iang

I like the idea but most of the servers we manage have out going firewalls to block them from talking to the internet. We produce installed package lists during deployment (as much as possible we run immutable pre-built images and replace the image rather than upgrade in place) which could be sent to a service like this but wouldn't want to start punching holes and adding routes for it. To work as is we'd need to add duplicate canary servers in an isolate environment to talk to the service.

Standard photo size (6 inches by 4 inches) - or at least some form of note card/postcard/paper size.

Dang, wished known about that a week ago when I was kludging it for a couple of utilities (thinking "someone must have a library for this but I can't find it!"). Thank you.

Actually we don't have the full DNA sequence for any human. For example, if you look at the data from say the Genome Reference Consortium the first 10,000 bases on Chromosome are designated as N - unknown.

True, but there's also the fact we don't know the whole human genome - only about 98% of it.

- Could you make a baby?

No, there's more to us than just DNA. For example methylation, the addition of methyl chemical groups to some bases, which isn't tracked in "normal" DNA sequencing controls which genes get expressed by which cells. Plus there's a reasonable chance of errors in the sequencing due to the need to copy the DNA repeatedly to identify.

- Data size

Most bioinformatics data formats are plain ASCII. So even the reference data would be 3Gb per person. But 1,000 genomes contains sequencing reads where each DNA bases is sample multiple times (20-40 is typical "read depth") so that errors in identifying bases can be minimised. Each base of each of these samples has a quality score associate (which is about a 6 bit value). Plus identifiers for all billion odd reads per person.

It's a long time since I worked on mobile phones but in GSM the phone has to keep an internal of the tower it's connected to and the nearest neighbours in order to manage handover smoothly (ie. With dropping calls). I suspect 3G is similar.

In GSM the phone also had to know the distances to each tower +/-500m in order to adjust the timings for communication with the tower.

(It's 8 years since I did is stuff so memory might be off on the numbers a bit :-)

Yep, it's called cell id location. I worked in mobile phone location about 8 years ago and you could find a rough position (about 200m radius IIRC) and we used it as a first pass. That was on GSM networks, 3G cells are smaller.

Sophie's World - Jostein Gaarder

Lives - Hendrik van Loon