The thing is that while there are for sure motifs that can be seen based on protein sequence (ie to see if it is a DNA binding protein or something like that) there is realy no way right now to predict much about overall structure of a given protein based soley on its sequence. The only real way to do this is via crystalography. And that is a VERY time consuming and expensive process, that may or maynot give good results back. As you can imagine, things get even more complicated when you move into protiens forming multimeric complexes... and those complexes interacting with other complexes...etc. These are things that take years for researchers to pick apart. Just imagine if just som of that work could be done computationally. If nothing else it would give scientists a huge head start of pick apart pathways.
I think that programming is by NO means a dead end. Sure there is a bit of a tough time right now with the economy in its current state. But, we are just now seeing an emergence of whole new computational fields. These mainly being in the life sciences arena. Genomic sequencng projects are quickly overloading scientists with raw data that someone needs to turn into usefull information. The area of developing these tools is vast. Possibly more important will be people who come up with better algorythms for predicting protein structre and interactions based on sequences. This is an amazing field that has the promise of keeping computre scientists, biologists, and bioinformatics people busy for decades to come. I think the field is ready to make leaps and bounds.... and most definitly not a dead end.
I have been messing around in the online auction business for several years now. I can say that you seriously have to do your homework on the person you are bying from.... look at their past ratings by other buyers... of course even with that you never know. Unfortunatly, sometimes you just get burned. It's happened to me a couple of times. Luckly with enough harassment and some "legal looking" documents sent to the seller I was able to clear it up. I know of others not as lucky.
It seems like the whole SOAP system is a great way to incorporte different datasets together for transmition and interaction (ie Java, XML, etc..). I hope that this project really has a chance to mature and get a good following.
Plus hey..... any added feature (or weapon) we can give to Apache the better.
Now, someone in the congress should take notice to the obsurd proposal the RIAA has to charge extra fee to internet raido stations. The Screen Savers had the founder of WOLF FM on the other night talking abotu this issue and it amazed me. The guy does this out of his own pocket basically and already pays the normal fees that any other broadcast radio station pays. Now they want to charge him MORE than that, on a per user basis that is retroactive back to 1998!!! He would have to literally pay millions of dollars if he wanted to stay broadcasting.
This is all about the RIAA wanting to put indepent people out of business...period. They want to control every outlet that consumers have to get content.... and it is disturbing. People need to get their haeads out of their asses and stop this. Call your Senator daily....write letters....send email... and spread the work. We shoudn't have to deal with this "everything in the world must be copy protected crap."
I hope the new site will be able to handle traffic better than the story link. There isn't even 6 comments posted yet and it is already dead. Nice work guys!
But I hate to see people moving to Red Hat based distros. I know they have the support network that compaines of that size need and all. But, I think that we risk building another monopoly in the linux market. There are already tons of people who think that Red Hat *IS* linux. Personally I can't stand Red Hat distros with all of their default bloatware. I would love to see a good comercial support company for Debian.
somethign like that would be a great idea. While taking up a bit more space it would give people who no only want a small system footprint, but also want some power behind it.
I know a lot of people want these style systems for the lowend market... and that is fine. But I'm sure there are plenty of power users out there that would love to shrink the footprint of their computers.
Take one of these impressive little boards and couple it with a Nvida nForce chipset? I would pounce on one of these small systems in a heartbeat if the graphics didn't suck ass so bad. I had one about a year ago and just ended up totally disgusted with overall video performance.
I know a lot of people will use them in the living room/small home server. But I would love to be able to get ride of my huge tower sittign next to my desk if I had a good alternative. support for a DVI port would make the deal even better. You have this nice small system.... who wants to use a bulky CRT with something so sleek? To me, using analog LCD panels just isn't a real option either.
I own this book and it is a wonderful overview of some astonishing things. As a microbiologist I would love to see a similar title come out covering the major developments of molecular biology over the past 40 years or so. Where chem. has had quite some time to develop over the years... there has been a literal explosion of scientific data being uncovered in the world of molecular microbiology. Just think.... it wasn't untill the 1950's that the structure of DNA was established. ALL of the knowledge we have now, has developed since then... to me... that is amazing.
