Ugh, I didn't mean to type 'kernelspace' in that last post. Kernelspace is the last place it should be implemented. The functionality should definitely be implemented in userspace. What I meant was that the abstraction should be exposed at the same level current filesystem abstractions are exposed.
I agree with you. I'd really like for this functionality to be available in kernelspace. That potential already exists with userspace-filesystem kernel modules like FUSE, or with ReiserFS's plugin system. And if and when those semantics are standardized and established at the operating system level as opposed to the desktop environment level, everybody else will gain that functionality. Until then, KDE apps have nice behavioural properties NOW. The fact that non-KDE apps cannot do certain things that KDE apps can do because they do not implement certain abstractions does not diminish this useful functionality present in the KDE application suite in ANY WAY.
So don't bitch at the KDE developers about it not having support at the OS level. That is hardly their fault.
-EB
More KDE love
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Why KDE Rules
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· Score: 1, Interesting
I'm a longtime KDE user. Some aspects of the system which I really like:
the ssh ioslave (fish://).. any KDE app I'm using can read and write to arbitrary SSH shells I have access to. Works anywhere. So I can use it in web forms to upload files to websites from remote ssh sites, or within kmail to attach files on remote machines, or with ksnapshot to save snapshots directly to my webhost, or with konqueror to browse filesystem HTML on remote machines.
I also use dcop functionality quite a bit. I have a fancy keyboard with special buttons. So I have all the music buttons bound to different actions using dcop (I use the 'hotkeys' app to do this). volume up, volume down, next, previous, play/pause, stop, mute, show-current-song, show/hide kmail, lock session, new konsole, new browser window pointing to homepage, new konqueror window pointing to home directory.. all are bound to convenient buttons using the command line DCOP client, and it was a synch to set up, since it allows you to investigate the interfaces at runtime, interactively.
Amarok is lovely. One little behavioural property I really like is how it allows me to quickly pick one-off songs to listen to. Changing the text in the search box updates your playlist dynamically. This means if I just type the title of a song, the playlist gets filtered down to just that song. Then, if I hit enter, amarok starts playing that song, and clears the search bar, which automatically resets the full playlist since there is no search query anymore. The method isn't foolproof, particularly for songs with common names, but it works 90% of the time for me, and the other 10% of the time I get a shortlist that will contain the song anyway, so it's still better than browsing manually.
KDE is just plain slick. Kudos to the developers. You guys are truly appreciated.
I still remember when a friend bought home a case of Bud one day. Oh yes, I remember waking up the next day, feeling strangely bewildered and disoriented when I realized that despite the several cans of shitty beer I'd consumed the night before, I had not received even a single blowjob from hot, giggling college girls.
A rude awakening, that was.. (well, waking up to a vomit-stained bed smelling vaguely reminiscent of that shitty generic beer taste was probably the most rude part).
Well, picked it up for $330 canadian or so. I'm thinking of perhaps $170 canadian as selling price. Not sure though. I have to investigate what the going rate is for a used iPod mini.
I also don't have the original headphones anymore (I think I used them too much when exercising, sweat got inside and broke them), and there are a few scratches on it.
Also, I have to see if I'll be able to cover the difference for the nano.
I'm one of those people. I knew very well what the costs were. I'm well aware of how much space 4GB is compared to 15 or 20GB.
Secondly, I am by no means an apple whore. The iPod mini is the only apple product I have ever bought in my entire life.
I don't give a shit, I like the mini better. It's smaller, it's cuter. I don't care if it was the same price as big ipod, I would have bought the mini. Hell, I'd probably have paid up to $50 more for the mini than for the larger ipod.
Aesthetics matter. The marginal value of an extra 10 gigs of space is not worth the marginal cost of the larger size and non-rounded edges for me (don't care about the colors really, I got a silver iPod mini).
Anyway. Now I'm wondering how much I can sell this thing for and use the cash to a nano with.
-Laxitive
Re:High Resolution Computer Graphics and Broadband
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Pornified
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· Score: 1
Oh my god. Another Space Moose reader. Can we be bestest friends?
Most people don't need a PDA. There have been extremely few times in life where I've been presented with a situation where a PDA would have solved a problem.
What kind of grammars are you looking to parse? Are you sure a DFA wouldn't do just as well? They're a lot cheaper you know, not to mention a lot easier to manage. Sure, your language set is limited, but then, do you REALLY need to understand all context free languages?
Well, I actually implemented a custom webapp to do this for my work. That project is a bit more heavyweight - proper DBMS backend, robust web frontend, flexible access control over data - mostly stuff that big institutions care about. Before we started that project we went around looking to see if there was work that was already done that we could modify to make work for us.
We looked at various applications (magpie, emboss, gboss, others) and database schemas (BioSQL, others from application papers). We didn't really find anything that fit our needs.
What I'm working on now (in my spare time) is a scaled down, standalone version of that, without a DBMS backend, without a web frontend, and without a bunch of the management features (users/groups/permissions/etc.). I assumed that since we didn't find anything before when we were starting the webapp, that there wasn't anything much out there - otherwise we would have run across it.
On the other hand, it's entirely possible that our search was not thorough. If you know of apps that implements something similar to what I was talking about, please let me know - I'm curious what's out there. Links or names of papers would be greatly appreciated.
And you're very correct, I don't want to repeat work if it's already been done.
I'm working on something to do basic sequence analysis in my spare time right now.
