Don't get me wrong it's good research, but it's no different or no more advanced than work by another dozen research groups (I could probably name a few). The only difference is that others don't get their articles on/.
If you read the actual article, it's nothing special. They took what's known from extensive lab studies of this organism and made a computer model out of it. It's not really able to predict how the organism would behave under some unknown conditions, but it has some mechanism biult in that would, kind of, wink, wink, give it that capability. What is the most telling is that they hadn't been able to predict the behaviour of one of their cell lines (lin-15(lf) mutants), so it just shows how limited the model is.
The annoying thing is that the press article is barely readable from all the buzz words and other crap, sounding like it's some sort of breakthrough, when it's just run-of-the-mill stuff done in probably a dozen other places.
Microsoft does something right for a change and everyone is discussing conspiracy theories. Could it be that they see the writting on the wall, that ODF is the way of the future and are willing to accept that and move on, no hard feelings? After all, that's how they got where they are now, by taking someone elses ideas.
The trouble here is that this solution was forced on the recording industry by government, they are fighting it tooth and nail. The provisions of the law also make any ripping and filesharing (as long as there is no commercial activity involved) legal, which is a huge sticking point that CRIA (Canadian RIA) is trying to change now. So unless US government comes out and says this is the deal and you have to live with it, there is no way this happens.
I think that Microsoft has a different strategy here and are going to be looking to abandon the OS altogether. With the new virtualization technologies there is no reason for them to spend billions developing something that became a white elephant, backward compatibility can be achived by running virtual OS, something Apple has succesfully implemented in OS X. I think that their main focus will be in the Office market and trying to develop a web-based applications suite running on a BSD base OS. This will make it easier to implement a subscription based model of operation, something they have been moving towards for years now. It also makes it easier to manage DRM and security, because you effectively remove any user interference with the code running on their machine.
It's interesting that BBC is showing the actual clip in their news coverage, it just goes to show that they are not affraid of taking flak for this. They do kind of laugh it off, but they discuss how, with cheaper video equipment, the interviewee is able to turn the tables on the interviewer, something that was not possible in the past. We are able to see both sides of the story, for better of for worse.
Microsoft has also announced they will start producing a revolutionary new device, enabling for much more efficient transport of goods. They are calling it the Microsoft Wheel.
Hey, the global warming has already started and there is no way to stop it (short of wrapping the planet in reflective foil), so we might as well relax and enjoy. Yeah, life is going to suck for a large portion of Earth population, but it's not like it's going to get any worse than it already is (wars, famine etc.). All the gloom and doom is created by people looking to profit either politically or financially and it's based on studies that are questionable at best. The current atmospheric models that are used to predict this sort of stuff are very inadequate and they are not even able to predict what is going to happen in 6 months, let alone in 2050 (just look at the Arctic ice melting rates). So we might be in deep or we might be fine, noone really knows. So chill and pass the beer.
I think that you are blaming WTO for something that they are not responsible for. Most foreign companies will let China get away with anything on the Chinese market as long as they can have cheap labour for export goodies to the US and Europe, because that's where the real profits are. WTO can't do anything because GM's of this world know that's the price of doing bussines in China.
A part of the British government is interested in lip-reading, amongst about half a dozen other, equally disturbing technologies. They'll talk the talk, but when the time comes, the cost/reliability will prevent any practical use. Biometrics, anyone?
With so many American kids being overweight, we should institute an exchange program, American for Indian kids. American kids would slim down and get better education, benefiting from the free broadband and Indian kids would fatten up and get dumber. Too many overachievers over there anyways.
I guess bad communicator is the case, trying to dumb it down too much. I am not a molecular biologist, more of a chemistry hack who does similar stuff (protein analysis and identification) using mass spectrometry. I actually bothered to read the original article in Science, that being of some professional interest to me (it's been the topic of the day in my lab, actually) so all the numbers come from there.