I would think this is somewhat clear. Intercepting any type of com. should fall under the same wiretap regulations as voice calls. Often email and instant messenges are treated by end users as being *more* secure than your typical voice conversation. Just because, when you are in a room alone on your computer you tend to feel secure.... often because of the quiet. Of course this is a falwed assumption. I'm sure the NSA is reading everything we all type anyhow;-)
But of course that is for "National Security"..... riiiiiiiight But, I am content with letting such security organizations operate somewhat above typical regulations, as long as they don't get too carried away. But, for your typical law enforcment agencies, including the FBI, I think we need to keep a close eye on. And, we should adopt policies that say any type of information intercept should be held to the same standards.
I have two old DEC Multia's powered by 166 mhz Alphas. I think it is wonderful to see some attention being given to these fun older platforms. For the longest time I was just messing with old builds of RH on them.... but Debian is the way to go for sure. I've played around with some of the BSD's (I run FreeBSD on my desktop), but didn't ahve much luck. Debain is the next best pick for me.
I highly recommend picking up one of these machines if you want somethign fun to play around with. They can be had for next to nothing on Ebay or Yahoo Auctions. Mine cost me 35 bucks a piece I believe...and they had never been opened form the packing! Integrated sound.....ethernet, PC Card slot.... and the slide out mothboard tray just looks sweet:)
Guns and video games are NOT the problem here. The problem is parents who do not take an active role in the kids lives. You are a fool to think that kids or criminals who want to get a hold of a new video game, or a firearm is going to be thwarted by some new legislation.
Just like when I was a kid... for some reason me and my friends always found ways to get "R" rated movies. This wouldn't stop anything. Just be a waste of taxpayers money in the courts when the challenge came.
Parents need to step up and start acting like parents again..... and actually see what their kids and doing...
ITs true that you never know what the future might hold. it just seems like a hard thing to overcome, sicne the publishing houses are so entrenched. It will take a lot of effort to build up the level of respect of a new journal such as this.
Top it off with the fact that there are still a lot of older faculty members that hardly know how to check their email, let alone review papers on the web. However, they are still contributing greatly to the scientific community. We have two or three such old guys at my departemnt at Indiana University. Until they finally kick the bucket:) these people who were involved in major scientific discoveries within their respective fields, have a lot of influence and pull. (one of the still uses a typewriter!....ack)
I think that some people are missing the whole point of the way the research journal system is setup today. The journals cost a lot of money to get.... esp the paper versions. But...the journal companies ahve a LOT of overhead to deal with. Mainly coordinating the review process that gives any jounral its credibility. Others in the given scientific field have to read and review the papers before they are deemed ready for publishing.... as well as several copy editors and others employed by the actual jounral. This is all to ensure validity of the science and quality of the paper. ALong with that, people publish in a given journal because of its reputation. Science or Nature being pretty much cream of the crop work.... then moving on to journals like Proc. National Academy of Sciences, Cell, J of Bacteriology, then down to the level of journals and so on. Where you publish becomes a reflection of the quality of work that you do. Some institutions even *require* faculty to publish so many papers in a given set of journals in order to be eligible for full professorship. So, this system seems great... but I think it is going to be very difficult to get people using it in large numbers.
I remember a couple years ago when i ordered my Visor Deluxe.... just when the company was starting up. I got the unit about 2 months after I ordered it, and it was non functional... they sent me another one and the screen was cracked. Finally over 3 months after my initial order I got a working unit. Grandted that I really liked it... but it was such a hastle. I hope they have the ability now to ship their products in a timely manner and have implemented some serious qa. ALso... the prce seems kinda high....... at least I think so.
Anyone remember Divix? Basically the same kinda thing..... and it failed horribly. Circuit City lost several Million dollars over the deal when they had to shut down the service. The principle was... buy a $5 disc and you could watch it for like 3 days. After that you have to "renew" the rental through your divix capable dvd player for a fee, buy the movie through the player, or toss it.
The point is... why deal with this when people can just go to a blockbuster and rent it for 5 days for the same price??