I'm not a bio researcher, but I am a programmer and I work in the field. My father is a biology researcher and we've been talking about putting together a GUI app that interfaces with various tools to provide an easy interface to common tasks that bio researchers have: basecalling, vectormasking, clustering, sequence alignment, along with a nice GUI that lets you play with the results (search the results, order them, associate them with different databaes, relate them to gene ontologies - essentially a powerful set of data visualization tools).
It's all focused around EST management. Our goal is to get an app that a non-power-user can get up and running, out-of-the-box, for managing small sets of libraries.
It's pretty obvious that there are a very solid set of OSS base tools that implement the algorithms for doing analysis on ESTs, but in terms of glue apps that bring all of the tools together into a cohesive whole, there's not much out there.
What IS out there is hopelessly complex to expect an average bio researcher with little time on his hands to get up to speed with ("Download and install mysql? wtf?").
The problem is that most of these tools are geared towards large institutions with dedicated bioinformatics departments. They have the resources to hire a couple sysadmins and programmers and set up a high-throughput management system. Most small-timers don't really have the resources to get these apps working. I want to write something targeted specifically to smaller labs.
I just started writing it last weekend.. so it's not like there's much there yet - OTOH I have programmed a high-throughput EST management system for my work, so I have a good idea of most of the design issues.
An OSS app in this area would rock. It's a great opportunity to add to the wealth of OSS tools in the field, and I think it would solve a real need.
If you want to talk about it, reply to this post and also send me a message kav062 at yahoo dot com.
Because at the time we gave him the weapons, he was an ally helping us fight a militant enemy which showed aggression to the United States. Your argument is pointless - if you feed and clothe a child, who grows up to be a murderer, are you responsible for their actions? If you attempt to do something to correct their path or deal with them, are you being hypocritical?
Your analogy fails. Here's a better one: The Americans fed and clothed a murderer so that he could help them kill somebody they didn't like. After that, they stayed friends for a while, and the murderer continued murdering a bunch of people, but America didn't care because it didn't affect them. Then the murderer got sloppy and did something to upset his benefactor, and had to be put down.
Saddam didn't become a murderous thug after the Americans helped him. He was already a murderous thug. That's why they wanted him.
I love when people say this. I suppose you do not have electricity in your house? You don't drive a car, or take mass transit? Oil consumption is the evil of the rest of the world, right?
Oil consumption is not evil. Killing and subjugating people so that you can get it is.
It's analogous to many situations in life. For example: sex is not evil, but raping somebody so you can get it is.
Anyone can offer rationale for their position. Child molesters claim that they really love the children they violate. It is up to intelligent people to determine if the rationale behind the action is reasonable or unreasonable. There is a lot of reason to think that the US action in Iraq is reasonable, but zero to think that flying planes into civilian-occupied buildings, blowing up schoolchildren, and shooting brides on their way to a wedding is 'justified'.
Exactly. There are some actions which are not justifiable, period. Blowing up innocent civilians would fall into that category. Dropping nukes on civilians would also fall into that category. Giving money, weapons, and intelligence support to mass murderers would also fall into that category.
I doubt you actually believe any of those actions are justified, you're just so busy frothing at the mouth about the US that you haven't really thought it through. The privilege of the inactive.
Better inactive than to be active in causing suffering in others.
We don't need it nearly as badly as Europe does, and we have plenty of it from other, closer sources. If we did need it that badly, then why not seize the oilfields? Why would the US/UK/etc. have allowed corrupt, autocratic regimes to nationalize oil production in the first place?
Because the corrupt, autocratic regimes were friendly to the US, of course. Saudi Arabia still prices oil on the US Dollar - they're still being good little children.
By your tone, I can only assume that you come from a country with either a completely clean history of foreign relations or that is so poor that it lacks to opportunity to meddle in other nations' affairs. Of course, it's also possible that you have no idea what you're talking about.
It's actually the latter. India has it's fair share of idiocies and self-interested boondoggles, but it's not really powerful enough to do much aside from getting together with Pakistan to fuck up Kashmir and some minor turf wars with China.
America will be disliked as long as we continue to be the sole superpower in the world.
Not quite. You'll be disliked as long as you're the sole superpower in the world and you abuse your status.
It's the people with the most power who have the most opportunity to cause the most suffering. It's nothing personal, if you get knocked off the hill and somebody else gets on top and behaves as bad as you, all us terrorist-supporting saddam-loving commies will have somebody new to bitch about.
Let's make this clear: any dealings the US had with Saddam were wrong. Period. But, that doesn't mean that freeing the Iraqis from him is now wrong, also.
Let's see, the US has freed the Iraqis from Saddam and delivered them into the hands of terrorists. Here's the difference between Saddam and the terrorists: Saddam had something to lose, and thus he was inherently easier to control than the terrorists, who have nothing to lose.
Now, instead of one madman controlling Iraq - one that could be placated with power - you have a thousand madmen running freely and killing indiscriminately. Now, instead of Iraqis being able to stay alive by keeping their mouth shut, they get to roll the dice on wether they will live or die every single time they walk outside.
Ask a man if he wants freedom and he'll say yes. Ask a man if he wants to choose freedom at the cost of having his country destroyed, losing his job, losing his livelyhood, and risking himself and his family getting blown up by terrorists or shot up by soldiers, and he'll tell you to go fuck yourself.
