tax/maintenance fee every time we make a turn, and to get out of our cars and hike whenever we leave a particular Road Service Area.
The wire should be a commodity today. No more reaping huge profits while ignoring the consumer, as every utility monopoly has done for years. These huge companies should still have to earn their profits, rather than resting on the laurels of a decades-old accomplishment. Deregulating the network would shift these jerks' attentions to customer service and support, which is where it belongs anyway.
I don't feel sorry for the wire-owners at all. It isn't like they wouldn't be compensated for their lines--the poor babies would just have to compete in an open market for once.
I'm not sure about the technical side of your idea, but I know I like the spirit of it. Send your post to Rob's email address, or he'll probably never read it. If this were structured in a similar manner to the comment moderation system, it would really make slashdot responsive to its readers.
Something like "Slashdot Jobs" works just fine until the unwashed masses of tech recruiters realize it's there. Once that happens, you can kiss any hope of eliteness goodbye. The only way you can really guarantee that competent people are searching your site is to communicate with them ahead of time--lots of resources.
Re:Nothing earth-shattering here
on
DNA Encryption
·
· Score: 1
They don't need to sequence 30 million strands of DNA. PCR amplifies out a target DNA fragment using oligonucleotide probes which are specific to regions of DNA. After the PCR has been performed, the purified PCR products may be sequenced quite easily, in a single step.
That requires a central repository
on
DNA Encryption
·
· Score: 1
Gee. Why don't cattle ranchers stop branding their cattle and just keep the animals' information in a big centralized database?
People don't crash or erase their own DNA. Not to mention the space that would be required to store that volume of information in a database.
I know these folks are just trying to pump another buck out of society, but I do agree with their point. Schools are woefully behind in their technology education, and few devote the kind of money necessary to keep up with the computer world.
I actually went to a high school where computer classes were ranked on par with home economics and phys ed. At least, that was what you had to choose from when you scheduled. There were no required computer courses--and my high school was considered progressive for the state!
I don't believe that all the fault lies with the for-profit software industry--if school systems would set some decent priorities, then spending on technology education would almost certainly have to increase (even considering free software).
Slashdot Mirror
3) The webserver they are running isn't Apache, at least, according to Netcraft, which says it's running "inetd in realloc(): warning, junk pointer too low to make sense"
Netcraft is probably broken. Both www.redhat.com, slashdot.org, linux.lanshark.com, and a number of other apache sites bring back the same response.
The Motley Fool has a saying on their website concerning P/E and growth:
"In a fully and fairly valued situation, a growth stock's price-to-earnings ratio should equal the percentage of the growth rate of its company's earnings per share."
I don't believe that the market always accurately specifies the value of future earnings, for exactly the reason outlined in the quote above. Those who buy at low PEG ratios and who short at higher PEG ratios are making their stock moves on more than intuition. This is more than I can say for the people buying and selling RHAT like its going out of style. =)
...because I would hate to think that such a definitive statement regarding the legality of Corel's practices is coming from a "hotheaded" /. reader.
Of all the things that you could possibly refer to as "little," this is not one of them. Yes, Corel has supported Linux in the past. Yes, they've chosen to release their own software on Linux. However, I have no reason to believe that their motives are different from any other profit-motivated software vendor. Do you? They want to release a Linux distro because they see $$, and I don't blame them. But when they RELICENSE someone else's code without permission, they violate the spirit and intent of the GPL, if not the letter.
You (and Corel) may claim that the beta testers are now "internal" members of Corel, and therefore the software has not been publicly released. If you truly believe this, however, you shouldn't be suprised when a less-than-admirable company comes along and licenses its "beta" version of Linux only to "internal users" where internal is defined as "those who have paid a subscription fee" or other such scenario. This is a serious problem facing the GPL, IMO.
I'm not a GPL fanatic, nor am I staunch defender of all that involves RMS. Nevertheless, Corel's actions are intolerable, not only when taking the GPL at its word, but when considering the GPL at an *intellectual* level. Corel is not taking a defensible stance on this issue, as they seem to be knowingly trouncing the very principles the GPL stands for. If Corel doesn't soon obey the letter and spirit of the GPL, I will never use their distribution, and I will encourage others to ignore them as well. This is ridiculous.