Actually DNA sequence files are not all the large. At least not what most scientists actualyl deal with on a regular basis. Most of the time you are just dealing with fairly small 500-900 base pair seqments, since that is what you can get reliable sequence data back on. Of course sometimes it is needed to prob this sequence against others findings, via some search engine such as Blast! or the like. If you are talking about whole genome sequences, most still are not that large. Considering that most the genomes sequenced are of bacteria and archea, this isn't that hard to see. E. Coli for instance has a genome size of roughly 4.6 million bases and this is fairly average for bacteria, at least within the same order of magnitude. Currently there are 74 completed genome sequences listed on NCBI's Genome page. So, while this is a substantial amount of biological data, it doesn't amount to that many megabytes of data with respect to a Terabyte storage system. At least not today.... with more Eukaryotic organism sequences being complete the size will of course jump dramatically.
CIS major's become the bosses of the CS people. While not as well versed in programming, their strong points are integrating tech. in a business enviroment. That is why they suffer through all those damn accounting and business law classes....ack!
It seems that steps could have been taken to have prevented a full out shut-down of everything. Tighten some things down.... clean it up a bit. I would think there would be some security consultants that could have at least came up with a temp fix until some more lasting changes could be made.
Exactly... I don't need all that other crap:) Not having stuff cluttering up my desktop is a plus in my mind. Besides.. we all know emacs is the best email client in the world.... so who needs Evolution?;-)
It really is a shame there is such an emphasis on eye candy in the gnome area. I have always found things painfully bogged down at times, even with an up to date video card and drivers. Although I do prefer KDE, my all time favorite is still Blackbox. [blackbox.alug.org] I guess I'm just a minimalist, but I love the speed and responsiveness of this wm.
Slashdot Mirror
Vector Prime totally broke my heart. How could they have done that?
The thing is that while there are for sure motifs that can be seen based on protein sequence (ie to see if it is a DNA binding protein or something like that) there is realy no way right now to predict much about overall structure of a given protein based soley on its sequence. The only real way to do this is via crystalography. And that is a VERY time consuming and expensive process, that may or maynot give good results back. As you can imagine, things get even more complicated when you move into protiens forming multimeric complexes... and those complexes interacting with other complexes...etc. These are things that take years for researchers to pick apart. Just imagine if just som of that work could be done computationally. If nothing else it would give scientists a huge head start of pick apart pathways.
I think that programming is by NO means a dead end. Sure there is a bit of a tough time right now with the economy in its current state. But, we are just now seeing an emergence of whole new computational fields. These mainly being in the life sciences arena. Genomic sequencng projects are quickly overloading scientists with raw data that someone needs to turn into usefull information. The area of developing these tools is vast. Possibly more important will be people who come up with better algorythms for predicting protein structre and interactions based on sequences. This is an amazing field that has the promise of keeping computre scientists, biologists, and bioinformatics people busy for decades to come. I think the field is ready to make leaps and bounds.... and most definitly not a dead end.
I have been messing around in the online auction business for several years now. I can say that you seriously have to do your homework on the person you are bying from.... look at their past ratings by other buyers... of course even with that you never know. Unfortunatly, sometimes you just get burned. It's happened to me a couple of times. Luckly with enough harassment and some "legal looking" documents sent to the seller I was able to clear it up. I know of others not as lucky.
It seems like the whole SOAP system is a great way to incorporte different datasets together for transmition and interaction (ie Java, XML, etc..). I hope that this project really has a chance to mature and get a good following.
Plus hey..... any added feature (or weapon) we can give to Apache the better.
"Does MS == S&M?" Does C/C++ dampen your love live? Does Perl please your partner? Can you jive with Java? Inquiring minds want to know."
This should have been an "IT's funny.... laugh." But, all in all... pretty good for a Sunday night post!
Now, someone in the congress should take notice to the obsurd proposal the RIAA has to charge extra fee to internet raido stations. The Screen Savers had the founder of WOLF FM on the other night talking abotu this issue and it amazed me. The guy does this out of his own pocket basically and already pays the normal fees that any other broadcast radio station pays. Now they want to charge him MORE than that, on a per user basis that is retroactive back to 1998!!! He would have to literally pay millions of dollars if he wanted to stay broadcasting.