Here's the crux of the matter: America had no right to invade Iraq. It had no right to destroy the Iraqis' country and kill their citizens in the name of freedom. Nobody has the right to play god with the lives of others, like Saddam did.
I seriously want to know: why do people like you support Saddam Hussein?
When the US led coalition bitchslapped Saddam in the first Gulf War, tell me, whose tanks and planes were they blowing up? Where they US made tanks and planes? No..they were Russian and French. When Saddam was making chemical weapons, who was building the facilities? Was it the US? No it was the Germans. Who was giving him equipment to make fine aerosal spray, just perfect for delivering a weaponized nerve gas? Was it the US? No, it was the British.
What do you want me to acknowledge? That other western countries also helped Saddam?
Sure, ok. I'll acknowledge that. There are more than enough kings of the shithill when it comes to supporting Saddam.
That still doesn't change the fact that the US sold him chemical weapons, and warheads - all while it was patently obvious that he was using them to kill and suppress his own citizens.
So you wish to take comfort in the fact that rather than being the only country to support mass murderers, the US happens to be one of many countries to support mass murderers? That's the comfort a lyncher takes from a lynch mob.
I'm not apologizing for the French, I know what they did in Algeria and Vietnam. I'm not apologizing for the Brits, I know what they did in China and India.
That doesn't change the US's lack of credibility one ounce.
As far as Osama, go figure out the difference between the mujahadeen and a rich-kid like Osama before you spout off. They are not all one and the same. Go figure out what Osama's original beef with the US was. (Hint, *he* wanted to be the leader of the army protecting Saudi Arabia against Hussein, he was pissed when the Saudi govt asked the US to do it.)
Of course they're not all one and the same. Last I checked cloning technology was not that advanced yet.
And Osama has a lot of beefs against a lot of people. He'd probably have a beef against me because I like pork chops. He's fucked up. The point is, America gave him, and other people like him, weapons and money.
I know who the mujahadeens are and were. They were Islamic fundamentalists, and they got their start fighting with the US against the commies.
Your reasoning is also shoddy. Just because other US Administrations either tacitly or overtly supported Saddam or Osama means we should not try to rectify that..ever? We are obliged to never call them on the carpet for their misdeeds due to past alliances? What kind of reasoning is that? Nations change, governments change, goals change. The US and the UK sent Stalin literally billions of tons of support in WWII, because of that support the US and the UK should not have opposed the encroachment of the Soviet Union throughout Western Europe in the Cold War? Is that your reasoning?
But the problem is that they're not rectifying it. They're making it worse, and the rest of us will have to deal with the fucked up monsters they help create. Iraq is now a terrorist state. Instead of hidden training grounds, now there's an entire fucking country where terrorists can get real training fighting against the infidels.
They're helping the terrorists out again. This time not directly, but indirectly.
The US is taking a stand and cleaning up the Osamas and Husseins of the world, acknowledging the mistakes of the past, and you *oppose* this?
They're not cleaning up the Husseins of the world. They still support Egypt. They still support Pakistan. They still support Saudi Arabia. Their biggest trading partner is still China. The list of countries in which the US has assisted the overthrow of democraticaly elected governments and replaced them with dictators is long and sordid.
America has no problem with dictators or authoritarian states or terrorists - they just dislike the ones that don't suck up to them.
And right now they're helping Osama gain followers and support. In the wake of 9/11, Americans, shocked beyond belief that the freaks they helped create can come back
Turn on the TV...look at the situation they were in. The only ones prosperous were the ones in power. That $$ (even the oil for food $$) went straight to Hussein and was not spent on food or upkeep of utilities. And don't do like the rest of the left and leave out all of the facts except the ones that support your case. He ATTACKED A NEIGHBORING COUNTRY. He left the oilfields burning when he realized he couldn't keep it for himself. He murdered so many they may never find all the mass graves. He fired upon allied airplanes in the no-fly zone more times than most people know. The list goes on and on.
If America cared so much about Hussein killing Iraqis, then why did they give him weapons to do it with? The United States never, ever, cared about the livelyhood of Iraqis. That's why they supported Saddam until he got uppity, and then (with the help of the UN) imposed sanctions that strangled the nation.
Don't give me a song and dance about how you helped free the Iraqi people by deposing Hussein. You helped subjugate them in the first place by propping him up.
Why were you propping him up? Because just a little while back, the other murdering dictator you propped up in Iran got overthrown.
Who else were you funding around that time? Oh, right.. your good friend Osama Bin Laden the freedom fighter.
Your country has its dirty, grubby little fingers all over the mess in the middle east. Why is that? Because the middle east has the substance that you need like a crackhead needs crack. You'll do anything to get it. You'll support dictators, you'll support terrorists, and you'll be friends with the country that the terrorists who attacked you came from.
And now I'm sure you'll be prepared with justifications for why it was OK for the US to support Saddam, and why it was OK for the US to support Osama - but then, people who do horrible things always have justifications for the things they do. Osama has a justification for flying planes into buildings full of civilans, and you have yours for supporting mass murderers.
But aside from tube junkies in America, few people in the rest of the world buy your story. You had an opportunity to show you had changed. You had an opportunity to gain the support of the world after 9/11. You blew it.
No, they're not. Which fits in well with the 'Adult' in 'Adult swim'.
