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Is There a Secret Backdoor in "the World's Most Popular Computer Operating System"?

5/23/2012

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Short answer: No.
Long answer: Coffee Crash describes a distributed computing system for massively parallel processing enabled by a secret module of program code built into the "Doorways" operating system at the behest of the National Security Agency.

The fictional name of the operating system is a clue that this is bogus. However, the Beowulf "architecture for clustering multiple off-the-shelf personal computers to achieve supercomputer performance" was indeed developed by Donald Becker and Thomas Sterling, as described in the book. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf_cluster.)

A number of real distributed computing systems take advantage of the processing power of huge numbers of personal computers. The best known of these is SETI@home (http://setiathome.berkeley.edu), which processes radio telescope data in the scientific search for extraterrestial intelligence. Owners of the personal computers voluntarily download screensaver-like software to enable their computers to take part in the processing during otherwise idle time on the computers.
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A Species Out Of Place In Coffee Crash

5/9/2012

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Out of the dozens of species of plants and animals mentioned in Coffee Crash, to the best of my knowledge, only one of them is out of place in the story. By that, I mean that I used the species in a location where it doesn't belong. (I'm not counting species intentionally out of place, such as those captive in The Butterfly Palace in Yogyakarta or in the Bird Park in Foz do Iguaçu.)

The species out of place in the story is the Golden Poison Dart Frog (Phyllobates terribilis).

There are many different species of "poison dart frogs" (The generic name refers to usage of the frogs' poison by indigenous hunters on the tips of darts and arrows.) Some poison dart frogs are native to areas of Brazil, however, Phyllobates terribilis is not among them. Phyllobates terribilis is from the coast of Colombia, on the opposite side of the South American continent from the area where the frog appears in the story.

In any case, few if any poison dart frogs are in the specific region where the frog appears in the story, a remote area of São Paulo State in the southeastern part of the country. (Poisonous snakes and spiders might be encountered there.) Within Brazil, poison dart frogs are mostly in the Amazon jungle region and other northern areas.

Nevertheless, I just plain wanted to use a poison dart frog in Coffee Crash, and I chose to use Phyllobates terribilis because its poison, batrachotoxin, is much more potent than the pumiliotoxins of the poison dart frogs that might be found within Brazil.
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