Given the amount of work that one has to put into coding/encapsulating KDE-specific and GNOME-specific routines for multi-environment applications, what future do you see in the development of multi-environment frameworks like wxWindows? In your opinion, are these frameworks the best way to create KDE-enabled *and* Gnome-enabled applications for the forseeable future?
Well, its official. Slashdot has worked its way into the realm of the net cliche with its annointing by the Media Wise as an Official Internet Community (tm) (accept no substitute).
/. as a real, honest-to-goodness community. But that was back when I could identify 80% of the posters on the site, and I could predict the quality of a post solely on the nick attached to it. Back when a circle of 10 or 15 people were submitting the majority of the stories on the site. Those days are gone. Thousands of users and millions of hits after its advent, /. has lost all claim to community. It's still a very cool website, but it is not a community any more than the millions who read USA Today are a community.
Seriously, though...the reporters who are so intently discussing this latest classification are ultimately the pawns of the marketing forces that sweep the web today like ocean currents. Unable to win big with the concept of the "portal," the marketroids have transformed (read: renamed) their sites into "communities", thus providing the ever-so-important weekly buzzword (and warm fuzzy feeling) that keeps speculative internet stocks inflated to their astronomically high levels.
Perhaps at one point I would have bought into the idea of
I am community member 686 of 50,000. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
heh heh hehhehheh...
settle down, taco!
a truly great shirt--wonder where rob got it?
IS FUN. Will this comment dissappear after Slashdot V2 goes live? Who knows...
This is a really nice piece of Linux propaganda, which is ESR produces at an impressive rate. However, his assertions seem to be a bit premature, considering that only one Linux-centric public company exists to date. How can one assert that the *nix industry is converging on Linux, when Linux hasn't even begun to experience the level of commercial pressures felt by its cousins?
Yes, it seems that several big Unix players have come out with modest support of Linux. Don't forget, however, that these companies are still massive entities, and the support that most have flung in the Linux direction is so token (for them) that they can hardly be credited with anything but protecting their own potential interests.
Don't get me wrong. I really like Linux. I use Linux exclusively at home and at work. But the Great Linux Migration is still in its infancy, and there is a LOT of room for corruption and division.
"You're obviously not a coder and haven't followed linux much if you think that the community hasn't been filled with "serious competition" since its conception. The "serious competition" is one of the things that draws a lot of us to it. It's made a huge difference too, Linux is far better because of competition."
/. have a KDE-positive counterpart posted immediately thereafter? (or vice versa)
Really? If you consider HURD vs. Linux, or WM vs. Afterstep or TWIN vs. WINE competition, then perhaps there has always been serious competition in the Linux domain. But I am a coder, and I have followed Linux software development for a long time. What I saw in those projects was peaceful coexistence and even cooperation between differing products. Sure WM is a lot like AfterStep, but then again, it is a lot unlike AfterStep as well. One doesn't exist just to outdo the other. WINE and TWIN? Same thing. In fact, there has been a lot of cross-communication between those projects recently.
Contrast this to the GNOME/KDE wars. Do these developers communicate with each other as effectively? Why are there two disparate object models being developed? Why is there very little cooperation on the CORBA front? Why must every GNOME-positive article on
How about the drafting of the GNOME WM compliance specification? As I recall there was/is a lot of dissention regarding how closely the spec was tied to E. Several WM authors decided not even to implement the spec because of this. Is this cooperation?
Perhaps we should create a distinction: community competition vs. corporate competition. Community competition leads to better products and common ideals. Corporate competition leads to lawsuits and fragmentation. And the Linux community seems to be moving from the former to the latter, IMO.
If you need one more piece of anecdotal evidence, reconsider for a moment the scuffle between LinuxCare and RedHat over a certain advertisement. This type of thing can't help but spill over into the code at some point.
...because I'm going to defy the great penguin.