It has symbolic, religions, and sexual themes which are simply out of reach for most kids. Not that I wouldn't let kids watch the show, as I don't particularly find those concepts scary (I bought the 1st DVD for my little brother of 13 a few years back). But for many younger kids, they just wouldn't get large portions of the show.
Anyway, NGE suffers a bit of a hype problem, and a lackluster, somewhat bolted-on ending (unless you also watch End of Eva), but it's still one of the shows that defines anime.
A friend of mine while I was attending university was a developer for Linley's Dungeon Crawl (http://www.dungeoncrawl.org/), a roguelike.
He was ALWAYS talking about game balance. From what I recall, most of his time was spent either fixing bugs, rewriting chunks of code (because the codebase was Ugly(tm) C++), or fixing imbalances introduced when other developers added "cool new spells".
I'm an on-and-off, but avid player of dungeon crawl, mostly due to the influence of my friend. I must say that after a while, you really, REALLY start to appreciate the fact that every character class, every profession, has something to offer. It doesn't necessarily have to be that every class is as good as the other - it just needs to be unique, and not useless compared to the other classes.
But yeah, I think balance is a lost art. Aside from my friend's obsession with it, I have heard nary a mention of it elsewhere, except for maybe a few odd posts on slashdot when MMORPG articles are posted.
I understand the problem you're discussing, and what you suggest is one avenue to solve that problem. But I think that there is another, potentially simpler solution that should solve all the major problems with package systems: get rid of the idea of package conflicts.
Circular dependencies are not a problem - if you view the set of packages and their dependencies as a directed finite graph - it's easy to come up with an algorithm for reliably figuring out the closure of dependency relations for any given package or set of packages.
Introducing the idea of conflicts throws the whole system out of whack. I don't have a proof for it, but it seems very intuitive that trying to figure out a valid configuration of packages conforming to an arbitrary requirements is an NP-complete problem (I think it's reducible to 3SAT).
Getting rid of the idea of package conflicts necessitates a change in the way packages are organized on the filesystem. For one, conflicting file locations must be gotten rid of. I.e. each package affects only it's own discrete set of subtrees in the filesystem.
Secondly, for multiple packages which provide the same service, there must be a way of choosing, for any given user, which set of packages of the potentially multiple providers for a set of services to use. It should be possible to come up with a user 'profile' that describes what implementations that user desires for the services. This needs an extra level of indirection.
Anyway, I think the idea of getting rid of package conflicts is worthwhile, and would remove a whole set of difficult-to-resolve issues from the realm of consideration.
It's really very simple why sticking to the keyboard while editing is much better than half-mouse-half-keyboard editing.
With a mouse, you're trading off complexity and size for a much thinner signal pipe. Think of the kinds of signals a mouse sends to the computer: "move up a bit" "up a bit more" "left a little" "up a bit more" "right a little"... repeat a few hundred times... "click"
In terms of real bandwidth, mice use much more than keyboards since the rate of signals being generated is much higher. On the other hand, the amount of differentiation between these signals is low. At most 3 or 4 bits of information is transmitted per logical signal from the mouse (up, down, left, right, b1 down, b1 up, b2 down, b2 up, b3 down, b3 up, scroll down, scroll up).
Secondly, the primary method that humans use for encoding information into these signals is to chain a whole bunch of them together to identify a geometric point in a 2-dimensional plane (the screen). The point's location, however, is not specified in the most efficient representation (which would be to encode the point in terms of combinations of signals where each one augments the previous signals' bitcount with its own), but rather linearly, which is very inefficient with respect to bandwidth. If you want to move over X pixels in a direction, you're going to be sending on the order of X signals, whereas optimally, you should be sending on the order of log(X) signals.
Now, combine this with the fact that humans generally don't identify things by x/y coordinates, and we definitely don't communicate those identifications using linear signals. We much prefer to identify things by pulling logical identifiers from a huge space of well-known identifiers (names). We use context, construct logical categories and subcategories to deal with and communicate information.
Let's inspect how keyboards don't have any of these limitations.
First off, the number of bits per signal in a keyboard is about 7 or 8 (keys, along with chording with CTRL and ALT).
Secondly, we communicate information through keyboards not linearly, but combinatorially. We don't hit the 'a' key 50 times to get to the 50th word that starts with 'a'. Thus, the order of addressing some concept using a keyboard is much closer to O(log(N)) than it is to O(N).
Thirdly, the way in which we use keyboards to identify concepts map much better to the way our mind organizes itself: conceptual tags (in other words: words).
This is why mice suck at dealing with communication of abstract conceptual data, like prose, programming, filesystem traversal, etc.
On the other hand, when dealing with information that is inherently geometrical (images, plots, diagrams), suddenly a mouse becomes a much better tool than keyboards.
Anyway, this whole analysis should make one point very, very clear to the reader:
Dammit, hit submit before I finished saying what I wanted to say.
What the hell is "that stuff" supposed to be?
There are a lot of pretty good natured h-games. Of course, if you've only kept your eye out for the disturbing stuff, then I think that says more about you than it does about h-games.
Slashdot Mirror
Ugh, I didn't mean to type 'kernelspace' in that last post. Kernelspace is the last place it should be implemented. The functionality should definitely be implemented in userspace. What I meant was that the abstraction should be exposed at the same level current filesystem abstractions are exposed.
