Piper is a peer-to-peer distributed workflow system that brings the UNIX paradigm to the GUI and GUI features to CLI programs.
It has been called an "Open Source alternative to.NET", although it is by no means a clone. Rather, it focuses on extending existing UNIX features and programs to the Internet, where they haven't been before.
Perhaps we don't need a clone, just as Linux is not a clone of Windows. And it's a good thing it is not.
Gnome Gnotices (It's interesting to note that the article first posted there referred to Piper as an alternative to.Net. The moderator later changed that. Paranoid minds, such as mine, wonder about this and the future intentions of GNOME with respect to.Net.)
Here are some of the issues that scientists (and publishers) are dealing with:
Copyright on scientific communications (published articles and so forth) belongs to publishing companies and not to authors, for most publications. Scientists wishing to share relevant communications, even their own in some cases, face legal challenges from publishers.
Publishing companies charge expensive subscriptions to access scientific communications. Scientists in developing countries and poorly-endowed institutions, although intellectually on par with their peers, are severely hindered by this.
These two problems have prevented scientists from gaining any access, even for simple searches, to the full text of these communications.
Scientific communications are published in journals segregated by topic. This has resulted in confusion as to the best place to publish, retrieve or extract (using computer automation) information (e.g., mathematical biology communications could be published in either a mathematical journal or a biological one).
Communications are also published in journals differing by publisher. This has caused the segregation of communications by the prestige of the journal (e.g., how difficult it is to be published in the journal and the composition of the readership). This has also allowed room for personal politics in scientific communication.
These two problems are compounded by the first two: with a limited budget, to which journals should one subscribe? What we are left with is an artificial selection, by publishers, of which communications are best suited to a scientist's field of study.
This may be the result of a competitive marketplace for readership, but is there an alternative to profit-based publications? Should there be? Can an alternative publication model be profitable for a publisher?
Additionally, even with the advent of computers, databases, and the World Wide Web, scientific communications are published as they were 100 years ago: as linear, printable text. And they are archived this way. While this makes good reading, it is not the best format for information retrieval or extraction.
All of these problems restrict information retrieval, extraction, and scientific inquiry. How do we resolve them? As the ultimate solution, should future communications be published in an "open-access, global knowledge-base"? Before or after information extraction techniques are applied?
The conference will be in Copenhagen, Denmark, and there is room for more attendees. The first 50 can in fact register for free.
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This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
Don't forget the flip side
on
Bioinformatics
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· Score: 1
The computer scientists who don't know their biology are just as lost in the field the as biologists who don't know their computer science.
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This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
Open Source Bioinformatics
on
Bioinformatics
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· Score: 3
Some people in the field are now releasing their software under Free/Open Source licenses. It may seem odd to non-scientists that the license is an issue. Isn't all scientific work free and open? Far from it, especially in bioinformatics, where, as you may have read, there is a lot of money involved.
A couple organizations have taken it upon themselves to promote freedom and openness in bioinformatics. One, Bioinformatics.org, has a modified version of SourceForge so that the community can perform project management and collaborations on a community-run website. Bioinformatics.org has other services, such as website hosting, news forums, a software registry and repository, and more to come. The organization currently hosts 27 projects and has over 600 members. (Disclaimer: I am the Director of the organization.)
Another organization, The Open Bioinformatics Foundation, supports the development of several language libraries for bioinformatics, such as the famous BioPerl. They also host the BOSC conference mentioned in the post.
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
The transmitter and receiver can be synchronized if the receiver knows "when" the next bit will come. But, the speed of light (which is the speed of the radio signal) needs to be constant, and it is NOT. Remember, the speed of light IN A VACUUM is constant; the speed changes when the light travels through media of different densities, such as the gasses in the atmosphere. I believe there may be problems using this technology for long-distance communications.
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This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
JXTA looks very much like the Piper project, mentioned on Slashdot before. Piper is developing a text shell very much like JXTA, but the big distinction is Piper's "connect-the-dots" GUI, which brings command-line functionality to the GUI -- unlike most modern GUI's, which are really Apple Lisa work-alikes.
Piper is licensed under the GNU LGPL and is a merger between several GNU-licensed projects. It's community-developed, and the programmers are the copyright holders. It's not controlled by a big corp with big name programmers making big bucks. Stop by and lend a hand if you'd like.
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
The test under discussion here, the SAT I, was designed to predict the taker's GPA in college. It does so remarkably well.
Not by my personal experience. I recall that I could only answer about 10 of the SAT questions correctly, so I chose to have my scores deleted. I then went to night school and later transferred into a university as a full-time day student (so, I didn't need the SAT scores). I graduated *MAGNA CUM LAUDE* with a 3.72 GPA.