This method is pretty much routine now, the only difference from the article is that the proteome (translation of the genome into amino acid sequence) of the organism is at least partially known. This is the biggest problem I have here, the authors here are running their T-Rex sample against the known databases which contains no T-Rex references and are the scores they are getting are not that high. So they can identify the sequences as probably being collagen because it's similar to collagen in a number of other species, but to discuss similarities with chicken or frog based on a few peptides is really too far (7 peptides on 3 proteins in the collagen family, where to get a full amino acid sequence even for one of those proteins you would need 10-20 peptides). The whole issue of calculating genetic drift using differences in partial amino acid sequences is a minefield, but it gets lots of publications. My position is that in the minefield one has to thread very carefully, so I see these results as extrapolating data too far.
No offence to anyone, but they are stretching the method a bit too far. Since I have a lot of experience with the method, I'll give you the redux. What you are supposed to do is extract the protein, analyze and sequence the portions of the sequence and then compare them to the genome (so DNA) of the organism you are studying. The search will identify the places on the genome where the analyzed sequences fit and allow you to fill the missing gaps. Once you have the full sequence (and only then) you run a comparison (or homology) search against the sequence of the same protein in another organism. So the problem here is that not only the genomes of the mastodont, ostrich and T-Rex are not known, but also the genomes of their closest relatives alive today, such as elephant or aligator, were not available. So the authors did their sequence analysis and in case of the mastodont and ostrich they got ~30% of the sequence, meaning that they detected and identified portions of the protein containing about 30% of its amino acids. For T-Rex they do not say how much sequence they recovered, but from the experimental data it looks poor, much less than what was obtained for the other two samples. This is where a major fudge comes in. In order to run comparisons you need more than 30%. So what you do is you take what you have and fill in the blanks from DNA of chicken, newt and frog, with modifications as you see fit. And suprise, suprise, the T-Rex has 58% of the sequence identical to chicken and about 50% to newt and frog. So the frog has much less in common with the T-Rex as it has with the Man (81% similarity). Not to diss the work completely, the experimental part, the fact that they were able to extract and sequence proteins from a 68 millions years old creature is amazing, but their analysis is bullshit.
A much better combarison would be the new Dune novel, Hunters of Dune, rather than the Dune prequels, since it's supposed to be based on the notes by Frank Herbert, while the prequels (Dune: Houses and Butlerian crap) were written completely from scratch and are often contradicting the original Frank Herbert books. I find that Chris Tolkien has really done as much as possible to preserve his fathers legacy, which cannot be said for Brian Herbert, who is trying to ruin his fathers franchise by putting out large numbers of half-baked books.
You should try MEPIS instead of Kubuntu, it's also based on Ubuntu and uses a lot of Ubuntu packages but it's much better (as far as KDE environment goes). It's now in the release candidate stage for 6.5, so the new version should be out any day. It also has Beryl, codecs and video drivers installed by out of the box, no need for Automatix and such.
To buck the perception that only people over 60 use Win98, I have to say that I have used it happily over the last well almost 10 years (if you include the Win95). I still use it as a second OS on a MEPIS 6 machine at home, because it runs any software that I need it to run, like CorelDraw and AutoCAD (and some really ancient pieces of Win 3.1 software), and does it much faster than my work XP machine. It's very frendly, unlike Win2000 or XP a lot of the tweaking options are on the surface instead of being burried deep inside 15 layers of menu options. Working with it is more like working with Linux than working with XP, users are not treated like sheep and I can actually get the OS to do what I want. Security is really good as well, though it's more like security through obscurity, a couple of Win98 machines that run some research instruments haven't had any problems (other than hardware failure) for almost 10 years now, while the 2000 and XP machines have been plagued with all kinds of spyware and virus problems. I don't really understand why would a Win98 user want to switch anyways, unless it's some sort of institutional mandate, the support for Win98 has been a joke for the past few years anyway. I think that most of the forum activity comes from people who are ignorant enough to be scared by the end of the support and are now looking for a cheap (free) solution that would work out of the box. If they actually wanted to spend some money on a new computer they would've done it long ago. They'll probably look around and finally decide that they'll take the chance on running Win98 for a few more years.
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Don't get me wrong it's good research, but it's no different or no more advanced than work by another dozen research groups (I could probably name a few). The only difference is that others don't get their articles on /.