-Laxitive
I agree with you. I'd really like for this functionality to be available in kernelspace. That potential already exists with userspace-filesystem kernel modules like FUSE, or with ReiserFS's plugin system. And if and when those semantics are standardized and established at the operating system level as opposed to the desktop environment level, everybody else will gain that functionality. Until then, KDE apps have nice behavioural properties NOW. The fact that non-KDE apps cannot do certain things that KDE apps can do because they do not implement certain abstractions does not diminish this useful functionality present in the KDE application suite in ANY WAY.
So don't bitch at the KDE developers about it not having support at the OS level. That is hardly their fault.
-EB
I'm a longtime KDE user. Some aspects of the system which I really like:
the ssh ioslave (fish://).. any KDE app I'm using can read and write to arbitrary SSH shells I have access to. Works anywhere. So I can use it in web forms to upload files to websites from remote ssh sites, or within kmail to attach files on remote machines, or with ksnapshot to save snapshots directly to my webhost, or with konqueror to browse filesystem HTML on remote machines.
I also use dcop functionality quite a bit. I have a fancy keyboard with special buttons. So I have all the music buttons bound to different actions using dcop (I use the 'hotkeys' app to do this). volume up, volume down, next, previous, play/pause, stop, mute, show-current-song, show/hide kmail, lock session, new konsole, new browser window pointing to homepage, new konqueror window pointing to home directory.. all are bound to convenient buttons using the command line DCOP client, and it was a synch to set up, since it allows you to investigate the interfaces at runtime, interactively.
Amarok is lovely. One little behavioural property I really like is how it allows me to quickly pick one-off songs to listen to. Changing the text in the search box updates your playlist dynamically. This means if I just type the title of a song, the playlist gets filtered down to just that song. Then, if I hit enter, amarok starts playing that song, and clears the search bar, which automatically resets the full playlist since there is no search query anymore. The method isn't foolproof, particularly for songs with common names, but it works 90% of the time for me, and the other 10% of the time I get a shortlist that will contain the song anyway, so it's still better than browsing manually.
KDE is just plain slick. Kudos to the developers. You guys are truly appreciated.
-Laxitive
HAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA. That's your definition of left wing?
I got some advice for you:
Don't trust the little endians. They're all communists!
-Laxitive
Meh.. I've been a vim user (junkie) for the last 7 years or so.. and I've always used
-Laxiive
No shit.
I still remember when a friend bought home a case of Bud one day. Oh yes, I remember waking up the next day, feeling strangely bewildered and disoriented when I realized that despite the several cans of shitty beer I'd consumed the night before, I had not received even a single blowjob from hot, giggling college girls.
A rude awakening, that was.. (well, waking up to a vomit-stained bed smelling vaguely reminiscent of that shitty generic beer taste was probably the most rude part).
-Laxitive
Well, picked it up for $330 canadian or so. I'm thinking of perhaps $170 canadian as selling price. Not sure though. I have to investigate what the going rate is for a used iPod mini.
I also don't have the original headphones anymore (I think I used them too much when exercising, sweat got inside and broke them), and there are a few scratches on it.
Also, I have to see if I'll be able to cover the difference for the nano.
-Laxitive
I'm one of those people. I knew very well what the costs were. I'm well aware of how much space 4GB is compared to 15 or 20GB.
Secondly, I am by no means an apple whore. The iPod mini is the only apple product I have ever bought in my entire life.
I don't give a shit, I like the mini better. It's smaller, it's cuter. I don't care if it was the same price as big ipod, I would have bought the mini. Hell, I'd probably have paid up to $50 more for the mini than for the larger ipod.
Aesthetics matter. The marginal value of an extra 10 gigs of space is not worth the marginal cost of the larger size and non-rounded edges for me (don't care about the colors really, I got a silver iPod mini).
Anyway. Now I'm wondering how much I can sell this thing for and use the cash to a nano with.
-Laxitive
Oh my god. Another Space Moose reader. Can we be bestest friends?
-Laxitive
This is a question you should ask yourself.
Most people don't need a PDA. There have been extremely few times in life where I've been presented with a situation where a PDA would have solved a problem.
What kind of grammars are you looking to parse? Are you sure a DFA wouldn't do just as well? They're a lot cheaper you know, not to mention a lot easier to manage. Sure, your language set is limited, but then, do you REALLY need to understand all context free languages?
-Laxitive
Well, I actually implemented a custom webapp to do this for my work. That project is a bit more heavyweight - proper DBMS backend, robust web frontend, flexible access control over data - mostly stuff that big institutions care about. Before we started that project we went around looking to see if there was work that was already done that we could modify to make work for us.
We looked at various applications (magpie, emboss, gboss, others) and database schemas (BioSQL, others from application papers). We didn't really find anything that fit our needs.
What I'm working on now (in my spare time) is a scaled down, standalone version of that, without a DBMS backend, without a web frontend, and without a bunch of the management features (users/groups/permissions/etc.). I assumed that since we didn't find anything before when we were starting the webapp, that there wasn't anything much out there - otherwise we would have run across it.
On the other hand, it's entirely possible that our search was not thorough. If you know of apps that implements something similar to what I was talking about, please let me know - I'm curious what's out there. Links or names of papers would be greatly appreciated.
And you're very correct, I don't want to repeat work if it's already been done.
-Laxitive
I'm working on something to do basic sequence analysis in my spare time right now.