Remarkably well, eh?
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
Let's do the math. You know (or can answer) 100% of the problems on the test, but you only have the time to attempt 70% of them: You'll get 70% of them correct. Someone else knows 70% of the problems but has the time to attempt 100% of them: They'll get 70% of them correct.
Now, you tell me. Does the test tell an admissions officer who knows more (or can learn more or reason better)? No. The test indicates that both know the same amount. But, that isn't true. The biggest factor here is the SPEED at which a student works!
But, perhaps the SAT/GRE is supposed to test for speed. Read the literature that ETS provides. Nowhere does it say that the test is an indication of how *FAST* a test-taker works. Everyone universally accepts it as a test of *KNOWLEDGE* and *INTELLIGENCE*!
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
My room-mate in college was fresh off the plane from China, and I had to help him with his writing assignments. Even still, he only got a B- (which was the only grade he ever got under an A).
The funny thing is, he scored 700+ on the GRE verbal test. I scored 500+. Why? He was an excellent test taker and fast worker. And I believe he actually studied long lists of English words for the test.
The GRE is a farse! Do away with it.
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
Piper is a peer-to-peer (P2P) distributed workflow system. It is an independent, GNU-based project which brings the power and flexibility of the GNU/UNIX command-line interface (CLI) to the graphical user interface (GUI) and Internet-distributed computing.
Networks, programs, files, widgets, and so on, can be Internet-distributed components represented in a GUI as the nodes of a flow chart. The user can join nodes via lines that depict links for data flow, procedural steps, relationships, and so forth.
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
Take this concept, extend it to programs as well as data, allow everything to be linked using a groovy "connect-the-dots" user interface, and you've got Piper:
Whilst it's easy to claim that Germans are idiots...
Adolf Hitler already proved that.
...please remember that frivolous suits are pretty uncommon in Germany: people claiming money for eating peanuts and suing because they were
allergic to nuts and there was no 'WARNING: May contain nuts' label on the box, or people suing because they spilled hot McDonalds coffee on themselves, would be laughed out of court in Germany. This is a fairly normal thing - the same would happen in the US if, say, I created a mySQL spin-off and called my new database 'Oracle' or 'Interbase', I'd be in a lot of trouble for trademark infringement.
In other words, when a human being has his dignity and rights trounced upon by a corporation, it is all a big joke in the German courts. But, when a company's product name `Can-O-Bugz-B-Gone' is `disrespected', Heaven forbid, some heads are gonna roll!
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
Here are some Ransom Love remarks made after the acquisition:
"We don't have to give everything back in a free fashion."
"We intend to provide our technologies in an open access mode - not necessarily giving it all away in the public domain or under one of the licenses that forces us to give our technology back."
Ransom Love is a snake. He stuffs his pockets with money from GNU and Linux supporters yet criticizes the license that keeps the software free from money-mongers like himself. (LinuxToday censored my post saying the same thing.)
Also look at how their PR calls "Caldera, Inc." a "new holding company" while in THE SAME PR saying that "Caldera, Inc. was founded in 1994". Methinks there's some truth-bending going on around here.
-- This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
I have always considered Caldera and SCO to be a perfect match, not on technical but philosophical grounds. Opinions expressed by the CEOs of BOTH companies have revealed a deep-seated resentment toward GNU/Linux and the GPL.
Caldera's Ransom Love made that painfully clear in his whining speech at Comdex, where he called the GPL "restrictive" for not allowing people to violate it (i.e., not allowing Caldera to violate it) and that such strict control made it "proprietary":
And we all know too well how SCO and its CEO have made Linux part of its business with one hand while publicly stabbing Linux and its supporters in the back with the other hand:
http://www.xos.nl/misc/sco.html
I wish the two vampires a wonderful and bloody honeymoon.
And be careful when you say that this is a "victory for Linux, because Caldera is a Linux company". Caldera was competing with Micro$oft on M$'s own turf (remember DRDOS) before they found the goldmine in Linux.
-- This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
Quothe the article: But distributed computing isn't for every job. "The SETI project lends itself to breaking the data into small, independent chunks, which makes the parallel computing fairly simple," Old explains. Unfortunately, not all data can be segmented that way, and many projects require complex communication among processors.
Distribution can still work where parallel distribution fails. Modularize the program (not the data) into routines (as you would normally do today) and then distribute the routines across the Internet. The benefit is that routines can run on the system most capable of performing the task (better speed or storage), and you don't have to have every possible data processing routine on your local system.
