Slashdot Mirror

Actually wget, grep, and sed are all available for widonws as one extra package.

if you tok those files along with your batch file you could put them in the same directory and even zip them together and clal that the install program. You would after all need to keep your script to re-install on an upgrade.

I admit that you would need to download the GNU utilities for windows, but that is one package. And I am not talking about Cygwin (which is great, but not what you need).here is a link to the page, there is a zip file with about 20 or so GNU utils, including wget, sed, grep.

Batch may not be as powerful as Bash, but it can easily accept a few parameters and do simple branching, which should be plenty good for what you need.

I could be wrong though, maybe you need to do more with the output of grep then batch allows?
Or maybe you are not in charge of how this part gets implemented, so the people do not know how to use these tools?
Or maybe you were too anti MS to even check.

There is definatly a nice set of tools to do what you want without installing "a bunch of extra packages" though.

DNA and RNA don't replicate themselves, they need the help of enzymes called polymerases. These biological machines unwind the template DNA or RNA strand and create a complementary copy (A pairs with T, G with C). Along with the template reading and synthesis domains, there is also a proofreading domain, checking to ensure that the right match has been made. However, the more stringent the proofreading, the slower the synthesis. Many viruses (which can have DNA or RNA as their base genetic material) want to replicate quickly, so their polymerase has diminished proofreading capability. HIV is an example of this, and consequently mutates quite frequently as a result of mismatches, deletions, insertions, etc. On the other hand, there are polymerases that are very very stringent with proofreading, and therefore have a very low mismatch (mutation) rate. This is independent of the nucleic acid (DNA or RNA) used as the template. The impression that RNA has a higher mismatch rate possibly comes from the fact that RNAs such as messenger RNA is transient in the cell (half-life of seconds to minutes) while DNA is around much longer (days to years).

My thought is this: as soon as the process becomes complex, errors introduced into each cell could produce vastly different results. And the debug process would be tortuous. There'd be no guarantee that a single mutation couldn't bring down the whole system.

The nice thing about working with bacterial systems is that the numbers of individual bacteria is quite high. A milliliter of liquid culture could have 10^7 or more organisms in it. A single mutation in one organism would be drowned out by the rest of the crowd, especially if it led to a lethal condition and was deleted by selective pressure. On the other hand, this also allows for beneficial mutations which increase survival rates to eventually take over (or at least coexist with) the original version.

N-ploid means N sets of chromosomes. Humans are diploid, having two sets. The general term is polyploid for three or more sets of chromosomes. See link for more info (in English).

I eagerly searched for open-source/free software alternatives that achieve the same integrated functionality, and came up lacking.

What, precisely, is it that you want "integrated"?

Administrators using Cygwin...

CygWin is awfully slow. When I'm on Windows, I stick with the native, though less capable (i.e. no usable alternative shell) UnxUtils and CygWin.

God, Windows has an *awful* virtual terminal, though. I keep wishing that I could use PuTTY's interface to talk to the local machine directly.

I use native win32 ports of gnu tools daily. Why? Because they are small and just work. The application is king. I don't really care where I run it. quixotal

To all of the morons complaining about BSD:
Go back to your Windows NT machine; I know you are having a hard time trying to figure out how to use the command line, but I have faith that you can figure it out.
type "strings C:\winnt\system32\ftp.exe |grep -i regents"
you will get the following output:
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
BSD code is in 98% of all operating systems. Don't have grep or strings? Follow this link UNIX Utils

You don't need to compile it, you can get Unix Utils for Win32 at http://www.weihenstephan.de/~syring/win32/UnxUtils .html. wget must be one of the most useful Gnu utilities there is out there!

http://www.weihenstephan.de/~syring/win32/UnxUtils .html

can't live without them now! HINT: be sure to put their working subdirectory BEFORE \windows\command in the path statement, otherwise the win9x "find" command pretends to be helpful! ;-)