I'm not a bio researcher, but I am a programmer and I work in the field. My father is a biology researcher and we've been talking about putting together a GUI app that interfaces with various tools to provide an easy interface to common tasks that bio researchers have: basecalling, vectormasking, clustering, sequence alignment, along with a nice GUI that lets you play with the results (search the results, order them, associate them with different databaes, relate them to gene ontologies - essentially a powerful set of data visualization tools).
It's all focused around EST management. Our goal is to get an app that a non-power-user can get up and running, out-of-the-box, for managing small sets of libraries.
It's pretty obvious that there are a very solid set of OSS base tools that implement the algorithms for doing analysis on ESTs, but in terms of glue apps that bring all of the tools together into a cohesive whole, there's not much out there.
What IS out there is hopelessly complex to expect an average bio researcher with little time on his hands to get up to speed with ("Download and install mysql? wtf?").
The problem is that most of these tools are geared towards large institutions with dedicated bioinformatics departments. They have the resources to hire a couple sysadmins and programmers and set up a high-throughput management system. Most small-timers don't really have the resources to get these apps working. I want to write something targeted specifically to smaller labs.
I just started writing it last weekend.. so it's not like there's much there yet - OTOH I have programmed a high-throughput EST management system for my work, so I have a good idea of most of the design issues.
An OSS app in this area would rock. It's a great opportunity to add to the wealth of OSS tools in the field, and I think it would solve a real need.
If you want to talk about it, reply to this post and also send me a message kav062 at yahoo dot com.
-Laxitive
Because at the time we gave him the weapons, he was an ally helping us fight a militant enemy which showed aggression to the United States. Your argument is pointless - if you feed and clothe a child, who grows up to be a murderer, are you responsible for their actions? If you attempt to do something to correct their path or deal with them, are you being hypocritical?
Your analogy fails. Here's a better one:
The Americans fed and clothed a murderer so that he could help them kill somebody they didn't like. After that, they stayed friends for a while, and the murderer continued murdering a bunch of people, but America didn't care because it didn't affect them. Then the murderer got sloppy and did something to upset his benefactor, and had to be put down.
Saddam didn't become a murderous thug after the Americans helped him. He was already a murderous thug. That's why they wanted him.
I love when people say this. I suppose you do not have electricity in your house? You don't drive a car, or take mass transit? Oil consumption is the evil of the rest of the world, right?
Oil consumption is not evil. Killing and subjugating people so that you can get it is.
It's analogous to many situations in life. For example: sex is not evil, but raping somebody so you can get it is.
Anyone can offer rationale for their position. Child molesters claim that they really love the children they violate. It is up to intelligent people to determine if the rationale behind the action is reasonable or unreasonable. There is a lot of reason to think that the US action in Iraq is reasonable, but zero to think that flying planes into civilian-occupied buildings, blowing up schoolchildren, and shooting brides on their way to a wedding is 'justified'.
Exactly. There are some actions which are not justifiable, period. Blowing up innocent civilians would fall into that category. Dropping nukes on civilians would also fall into that category. Giving money, weapons, and intelligence support to mass murderers would also fall into that category.
I doubt you actually believe any of those actions are justified, you're just so busy frothing at the mouth about the US that you haven't really thought it through. The privilege of the inactive.
Better inactive than to be active in causing suffering in others.
-Laxitive
We don't need it nearly as badly as Europe does, and we have plenty of it from other, closer sources. If we did need it that badly, then why not seize the oilfields? Why would the US/UK/etc. have allowed corrupt, autocratic regimes to nationalize oil production in the first place?
Because the corrupt, autocratic regimes were friendly to the US, of course. Saudi Arabia still prices oil on the US Dollar - they're still being good little children.
By your tone, I can only assume that you come from a country with either a completely clean history of foreign relations or that is so poor that it lacks to opportunity to meddle in other nations' affairs. Of course, it's also possible that you have no idea what you're talking about.
It's actually the latter. India has it's fair share of idiocies and self-interested boondoggles, but it's not really powerful enough to do much aside from getting together with Pakistan to fuck up Kashmir and some minor turf wars with China.
America will be disliked as long as we continue to be the sole superpower in the world.
Not quite. You'll be disliked as long as you're the sole superpower in the world and you abuse your status.
It's the people with the most power who have the most opportunity to cause the most suffering. It's nothing personal, if you get knocked off the hill and somebody else gets on top and behaves as bad as you, all us terrorist-supporting saddam-loving commies will have somebody new to bitch about.
-Laxitive
Let's make this clear: any dealings the US had with Saddam were wrong. Period. But, that doesn't mean that freeing the Iraqis from him is now wrong, also.
Let's see, the US has freed the Iraqis from Saddam and delivered them into the hands of terrorists. Here's the difference between Saddam and the terrorists: Saddam had something to lose, and thus he was inherently easier to control than the terrorists, who have nothing to lose.
Now, instead of one madman controlling Iraq - one that could be placated with power - you have a thousand madmen running freely and killing indiscriminately. Now, instead of Iraqis being able to stay alive by keeping their mouth shut, they get to roll the dice on wether they will live or die every single time they walk outside.
Ask a man if he wants freedom and he'll say yes. Ask a man if he wants to choose freedom at the cost of having his country destroyed, losing his job, losing his livelyhood, and risking himself and his family getting blown up by terrorists or shot up by soldiers, and he'll tell you to go fuck yourself.
Here's the crux of the matter: America had no right to invade Iraq. It had no right to destroy the Iraqis' country and kill their citizens in the name of freedom. Nobody has the right to play god with the lives of others, like Saddam did.