A system for distributed serial computing is currently being developed as "Piper":
The neat thing about Piper is that it makes use of standard UNIX I/O, or "piping", and allows piping to be done over the Internet. In that sense, Piper networks are like Internet-distributed shell scripts.
Piper is a collaboration between 4 (possibly soon to be 5) GPL'd projects and will be competing directly with M$.NET in some aspects. Contributions are very much welcome!
Jeff
-- This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
Although Micro$oft has provided very few technical details (okay, maybe NO technical details), there seem to be some similarities with a largely unknown GNU project that started years ago: Pied/Piper.
The reason you may not have heard of Pied/Piper is because it is a new name for a collaboration between 4 older projects with the same goal: Overflow, gMessaging Service, The Loci Project, and BlueBox/YellowBox.
Pied/Piper is an effort to bring "The Unix Way" to the GUI, "connect-the-dots" to the CLI, and to distribute applications AND APPLICATION COMPONENTS across the Internet.
Note that we just released version 0.0.1, and there is much to do to get the 4 original projects working together. But, feel free to check us out, join the mailing list, and contribute code (that would be best:-)):
We've been following stories on how greedy corporations are trying to lay claim to the information in your genome. You can find excerpts and links at...
BIOINFORMATICS.ORG: The Open Lab, is a non-profit, scientific organization for research, development and information projects in the field of bioinformatics (biological information). We stand for 'open-source science' or the application of open-source ideals to science. Of course, this means we're against patenting scientific information.
Jeff
-- This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
Because KOffice as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The real edge of Koffice lies in KParts my friends: for a start the individual components of KOffice wil interoperate in a way that is standardized across KDE.
You may not realize that Applix Words is part of Applixware, a rather old and established office suit for UNIX. Applixware has a spreadsheet, a vector drawing program, a presentation program, and it even does file sharing between workgroups.
So, why will KOffice win?
Jeff
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
Slashdot Mirror
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin
It has been called an "Open Source alternative to .NET", although it is by no means a clone. Rather, it focuses on extending existing UNIX features and programs to the Internet, where they haven't been before.
Perhaps we don't need a clone, just as Linux is not a clone of Windows. And it's a good thing it is not.
Here are some articles and mentions of Piper:
On Slashdot
Linux Software Encyclopedia
Linux Weekly News
Gnome Gnotices (It's interesting to note that the article first posted there referred to Piper as an alternative to .Net. The moderator later changed that. Paranoid minds, such as mine, wonder about this and the future intentions of GNOME with respect to .Net.)
O'Reilly P2P website
SunWorld Online
And some other online magazines/forums:
Infolets
Tecnologia
Hispa MP3
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
http://biomedcentral.com/
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
Bioinformatics.org, an organization committed to freedom and openness in the field of bioinformatics (a very commercial field), is hosting a joint conference on open-access publications and informatiion extraction in the biological sciences. We have sought several speakers who can address how the above problems might be solved. They come from the Public Library of Science, BioMed Central, and PubGene (mentioned on Slashdot before).
The conference will be in Copenhagen, Denmark, and there is room for more attendees. The first 50 can in fact register for free.
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
A couple organizations have taken it upon themselves to promote freedom and openness in bioinformatics. One, Bioinformatics.org, has a modified version of SourceForge so that the community can perform project management and collaborations on a community-run website. Bioinformatics.org has other services, such as website hosting, news forums, a software registry and repository, and more to come. The organization currently hosts 27 projects and has over 600 members. (Disclaimer: I am the Director of the organization.)
Another organization, The Open Bioinformatics Foundation, supports the development of several language libraries for bioinformatics, such as the famous BioPerl. They also host the BOSC conference mentioned in the post.
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
Piper is licensed under the GNU LGPL and is a merger between several GNU-licensed projects. It's community-developed, and the programmers are the copyright holders. It's not controlled by a big corp with big name programmers making big bucks. Stop by and lend a hand if you'd like.
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
Not by my personal experience. I recall that I could only answer about 10 of the SAT questions correctly, so I chose to have my scores deleted. I then went to night school and later transferred into a university as a full-time day student (so, I didn't need the SAT scores). I graduated *MAGNA CUM LAUDE* with a 3.72 GPA.
Remarkably well, eh?
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
Now, you tell me. Does the test tell an admissions officer who knows more (or can learn more or reason better)? No. The test indicates that both know the same amount. But, that isn't true. The biggest factor here is the SPEED at which a student works!
But, perhaps the SAT/GRE is supposed to test for speed. Read the literature that ETS provides. Nowhere does it say that the test is an indication of how *FAST* a test-taker works. Everyone universally accepts it as a test of *KNOWLEDGE* and *INTELLIGENCE*!