If you read the actual article, it's nothing special. They took what's known from extensive lab studies of this organism and made a computer model out of it. It's not really able to predict how the organism would behave under some unknown conditions, but it has some mechanism biult in that would, kind of, wink, wink, give it that capability. What is the most telling is that they hadn't been able to predict the behaviour of one of their cell lines (lin-15(lf) mutants), so it just shows how limited the model is. The annoying thing is that the press article is barely readable from all the buzz words and other crap, sounding like it's some sort of breakthrough, when it's just run-of-the-mill stuff done in probably a dozen other places.
Microsoft does something right for a change and everyone is discussing conspiracy theories. Could it be that they see the writting on the wall, that ODF is the way of the future and are willing to accept that and move on, no hard feelings? After all, that's how they got where they are now, by taking someone elses ideas.
The trouble here is that this solution was forced on the recording industry by government, they are fighting it tooth and nail. The provisions of the law also make any ripping and filesharing (as long as there is no commercial activity involved) legal, which is a huge sticking point that CRIA (Canadian RIA) is trying to change now. So unless US government comes out and says this is the deal and you have to live with it, there is no way this happens.
I think that Microsoft has a different strategy here and are going to be looking to abandon the OS altogether. With the new virtualization technologies there is no reason for them to spend billions developing something that became a white elephant, backward compatibility can be achived by running virtual OS, something Apple has succesfully implemented in OS X.
I think that their main focus will be in the Office market and trying to develop a web-based applications suite running on a BSD base OS. This will make it easier to implement a subscription based model of operation, something they have been moving towards for years now. It also makes it easier to manage DRM and security, because you effectively remove any user interference with the code running on their machine.
... fixing their bugs instead of studying whether to fix them they would have a better product. It reminds me of a joke http://www.infojokes.com/index.php/archives/10184
It's interesting that BBC is showing the actual clip in their news coverage, it just goes to show that they are not affraid of taking flak for this. They do kind of laugh it off, but they discuss how, with cheaper video equipment, the interviewee is able to turn the tables on the interviewer, something that was not possible in the past. We are able to see both sides of the story, for better of for worse.
Microsoft has also announced they will start producing a revolutionary new device, enabling for much more efficient transport of goods. They are calling it the Microsoft Wheel.
Hey, the global warming has already started and there is no way to stop it (short of wrapping the planet in reflective foil), so we might as well relax and enjoy. Yeah, life is going to suck for a large portion of Earth population, but it's not like it's going to get any worse than it already is (wars, famine etc.). All the gloom and doom is created by people looking to profit either politically or financially and it's based on studies that are questionable at best. The current atmospheric models that are used to predict this sort of stuff are very inadequate and they are not even able to predict what is going to happen in 6 months, let alone in 2050 (just look at the Arctic ice melting rates). So we might be in deep or we might be fine, noone really knows. So chill and pass the beer.
I guess a rant about the quality of engineers today is in order. Scotty could still teach them quite a bit about those impulse engines: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relics_(TNG_Episode)
I think that you are blaming WTO for something that they are not responsible for. Most foreign companies will let China get away with anything on the Chinese market as long as they can have cheap labour for export goodies to the US and Europe, because that's where the real profits are. WTO can't do anything because GM's of this world know that's the price of doing bussines in China.
A part of the British government is interested in lip-reading, amongst about half a dozen other, equally disturbing technologies. They'll talk the talk, but when the time comes, the cost/reliability will prevent any practical use. Biometrics, anyone?
With so many American kids being overweight, we should institute an exchange program, American for Indian kids. American kids would slim down and get better education, benefiting from the free broadband and Indian kids would fatten up and get dumber. Too many overachievers over there anyways.
The Canadian government has already appologized for Celine Dion, just let it go.
I guess bad communicator is the case, trying to dumb it down too much. I am not a molecular biologist, more of a chemistry hack who does similar stuff (protein analysis and identification) using mass spectrometry. I actually bothered to read the original article in Science, that being of some professional interest to me (it's been the topic of the day in my lab, actually) so all the numbers come from there.