I seriously want to know: why do people like you support Saddam Hussein?
For the same reason you support terrorists.
-Laxitive
When the US led coalition bitchslapped Saddam in the first Gulf War, tell me, whose tanks and planes were they blowing up? Where they US made tanks and planes? No..they were Russian and French. When Saddam was making chemical weapons, who was building the facilities? Was it the US? No it was the Germans. Who was giving him equipment to make fine aerosal spray, just perfect for delivering a weaponized nerve gas? Was it the US? No, it was the British.
What do you want me to acknowledge? That other western countries also helped Saddam?
Sure, ok. I'll acknowledge that. There are more than enough kings of the shithill when it comes to supporting Saddam.
That still doesn't change the fact that the US sold him chemical weapons, and warheads - all while it was patently obvious that he was using them to kill and suppress his own citizens.
So you wish to take comfort in the fact that rather than being the only country to support mass murderers, the US happens to be one of many countries to support mass murderers? That's the comfort a lyncher takes from a lynch mob.
I'm not apologizing for the French, I know what they did in Algeria and Vietnam. I'm not apologizing for the Brits, I know what they did in China and India.
That doesn't change the US's lack of credibility one ounce.
As far as Osama, go figure out the difference between the mujahadeen and a rich-kid like Osama before you spout off. They are not all one and the same. Go figure out what Osama's original beef with the US was. (Hint, *he* wanted to be the leader of the army protecting Saudi Arabia against Hussein, he was pissed when the Saudi govt asked the US to do it.)
Of course they're not all one and the same. Last I checked cloning technology was not that advanced yet.
And Osama has a lot of beefs against a lot of people. He'd probably have a beef against me because I like pork chops. He's fucked up. The point is, America gave him, and other people like him, weapons and money.
I know who the mujahadeens are and were. They were Islamic fundamentalists, and they got their start fighting with the US against the commies.
Your reasoning is also shoddy. Just because other US Administrations either tacitly or overtly supported Saddam or Osama means we should not try to rectify that..ever? We are obliged to never call them on the carpet for their misdeeds due to past alliances? What kind of reasoning is that? Nations change, governments change, goals change. The US and the UK sent Stalin literally billions of tons of support in WWII, because of that support the US and the UK should not have opposed the encroachment of the Soviet Union throughout Western Europe in the Cold War? Is that your reasoning?
But the problem is that they're not rectifying it. They're making it worse, and the rest of us will have to deal with the fucked up monsters they help create. Iraq is now a terrorist state. Instead of hidden training grounds, now there's an entire fucking country where terrorists can get real training fighting against the infidels.
They're helping the terrorists out again. This time not directly, but indirectly.
The US is taking a stand and cleaning up the Osamas and Husseins of the world, acknowledging the mistakes of the past, and you *oppose* this?
They're not cleaning up the Husseins of the world. They still support Egypt. They still support Pakistan. They still support Saudi Arabia. Their biggest trading partner is still China. The list of countries in which the US has assisted the overthrow of democraticaly elected governments and replaced them with dictators is long and sordid.
America has no problem with dictators or authoritarian states or terrorists - they just dislike the ones that don't suck up to them.
And right now they're helping Osama gain followers and support. In the wake of 9/11, Americans, shocked beyond belief that the freaks they helped create can come back
Turn on the TV...look at the situation they were in. The only ones prosperous were the ones in power. That $$ (even the oil for food $$) went straight to Hussein and was not spent on food or upkeep of utilities. And don't do like the rest of the left and leave out all of the facts except the ones that support your case. He ATTACKED A NEIGHBORING COUNTRY. He left the oilfields burning when he realized he couldn't keep it for himself. He murdered so many they may never find all the mass graves. He fired upon allied airplanes in the no-fly zone more times than most people know. The list goes on and on.
If America cared so much about Hussein killing Iraqis, then why did they give him weapons to do it with? The United States never, ever, cared about the livelyhood of Iraqis. That's why they supported Saddam until he got uppity, and then (with the help of the UN) imposed sanctions that strangled the nation.
Don't give me a song and dance about how you helped free the Iraqi people by deposing Hussein. You helped subjugate them in the first place by propping him up.
Why were you propping him up? Because just a little while back, the other murdering dictator you propped up in Iran got overthrown.
Who else were you funding around that time? Oh, right.. your good friend Osama Bin Laden the freedom fighter.
Your country has its dirty, grubby little fingers all over the mess in the middle east. Why is that? Because the middle east has the substance that you need like a crackhead needs crack. You'll do anything to get it. You'll support dictators, you'll support terrorists, and you'll be friends with the country that the terrorists who attacked you came from.
And now I'm sure you'll be prepared with justifications for why it was OK for the US to support Saddam, and why it was OK for the US to support Osama - but then, people who do horrible things always have justifications for the things they do. Osama has a justification for flying planes into buildings full of civilans, and you have yours for supporting mass murderers.
But aside from tube junkies in America, few people in the rest of the world buy your story. You had an opportunity to show you had changed. You had an opportunity to gain the support of the world after 9/11. You blew it.
Have fun fighting your old friends.
-Laxitive
SCSI thong?
I was thinking more along the lines of granny underwear. SCSI Ultra Wide.
-Laxitive
A modal dialog?
