Slashdot Mirror

From the short video on their site (youtube alternate), it appears that this technology relies on a DNA template across thousands or millions of wells on a chip that emits hydrogen ions every time a base is incorporated into a DNA strand by a polymerase. I'm not a biologist but it looks like a pretty neat idea and I certainly hope it works as well as they say it does. I guess even if your sensor isn't that great at classifying between A, G, C or T then you can just build more wells on the chip and look at the statistics. I'm not sure how they ensure that one process is going on in each cell but I'm hoping this yields some cheap and fast accuracy. This would be a huge boon for research -- hell you could start up some hobby work very quickly and (relatively) cheaply since it's such a straight forward process.

Our company uses Jive's "Social Business Software" - it has pretty nice capabilities, I think you can share with outside folks, and it's good cross platforms. Worth a look: http://www.jivesoftware.com/

http://www.jivesoftware.com/

For me, KB is not really a pure category. More of a hybrid that fits somewhere
between/within a ContentMgmtSys and a DocMgmtSys

You mention mediawiki, which I feel is quite impressive, as a collaborative CMS.
If mediawiki is overly-complex then maybe a different one would work better:
http://twiki.org/
http://www.splitbrain.org/projects/dokuwiki
http://moinmo.in/
http://www.pmwiki.org/

OTOH, if yo mean a KB that is concerned about DocMgmt, then you probably know that
many Document Managements Systems, though ofter synonomous with a "Knowledge Base Systems" (KBS), but probably contain better features related to lifecycle management for documents,
  publication workflow and access rights management.
http://www.alfresco.com/
http://www.knowledgetree.com/
http://www.epiware.com/
http://www.jaspersoft.com/
http://www.jivesoftware.com/clearspace/
is not free for use, but I've deployed it and can say 1st hand its worth mentioning;
you can download a free 30-day trial for evaluation.

You should check out Clearspace (http://www.jivesoftware.com/products/clearspace). We looked into the product when searching for collaboration software. Ultimately we didn't pick it since it didn't fit our needs quite right, however it sounds perfect for you. Builtin forums, user profiles, wikis, and a host of other things.

I bet you that with in two weeks after you install phpbb with captcha and email account verification you'll have spam bots/spamers registering and spaming your forums

It may also be worth looking at ejabberd (which is what jabber.org now uses).

You should take a look at Wildfire. It has a GPL'd version and commercial version (extra features and support). At work I use the GPL'd Wildfire and it is excellent. It's also very easy to install, basically all you have to do is install the RPM and open a web brower to configure it.

My understanding is that if you were to write an external component that communicated with the server over tcp/ip then it doesn't matter what license that component uses, even if the server itself is gpl. But if you want to write a module that integrates with the server internally then you do need to worry about licenses...

Jive software are the same people who put out the smack xmpp java library which is imho very well written, so I suspect that the server is also quite good.

It's good to have another opensource jabber server as I think jabberd2 has been a bit of a disappointment. I doubt it will be as good as ejabberd though.

The best I've seen is jive software's Jive Forums. It used to be open source, but I'm pretty sure that now it's developer's source or something similar. If you pay the license fee you get access to the code. The guys who run this seem really good, both in their responses and usually their response time. They seem to have all the features you need, but might be a little on the expensive side, depending on what you're doing. Just my 2 cents.

Do realize there is more than a single commerical vendor for Jabber? For instance Jive Messenger has an unlimited user license for $4500. Now granted you probably wouldn't want to handle 10,000+ users on a single Jive Messenger instance but there are less expensive options than Jabber Inc. However, with Jabber Inc's solution you can easily scale to hundreds of thousands of users, something that very few, if any, other IM products are capable of.

Yes there seems to be no such thing as an open source J2EE weblog. One reason might of course be that open source developers in general seem to have quite a bland attitude towards everything Java. The high profile open source Java stuff seems to be mostly infrastructure stuff, like the Apache Jakarta project and JBOSS. One thing which might be a good start for a Java weblog is Jive, probably the highest performing forum software around (and yes, written in Java). Unfortunately they went commercial a while ago, but you can still download the older Jive 1.2.4, which is under an Apache license. So with some amount of work, you might be able to mangle it to something resembling a weblog. And there seems to be some kind of integration with Struts too, which of course would be a very cool thing to have. I'd really like to do something like this, but considering that I don't personally really have a need for a weblog and that I unfortunately seem to be perpetually busy with all kinds of things I don't think I'd be able to donate enough time to a project like this...:( I wish you good luck if you decide to give it a try.

a variety of optimizations that continue to make it possible to serve a quantity of pages that no other open source package like this can even touch :) [emphasis added]

I am not an expert on improving the scalability of web applications (especially those written in Perl, as is Slashcode), but, from what I read, I understand that Java generally scales much better, especially when it has been tweaked for that purpose. Recently, an open source discussion board (written in Java) appeared that its creators say is one of the most scalable on the planet: Jive. Even in Jive's old, version 1.24 form, it was so scalable that Sun Microsystems decided to use it as its main web discussion software, replacing discussion software that they had written themselves (in Java). Sun employee Eric Larson wrote (in article's last paragraph) that

Jive has proven itself at Sun by supporting 94 forums with more than 358,000 messages, and about 2 million users. And the current infrastructure is not even close to capacity. As more developers try the software and contribute to the project, Jive's success will only continue.

Jive's developers swear that it can serve a million page views per day without a problem. On the other hand, Jive doesn't support the posting of news items in a manner similar to Slashcode. Maybe that's what Taco meant when he wrote "like this" (above). Of course, the open source developers at Meinds may decide to alter the Jive source to permit the posting of news items. Then Slashcode might have been bested in terms of features as well as scalability.

The Jive Forum BBS software was hit by the bug as well, for the same reason as everybody else: the sort order changes when the values are stored in a character field.
Here's a comment from one of the developers regarding the design decision:

Hey all,

Thought I would respond since I'm a Jive developer. There were quite a few reasons for the date to be stored as it is:

1) Java uses the millesecond values since 1970 as its native date format. However, unlike Unix, this value is stored as a 64 bit long instead of a 32 bit integer. Effectively, this means there will never be date overflow. In any case, using the millesecond value is very easy and fast in Java.

2) Database support for dates is horrible. Most db's have a DATETIME or TIMESTAMP column type. However, all databases seem to implement them differently. Further, support for 64 bit numbers is also poorly supported across many databases. Therefore, we were forced to go with our own encoding (millesecond values), and to use character columns instead of numeric ones. This lets Jive work with over 10 different databases instead of 1 or 2.

3) Yep, we never thought about the date rollover bug until about a month and a half ago. Adding a few padding 0's was a simple fix and was released on Aug 8th as Jive 2.0.

-Matt