/. has witnessed more posts from people who believe that it is their Deity-given right to be financially compensated for writing free software--something that these same developers were patting themselves on the back for doing without compensation just a month before. I didn't think it would happen, but the aura surrounding Linux has notably shifted from one of community to one of serious competition, and while not all of this is due to $$ (witness the KDE/GNOME wars), it certainly hasn't helped. The RedHat IPO, as far as I can tell, has made the situation worse. Perhaps it won't affect the quality and reputation of the kernel, but the kind of corporate squabbling coming down the pipe can't help Linux's overall public image.
That article was not only honest, but it was accurate, given the amount of complaints that the RH IPO fiasco generated from the *altruistic* linux developers on this site.
In the last month
Some thoughts on your post:
1) The DNA computing solution to the TSP didn't use nucleotides, but synthetic strands of DNA made with unique sequences to represent the nodes of the graph. The sample space is therefore full as long as a suitable # of copies of fragments are placed in solution (hence the parallelism of the solution).
2) Mixing is affected by the number of free DNA fragments, but only in the probability that two molecules will interact with DNA ligase in such a way as to ligate successfully. This, of course is more dependent on *concentration* of DNA and enzymes than the number of copies of DNA fragments considered in isolation.
3) As alluded in 2, "Increasing the vat" will not necessarily get you *faster* mixing. Biochem textbooks go into this in painful detail in their discussion of enzyme kinetics. Basically, at some reaction condition an enzyme reaches "maximum velocity" and will not catalyze a reaction any faster than that rate, no matter what you do. Substrate concentration plays a role, as does product concentration, so while increasing DNA conc. will increase the "mixing rate" to a point, this effect will ultimately plateau.
4) Given 3, you won't necessarily have more duplicates to check unless you allow the ligation reaction to run for a longer period of time. This is true if your ligase enzymes are already at their maximum velocity (which is commonly achieved).
4a) This is sort of a nit-pick, but the number of "wrong answers" that need to be checked is ultimately a non-issue. The standard DNA manipulations used in a bio lab would allow you to filter out all but the solutions to this problem in a single step (gel electrophoresis of DNA allows molecules to be separated by size at very fine resolutions).
5) As the problem domain is made more complicated, there are longer fragments of DNA to screen. However, DNA breakage is not a practical concern, given that living organisms have DNA strands that are many kilobases, if not megabases long. We're talking about concatamers of N*20 bases here, where N is the number of nodes in the TSP. You're problem domain would have to be *huge* for this to be a real problem. Even then, the number of broken strands would be vastly outnumbered by intact strands.
6) As someone else noted P or NP is irrelevant to this type of solution to the TSP. The DNA solution is fundamentally parallel, but to measure it with a problem set defined for Turing machines is like comparing apples to oranges. The DNA approach makes Turing NP-complete problems tractable in "real" linear time (linear because it ultimately take linear time to sequence DNA fragments). But as so many others have noted, the solution space for this problem is not linear, since the real work is done by enzymes in a massively-parallel fashion. It just happens to be a cheap massively parallel computer =)
If anyone wants to debate this further, I'm game. Contact me at trobertsNO_SPAM@du.NO_SPAMedu
-Tim
This is de facto compensation of Open Source coders, thus providing an alternate incentive to write GPLed code (as opposed to those motives which have driven the movement for years now). The only problem with this type of incentive is that not everyone has millions to throw around at programmers. Red Hat gains a rather perverse advantage in the marketplace, because it can now hire coders w/o really hiring people. Plus they can suck coders away from other projects because, after all, they decide who gets shares.
If there is a way to turn Red Hat into Microsoft, this proposal is it.
I am leaving for San Jose tonight for a business trip not related to LWE. I won't get there until 9:30 PM, and I likely won't be able to attend the expo due to work. =(
I [always] enjoy seeing [well written] articles on technologies and [operating systems] that I [use]. Linus is certainly [inspirational] in that he can [work full time] and [maintain Linux]. I [hope that] he [will continue to devote] himself [to Linux]. Incidentally my new [e-business] [Paraphrase.com] is applying for [patents] on the [extensive] use of [[]] in [electronic documents].
...when a company that has talked internally of starvinng/squelching/destrroying competition through price gouging AND who posesses >95% of a product market is not restrained as a monopolist?