This is all about the RIAA wanting to put indepent people out of business...period. They want to control every outlet that consumers have to get content.... and it is disturbing. People need to get their haeads out of their asses and stop this. Call your Senator daily....write letters....send email... and spread the work. We shoudn't have to deal with this "everything in the world must be copy protected crap."
I hope the new site will be able to handle traffic better than the story link. There isn't even 6 comments posted yet and it is already dead. Nice work guys!
But I hate to see people moving to Red Hat based distros. I know they have the support network that compaines of that size need and all. But, I think that we risk building another monopoly in the linux market. There are already tons of people who think that Red Hat *IS* linux. Personally I can't stand Red Hat distros with all of their default bloatware. I would love to see a good comercial support company for Debian.
somethign like that would be a great idea. While taking up a bit more space it would give people who no only want a small system footprint, but also want some power behind it.
I know a lot of people want these style systems for the lowend market... and that is fine. But I'm sure there are plenty of power users out there that would love to shrink the footprint of their computers.
Take one of these impressive little boards and couple it with a Nvida nForce chipset? I would pounce on one of these small systems in a heartbeat if the graphics didn't suck ass so bad. I had one about a year ago and just ended up totally disgusted with overall video performance.
I know a lot of people will use them in the living room/small home server. But I would love to be able to get ride of my huge tower sittign next to my desk if I had a good alternative. support for a DVI port would make the deal even better. You have this nice small system.... who wants to use a bulky CRT with something so sleek? To me, using analog LCD panels just isn't a real option either.
Anyhow... jsut my thoughts.
"The Company Therapist (dot.com)"
Sorry but I couldn't help but think of the Saturday Night Live Jeparody skit with Sean Connery.
"I'll take the rapists for twenty!"
;-)
I own this book and it is a wonderful overview of some astonishing things. As a microbiologist I would love to see a similar title come out covering the major developments of molecular biology over the past 40 years or so. Where chem. has had quite some time to develop over the years... there has been a literal explosion of scientific data being uncovered in the world of molecular microbiology. Just think.... it wasn't untill the 1950's that the structure of DNA was established. ALL of the knowledge we have now, has developed since then... to me... that is amazing.
I would think this is somewhat clear. Intercepting any type of com. should fall under the same wiretap regulations as voice calls. Often email and instant messenges are treated by end users as being *more* secure than your typical voice conversation. Just because, when you are in a room alone on your computer you tend to feel secure.... often because of the quiet. Of course this is a falwed assumption. I'm sure the NSA is reading everything we all type anyhow ;-)
But of course that is for "National Security"..... riiiiiiiight But, I am content with letting such security organizations operate somewhat above typical regulations, as long as they don't get too carried away. But, for your typical law enforcment agencies, including the FBI, I think we need to keep a close eye on. And, we should adopt policies that say any type of information intercept should be held to the same standards.
I have two old DEC Multia's powered by 166 mhz Alphas. I think it is wonderful to see some attention being given to these fun older platforms. For the longest time I was just messing with old builds of RH on them.... but Debian is the way to go for sure. I've played around with some of the BSD's (I run FreeBSD on my desktop), but didn't ahve much luck. Debain is the next best pick for me.
I highly recommend picking up one of these machines if you want somethign fun to play around with. They can be had for next to nothing on Ebay or Yahoo Auctions. Mine cost me 35 bucks a piece I believe...and they had never been opened form the packing! Integrated sound.....ethernet, PC Card slot.... and the slide out mothboard tray just looks sweet:)
Guns and video games are NOT the problem here. The problem is parents who do not take an active role in the kids lives. You are a fool to think that kids or criminals who want to get a hold of a new video game, or a firearm is going to be thwarted by some new legislation.
Just like when I was a kid... for some reason me and my friends always found ways to get "R" rated movies. This wouldn't stop anything. Just be a waste of taxpayers money in the courts when the challenge came.