-Laxitive
No, they're not. Which fits in well with the 'Adult' in 'Adult swim'.
It has symbolic, religions, and sexual themes which are simply out of reach for most kids. Not that I wouldn't let kids watch the show, as I don't particularly find those concepts scary (I bought the 1st DVD for my little brother of 13 a few years back). But for many younger kids, they just wouldn't get large portions of the show.
Anyway, NGE suffers a bit of a hype problem, and a lackluster, somewhat bolted-on ending (unless you also watch End of Eva), but it's still one of the shows that defines anime.
-EB
A friend of mine while I was attending university was a developer for Linley's Dungeon Crawl (http://www.dungeoncrawl.org/), a roguelike.
He was ALWAYS talking about game balance. From what I recall, most of his time was spent either fixing bugs, rewriting chunks of code (because the codebase was Ugly(tm) C++), or fixing imbalances introduced when other developers added "cool new spells".
I'm an on-and-off, but avid player of dungeon crawl, mostly due to the influence of my friend. I must say that after a while, you really, REALLY start to appreciate the fact that every character class, every profession, has something to offer. It doesn't necessarily have to be that every class is as good as the other - it just needs to be unique, and not useless compared to the other classes.
But yeah, I think balance is a lost art. Aside from my friend's obsession with it, I have heard nary a mention of it elsewhere, except for maybe a few odd posts on slashdot when MMORPG articles are posted.
-Laxitive
I understand the problem you're discussing, and what you suggest is one avenue to solve that problem. But I think that there is another, potentially simpler solution that should solve all the major problems with package systems: get rid of the idea of package conflicts.
Circular dependencies are not a problem - if you view the set of packages and their dependencies as a directed finite graph - it's easy to come up with an algorithm for reliably figuring out the closure of dependency relations for any given package or set of packages.
Introducing the idea of conflicts throws the whole system out of whack. I don't have a proof for it, but it seems very intuitive that trying to figure out a valid configuration of packages conforming to an arbitrary requirements is an NP-complete problem (I think it's reducible to 3SAT).
Getting rid of the idea of package conflicts necessitates a change in the way packages are organized on the filesystem. For one, conflicting file locations must be gotten rid of. I.e. each package affects only it's own discrete set of subtrees in the filesystem.
Secondly, for multiple packages which provide the same service, there must be a way of choosing, for any given user, which set of packages of the potentially multiple providers for a set of services to use. It should be possible to come up with a user 'profile' that describes what implementations that user desires for the services. This needs an extra level of indirection.
Anyway, I think the idea of getting rid of package conflicts is worthwhile, and would remove a whole set of difficult-to-resolve issues from the realm of consideration.
-Laxitive
It's really very simple why sticking to the keyboard while editing is much better than half-mouse-half-keyboard editing.
... repeat a few hundred times ...
With a mouse, you're trading off complexity and size for a much thinner signal pipe. Think of the kinds of signals a mouse sends to the computer:
"move up a bit"
"up a bit more"
"left a little"
"up a bit more"
"right a little"
"click"
In terms of real bandwidth, mice use much more than keyboards since the rate of signals being generated is much higher. On the other hand, the amount of differentiation between these signals is low. At most 3 or 4 bits of information is transmitted per logical signal from the mouse (up, down, left, right, b1 down, b1 up, b2 down, b2 up, b3 down, b3 up, scroll down, scroll up).
Secondly, the primary method that humans use for encoding information into these signals is to chain a whole bunch of them together to identify a geometric point in a 2-dimensional plane (the screen). The point's location, however, is not specified in the most efficient representation (which would be to encode the point in terms of combinations of signals where each one augments the previous signals' bitcount with its own), but rather linearly, which is very inefficient with respect to bandwidth. If you want to move over X pixels in a direction, you're going to be sending on the order of X signals, whereas optimally, you should be sending on the order of log(X) signals.
Now, combine this with the fact that humans generally don't identify things by x/y coordinates, and we definitely don't communicate those identifications using linear signals. We much prefer to identify things by pulling logical identifiers from a huge space of well-known identifiers (names). We use context, construct logical categories and subcategories to deal with and communicate information.
Let's inspect how keyboards don't have any of these limitations.
First off, the number of bits per signal in a keyboard is about 7 or 8 (keys, along with chording with CTRL and ALT).
Secondly, we communicate information through keyboards not linearly, but combinatorially. We don't hit the 'a' key 50 times to get to the 50th word that starts with 'a'. Thus, the order of addressing some concept using a keyboard is much closer to O(log(N)) than it is to O(N).
Thirdly, the way in which we use keyboards to identify concepts map much better to the way our mind organizes itself: conceptual tags (in other words: words).
This is why mice suck at dealing with communication of abstract conceptual data, like prose, programming, filesystem traversal, etc.
On the other hand, when dealing with information that is inherently geometrical (images, plots, diagrams), suddenly a mouse becomes a much better tool than keyboards.
Anyway, this whole analysis should make one point very, very clear to the reader:
VI IS BETTER THAN EMACS. NUFF SAID.
-Laxitive
Dammit, hit submit before I finished saying what I wanted to say.
What the hell is "that stuff" supposed to be?
There are a lot of pretty good natured h-games. Of course, if you've only kept your eye out for the disturbing stuff, then I think that says more about you than it does about h-games.
-Laxitive
They're about as sexy and mature as porn is, which makes sense, because they're porn games.
-Laxitive