This method is pretty much routine now, the only difference from the article is that the proteome (translation of the genome into amino acid sequence) of the organism is at least partially known. This is the biggest problem I have here, the authors here are running their T-Rex sample against the known databases which contains no T-Rex references and are the scores they are getting are not that high. So they can identify the sequences as probably being collagen because it's similar to collagen in a number of other species, but to discuss similarities with chicken or frog based on a few peptides is really too far (7 peptides on 3 proteins in the collagen family, where to get a full amino acid sequence even for one of those proteins you would need 10-20 peptides). The whole issue of calculating genetic drift using differences in partial amino acid sequences is a minefield, but it gets lots of publications. My position is that in the minefield one has to thread very carefully, so I see these results as extrapolating data too far.
No offence to anyone, but they are stretching the method a bit too far. Since I have a lot of experience with the method, I'll give you the redux. What you are supposed to do is extract the protein, analyze and sequence the portions of the sequence and then compare them to the genome (so DNA) of the organism you are studying. The search will identify the places on the genome where the analyzed sequences fit and allow you to fill the missing gaps. Once you have the full sequence (and only then) you run a comparison (or homology) search against the sequence of the same protein in another organism. So the problem here is that not only the genomes of the mastodont, ostrich and T-Rex are not known, but also the genomes of their closest relatives alive today, such as elephant or aligator, were not available.
So the authors did their sequence analysis and in case of the mastodont and ostrich they got ~30% of the sequence, meaning that they detected and identified portions of the protein containing about 30% of its amino acids. For T-Rex they do not say how much sequence they recovered, but from the experimental data it looks poor, much less than what was obtained for the other two samples. This is where a major fudge comes in. In order to run comparisons you need more than 30%. So what you do is you take what you have and fill in the blanks from DNA of chicken, newt and frog, with modifications as you see fit. And suprise, suprise, the T-Rex has 58% of the sequence identical to chicken and about 50% to newt and frog. So the frog has much less in common with the T-Rex as it has with the Man (81% similarity).
Not to diss the work completely, the experimental part, the fact that they were able to extract and sequence proteins from a 68 millions years old creature is amazing, but their analysis is bullshit.
A much better combarison would be the new Dune novel, Hunters of Dune, rather than the Dune prequels, since it's supposed to be based on the notes by Frank Herbert, while the prequels (Dune: Houses and Butlerian crap) were written completely from scratch and are often contradicting the original Frank Herbert books. I find that Chris Tolkien has really done as much as possible to preserve his fathers legacy, which cannot be said for Brian Herbert, who is trying to ruin his fathers franchise by putting out large numbers of half-baked books.
You should try MEPIS instead of Kubuntu, it's also based on Ubuntu and uses a lot of Ubuntu packages but it's much better (as far as KDE environment goes). It's now in the release candidate stage for 6.5, so the new version should be out any day. It also has Beryl, codecs and video drivers installed by out of the box, no need for Automatix and such.
To buck the perception that only people over 60 use Win98, I have to say that I have used it happily over the last well almost 10 years (if you include the Win95). I still use it as a second OS on a MEPIS 6 machine at home, because it runs any software that I need it to run, like CorelDraw and AutoCAD (and some really ancient pieces of Win 3.1 software), and does it much faster than my work XP machine. It's very frendly, unlike Win2000 or XP a lot of the tweaking options are on the surface instead of being burried deep inside 15 layers of menu options. Working with it is more like working with Linux than working with XP, users are not treated like sheep and I can actually get the OS to do what I want. Security is really good as well, though it's more like security through obscurity, a couple of Win98 machines that run some research instruments haven't had any problems (other than hardware failure) for almost 10 years now, while the 2000 and XP machines have been plagued with all kinds of spyware and virus problems. I don't really understand why would a Win98 user want to switch anyways, unless it's some sort of institutional mandate, the support for Win98 has been a joke for the past few years anyway. I think that most of the forum activity comes from people who are ignorant enough to be scared by the end of the support and are now looking for a cheap (free) solution that would work out of the box. If they actually wanted to spend some money on a new computer they would've done it long ago. They'll probably look around and finally decide that they'll take the chance on running Win98 for a few more years.