It seems that our anti-trust laws punish only after the damage of a monopoly, rather than preventing the damage in the first place. In essence, the gov't may lose this case because it didn't wait long enough to file it (had they waitted until netscape was dead in the water, the case would have been much stronger.)
If this is tuly what the laws say, then the laws need to be ammeded IMHO.
My $0.02 American, worth only $0.0134 after internet tax.
I've been worried about the same thing since Red Hat's IPO became common knowledge to the media. After all, it is NOT in Red Hat's best interests, financially, to mention other distros near the time of their IPO (or to correct media blurbs to do so). As Bob Young is so proud of saying (I paraphrase) "All Red Hat really owns is a brand." It just doesn't make good business sense to mention other brands when you're trying to make money off of your own, so I don't really expect this situation to change.
However, I don't believe Linux has to become synonymous with Red Hat, because:
1) Linux distributions for other platforms make it hard for the mediia to accuse other brands of borrowing "Red Hat's" code. LinuxPPC, YellowDog, etc. are becoming more of a presence now, and the media is too thick to understand that a Mac operating system could use the same code as an Intel OS.
2) Caldera, at the very least, has a good business presence--they've targeted the office, so their name still makes rounds in the business world. If they IPO, they will likely carry a buzz as a "competitor to Red Hat."
3) All of us know better, and if history is any indication, we'll scream bloody murder if "Red Hat's Linux" is bantered around too casually. =)
My 2/100ths of a dollar.
Yeah...slightly darker or lighter depending on the time of day =)
Maybe, but the weather sucks (unless of course you like gray skies all year round).
As I see it, the purpose of opening the lines to competition is to keep the lines from being a source of profit in and of themselves.
Why should a company have to let others use the network it paid for? Because years of government-granted monopoly have allowed said companies to lay the wire...Because it is inefficient and wasteful to rebuild a huge infrastructure over and over again just to allow market economics to take place...Because the idea of profiting from the *wire* is as silly and anachronistic as toll roads are today.
We may bitch and moan that current open-access resources (like roads) are poorly maintained and managed, but almost all of us would prefer to hop in our cars and drive from A to B over having to pay a new toll/tax/maintenance fee every time we make a turn, and to get out of our cars and hike whenever we leave a particular Road Service Area.
The wire should be a commodity today. No more reaping huge profits while ignoring the consumer, as every utility monopoly has done for years. These huge companies should still have to earn their profits, rather than resting on the laurels of a decades-old accomplishment. Deregulating the network would shift these jerks' attentions to customer service and support, which is where it belongs anyway.
I don't feel sorry for the wire-owners at all. It isn't like they wouldn't be compensated for their lines--the poor babies would just have to compete in an open market for once.
I'm not sure about the technical side of your idea, but I know I like the spirit of it. Send your post to Rob's email address, or he'll probably never read it. If this were structured in a similar manner to the comment moderation system, it would really make slashdot responsive to its readers.
Something like "Slashdot Jobs" works just fine until the unwashed masses of tech recruiters realize it's there. Once that happens, you can kiss any hope of eliteness goodbye. The only way you can really guarantee that competent people are searching your site is to communicate with them ahead of time--lots of resources.
They don't need to sequence 30 million strands of DNA. PCR amplifies out a target DNA fragment using oligonucleotide probes which are specific to regions of DNA. After the PCR has been performed, the purified PCR products may be sequenced quite easily, in a single step.
Gee. Why don't cattle ranchers stop branding their cattle and just keep the animals' information in a big centralized database?
People don't crash or erase their own DNA. Not to mention the space that would be required to store that volume of information in a database.
I know these folks are just trying to pump another buck out of society, but I do agree with their point. Schools are woefully behind in their technology education, and few devote the kind of money necessary to keep up with the computer world.
I actually went to a high school where computer classes were ranked on par with home economics and phys ed. At least, that was what you had to choose from when you scheduled. There were no required computer courses--and my high school was considered progressive for the state!
I don't believe that all the fault lies with the for-profit software industry--if school systems would set some decent priorities, then spending on technology education would almost certainly have to increase (even considering free software).