Category: Uncategorized

COMPUTER MONOCULTURE. "Today, our computing infrastructure is more vulnerable than ever before due to a convergence of four key factors. First, the world population of computers is more homogeneous than ever before, creating a computing “monoculture;” if one machine is susceptible to a bug, the rest are too. Second, our computing systems are more connected than ever before, enabling a fast spreading virus to rapidly infect millions of machines. Essentially, each of our desktops have a genetically similar software and hardware makeup." https://lnkd.in/eV_mmFn View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this second of three weekends dedicated to plant clocks. The last weekend shows how the clocks are used to control flowering. The sheer diversity of plant solutions, the modulations on a theme, and the use of quite different molecular strategies to solve clock issues is an Exemplar of the sophistication of these strange creatures called plants, that we still barely understand. View in LinkedIn

DECEPTIVE CHAOS. "Viruses, like graffiti, are just as much signal as noise – that they are in fact an irreducible confusion of the two." https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn

OSCILLATOR ROLE. "In most organisms, effects of light on the clock are mediated by light-induced changes in the level of one of the oscillator components. Plants are unusual in this respect because light affects the oscillator at several levels." https://lnkd.in/d_f7kfY View in LinkedIn

ANTI-VIRAL R&D. "Endlessly revising and debating the burgeoning taxonomy of virus species, nervously policing the boundary between the great unwashed and those trustworthy enough to handle "live" specimens, the world of antivirus research offered its initiates a thrill somewhere between the delightful romance of butterfly collecting and the grim camaraderie of working for the National Security Agency." https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn

CONSTANT VIRAL ATTACK. "At Arthur J. Gallagher we block over 800,000 email viruses, scams, malware and malicious web sites that pass through our IT systems each month. However these attacks are adapting faster than the systems being developed to prevent them and with over 20,000 employees, we naturally go to great lengths to protect our hardware, software and data." https://lnkd.in/edbTuJc View in LinkedIn

ONCE AN URBAN MYTH. "In the late 1980s and early ‘90s, computer viruses were considered an urban myth. A small number of computer viruses had been written and infection was fairly uncommon. Today, the situation is much different: over 56,000 distinct virus, worm and Trojan horse strains are known!" https://lnkd.in/eV_mmFn View in LinkedIn

BUGS, MUTATIONS, ERRORS. "All software contains bugs, that is a given. There is an established body of evidence out there to support the notion that producing error-free software is an impossibility." https://lnkd.in/e6GQx2z View in LinkedIn

COMPUTER VIRUSES, or bugs, represent a very interesting topic. In genetics, errors or mutations, are the sources of genetic innovation, the drivers of evolution, and through selective pressures acting on the diverse bell-curve of possibilities, drives adaptation to new niches and fitter organisms. How do code errors function in the computing ecosystem? View in LinkedIn

INSPIRATION FOR VENUS. "Dewdney proposed a game called "Core Wars", in which hackers create computer programs that battle for control of a computer's "core" memory. Since computer programs are just patterns of information, a successful program in core wars is one that replicates its pattern within the memory, so that eventually most of the memory contains its pattern rather than that of the competing program." https://lnkd.in/esA_k7j View in LinkedIn