Parents need to step up and start acting like parents again..... and actually see what their kids and doing...
Just my thoughts..
ITs true that you never know what the future might hold. it just seems like a hard thing to overcome, sicne the publishing houses are so entrenched. It will take a lot of effort to build up the level of respect of a new journal such as this.
:) these people who were involved in major scientific discoveries within their respective fields, have a lot of influence and pull. (one of the still uses a typewriter!....ack)
Top it off with the fact that there are still a lot of older faculty members that hardly know how to check their email, let alone review papers on the web. However, they are still contributing greatly to the scientific community. We have two or three such old guys at my departemnt at Indiana University. Until they finally kick the bucket
I think that some people are missing the whole point of the way the research journal system is setup today. The journals cost a lot of money to get.... esp the paper versions. But...the journal companies ahve a LOT of overhead to deal with. Mainly coordinating the review process that gives any jounral its credibility. Others in the given scientific field have to read and review the papers before they are deemed ready for publishing.... as well as several copy editors and others employed by the actual jounral. This is all to ensure validity of the science and quality of the paper. ALong with that, people publish in a given journal because of its reputation. Science or Nature being pretty much cream of the crop work.... then moving on to journals like Proc. National Academy of Sciences, Cell, J of Bacteriology, then down to the level of journals and so on. Where you publish becomes a reflection of the quality of work that you do. Some institutions even *require* faculty to publish so many papers in a given set of journals in order to be eligible for full professorship. So, this system seems great... but I think it is going to be very difficult to get people using it in large numbers.
I remember a couple years ago when i ordered my Visor Deluxe.... just when the company was starting up. I got the unit about 2 months after I ordered it, and it was non functional... they sent me another one and the screen was cracked. Finally over 3 months after my initial order I got a working unit. Grandted that I really liked it... but it was such a hastle. I hope they have the ability now to ship their products in a timely manner and have implemented some serious qa. ALso... the prce seems kinda high....... at least I think so.
Anyone remember Divix? Basically the same kinda thing..... and it failed horribly. Circuit City lost several Million dollars over the deal when they had to shut down the service. The principle was... buy a $5 disc and you could watch it for like 3 days. After that you have to "renew" the rental through your divix capable dvd player for a fee, buy the movie through the player, or toss it.
The point is... why deal with this when people can just go to a blockbuster and rent it for 5 days for the same price??
Flop... that's what I say!
Actually DNA sequence files are not all the large. At least not what most scientists actualyl deal with on a regular basis. Most of the time you are just dealing with fairly small 500-900 base pair seqments, since that is what you can get reliable sequence data back on. Of course sometimes it is needed to prob this sequence against others findings, via some search engine such as Blast! or the like. If you are talking about whole genome sequences, most still are not that large. Considering that most the genomes sequenced are of bacteria and archea, this isn't that hard to see. E. Coli for instance has a genome size of roughly 4.6 million bases and this is fairly average for bacteria, at least within the same order of magnitude. Currently there are 74 completed genome sequences listed on NCBI's Genome page. So, while this is a substantial amount of biological data, it doesn't amount to that many megabytes of data with respect to a Terabyte storage system. At least not today.... with more Eukaryotic organism sequences being complete the size will of course jump dramatically.
CIS major's become the bosses of the CS people. While not as well versed in programming, their strong points are integrating tech. in a business enviroment. That is why they suffer through all those damn accounting and business law classes....ack!
It seems that steps could have been taken to have prevented a full out shut-down of everything. Tighten some things down.... clean it up a bit. I would think there would be some security consultants that could have at least came up with a temp fix until some more lasting changes could be made.
Exactly... I don't need all that other crap:) Not having stuff cluttering up my desktop is a plus in my mind. Besides.. we all know emacs is the best email client in the world.... so who needs Evolution? ;-)
It really is a shame there is such an emphasis on eye candy in the gnome area. I have always found things painfully bogged down at times, even with an up to date video card and drivers. Although I do prefer KDE, my all time favorite is still Blackbox. [blackbox.alug.org] I guess I'm just a minimalist, but I love the speed and responsiveness of this wm.