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
The funny thing is, he scored 700+ on the GRE verbal test. I scored 500+. Why? He was an excellent test taker and fast worker. And I believe he actually studied long lists of English words for the test.
The GRE is a farse! Do away with it.
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
http://www.bioinformatics.org/piper/documentation/ command-compilation.html
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
Yes, we know that it is not new ;-)
But, for the combination of visual programming, visual data flow, and P2P networking, Piper is in a pretty small field.
Khoros is actually most similar, but it is closed source and commercial.
Piper has some pretty unique ideas too.
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
http://theopenlab.org/piper
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
Networks, programs, files, widgets, and so on, can be Internet-distributed components represented in a GUI as the nodes of a flow chart. The user can join nodes via lines that depict links for data flow, procedural steps, relationships, and so forth.
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
http://theopenlab.org/piper
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
Yet it was the Germans who followed him :-)
I'm not anti-German, but we shouldn't let it be forgotten.
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
Adolf Hitler already proved that.
In other words, when a human being has his dignity and rights trounced upon by a corporation, it is all a big joke in the German courts. But, when a company's product name `Can-O-Bugz-B-Gone' is `disrespected', Heaven forbid, some heads are gonna roll!
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
"We don't have to give everything back in a free fashion."
"We intend to provide our technologies in an open access mode - not necessarily giving it all away in the public domain or under one of the licenses that forces us to give our technology back."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/cont ent/1/12339.html
Ransom Love is a snake. He stuffs his pockets with money from GNU and Linux supporters yet criticizes the license that keeps the software free from money-mongers like himself. (LinuxToday censored my post saying the same thing.)
Also look at how their PR calls "Caldera, Inc." a "new holding company" while in THE SAME PR saying that "Caldera, Inc. was founded in 1994". Methinks there's some truth-bending going on around here.
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
I have always considered Caldera and SCO to be a perfect match, not on technical but philosophical grounds. Opinions expressed by the CEOs of BOTH companies have revealed a deep-seated resentment toward GNU/Linux and the GPL.
Caldera's Ransom Love made that painfully clear in his whining speech at Comdex, where he called the GPL "restrictive" for not allowing people to violate it (i.e., not allowing Caldera to violate it) and that such strict control made it "proprietary":
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2
And we all know too well how SCO and its CEO have made Linux part of its business with one hand while publicly stabbing Linux and its supporters in the back with the other hand:
http://www.xos.nl/misc/sco.html
I wish the two vampires a wonderful and bloody honeymoon.
And be careful when you say that this is a "victory for Linux, because Caldera is a Linux company". Caldera was competing with Micro$oft on M$'s own turf (remember DRDOS) before they found the goldmine in Linux.
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
Distribution can still work where parallel distribution fails. Modularize the program (not the data) into routines (as you would normally do today) and then distribute the routines across the Internet. The benefit is that routines can run on the system most capable of performing the task (better speed or storage), and you don't have to have every possible data processing routine on your local system.
A system for distributed serial computing is currently being developed as "Piper":
http://theopenlab.org/piper
The neat thing about Piper is that it makes use of standard UNIX I/O, or "piping", and allows piping to be done over the Internet. In that sense, Piper networks are like Internet-distributed shell scripts.
Piper is a collaboration between 4 (possibly soon to be 5) GPL'd projects and will be competing directly with M$ .NET in some aspects. Contributions are very much welcome!
Jeff
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
The reason you may not have heard of Pied/Piper is because it is a new name for a collaboration between 4 older projects with the same goal: Overflow, gMessaging Service, The Loci Project, and BlueBox/YellowBox.
Pied/Piper is an effort to bring "The Unix Way" to the GUI, "connect-the-dots" to the CLI, and to distribute applications AND APPLICATION COMPONENTS across the Internet.
Note that we just released version 0.0.1, and there is much to do to get the 4 original projects working together. But, feel free to check us out, join the mailing list, and contribute code (that would be best :-)):
http://theopenlab.org/piper
Help keep Micro$oft from controlling the Internet!
Jeff
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
BIOINFORMATICS.ORG: The Open Lab
BIOINFORMATICS.ORG: The Open Lab, is a non-profit, scientific organization for research, development and information projects in the field of bioinformatics (biological information). We stand for 'open-source science' or the application of open-source ideals to science. Of course, this means we're against patenting scientific information.
Jeff
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
You may not realize that Applix Words is part of Applixware, a rather old and established office suit for UNIX. Applixware has a spreadsheet, a vector drawing program, a presentation program, and it even does file sharing between workgroups.
So, why will KOffice win?
Jeff
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
Take a look at Loci:
http://theopenlab.org/loci/d ocumentation/overview.php3
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.