Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Old genes if not old news: (Score 1) 88

This is completely not surprising to me.

Evolve makes it sound like these are new mutations. Not usually. They just are present in a very small percentage of a given group of microbes. Nature keeps around a lot of potentially useful things in genomes by having them only present in fairly rare individuals of the species. That way, the cost of keeping them around is low in terms of genome space and energy to replicate them/produce the relevant proteins.

Bacteria use a trick called horizontal gene transfer to quickly spread things that turn out to be useful (example: antibiotic resistance) to much of the population and even to other microbe species.

As to the universality of bugs being able to in time to find a way to break down almost anything, look at the work of, for example, Terry Hazen at DOE and the University of Tennessee on using bacteria in hazardous waste site cleanup.

Comment Re:Still see a few machines a year of that vintage (Score 1) 130

I'm at a university, so I see this all the time. Many of the research instruments I work on were gotten from specifically written grants and it's nearly impossible to get a grant to replace it unless the new machine enables new capabilities. The grants process is often so competitive that just keeping your research happening isn't enough. You have to justify it with new capabilities and providing service to other research groups. That's a tall order, even when it's a machine that's crucial to your work.

And when the actual machine is still functional, save for being wedded hip and thigh to an old computer (due to legacy cards and software) it seems awfully wasteful to have to replace it.

Comment Re:scientific instruments (Score 1) 130

I feel your pain daily.

I work at a university repairing lab equipment and instruments. I still have a few that I work on that are using embedded or standalone computers running DOS. Win 2k still lives on here and XP is very common for them. Like you, we keep them off the network, Far too often, the attitude of manufacturers toward older instruments is "buy our new model" rather than do any upgrades in software so that it can run on newer computers. Never mind that a replacement would cost a half million in many cases and the current one works fine save for being on an outdated computer.

Comment Re:PLATO was my life (Score 2) 16

I'm another Plato-ite. I was on the CERL system. Champaign-Urbana where the University of Illinois was had a whole social underground clustered around Plato. I knew people who went on to work for Novanet and some of the other companies that wrote training software for both private companies and the government.

My one notable thing was that at one time I was one of the only people to have a Plato terminal in my bedroom linked to CERL over a cable television network. It was the late 80s and the Plato staff and some of the professors who used it heavily were trying to keep it from going obsolete. They wanted it to be available to a wider public via cable systems. I was a technician for a cable system for a large apartment complex, and being an old Playtoy veteran, was a natural for being a testbed and could do the maintenance on it as well.

I wasn't so much of a gamer, I mostly followed oodles of notesfiles. I've still got a cyber1 login as well.

Slashdot Top Deals

Are you having fun yet?

Working...