I had noticed. My point stands: why come up with a new UI, then slap a skin on it that looks exactly like an often-copied commercial OS? I realize this has nothing to do with functionality, but you're not making that point very well by posting all those Aqua-themed images on your webpage.
Anyone who's ever used an SGI would agree that they've made about as slick an X server as possible, largely because they've done such a good job integrating with hardware. It's smooth even on older computers, and the widgets (modified from Motif) look great. However, the underlying problems in X go way beyond the issues of specific implementations which shall remain nameless. Try reading the O'Reilly books like "Xlib Programming Manual" sometime, and see how long it takes for your brains to leak out your ears. Apple, on the other hand, has come out with a relatively consistent and polished API. Personally, I think Aqua is a bitch to actually use and prefer to deal with the clumsiness of Linux/XFree86 for running apps, but based on what I've read I'd much rather develop for OS X than Linux. I suppose I could use one of the many toolkits, but it'd be nice if I had one to choose from that didn't suck.
Yeah, but now that it's been featured on Slashdot I give you guys a week, max, before you get C&D'd by Apple's lawyers. Do free software developers really need to repeat this mistake every few months?
If you've really come up with something innovative and technically superior- which I'm not disputing- why copy the look and feel of an established interface?
I agree that Lucas has "admitted" to this, but I still think it's pretentious film-school bullshit invented after the fact to make Lucas sound like more of an artiste than he might otherwise. It's like Jerry Bruckheimer talking about how he tried to work Shakespearean themes into "Armageddon". Or like Ari Fleischer describing W.'s forays into the world's great thinkers- "he's been spending a lot of time reading classical political theorists." Yeah. Right.
Okay, the Kurosawa bit is obvious. The Campbell connection, however, sounds like a joke.
I figure GL might have had some artistic motivation for making Star Wars; perhaps he simply wanted to make the ultimate space opera. People viewed it as a big noisy blockbuster, and to a certain extent that's fine- everyone loved it, Lucas raked in cash, it became a cultural icon. But it ain't art, and I suspect Lucas wanted to be seen as an artist, not just a really good effects guy.
The nature of Campbell's work, from what I've seen, is such that anyone can make some half-assed epic and find the links to Campbell. Campbell basically distilled myth and legend into motifs, and when your movie is based on the past half-century of science fiction, and the works of many previous filmmakers, of course you're going to find Campbell in there. Campbell, in the meantime, was apparently only too happy to agree with Lucas: what academic wouldn't like to have his pet theories known as the inspiration behind one of the greatest movies ever made?
Star Wars is derivative as hell, but I find it pointless to try and find greater meaning to it; it's a pastiche with high production values. Lucas' only "art" is in making it so convincing, and a lesser filmmaker would have totally fucked it up. (Say, Lucas in the past decade, as Eps. I and II so painfully show.) There isn't anything original or insightful in the story, but those sure are some bitchin' spaces battles.
To be fair, it's hard to avoid many of the concepts in Star Wars if you're making a sci-fi movie, unless you make up some really freaky stuff (like, um, Vinge) that wouldn't fit in a two-hour movie. Galactic empires, desert planets, etc., are all pretty basic, and it's easy to slip these in. Frankly, I'd have more respect for Lucas if he dropped the mythical pretenses and just said, "I just wanted to entertain people, and get really fucking rich doing it."
That's not really fair; while these machines may be useless for running most modern 3D apps, they're still bitchin' X terminals. The latest version of Irix will run great on those things, and the OS and GUI are so smooth overall that the reduced horsepower isn't really a bother. They aren't for everyone, but they're wonderful machines for people who care more about stability and polish than speed. (Some say the same about Mac OS X, but I've found it has far more annoying hangups than Irix does.)
Being able to predict different tertiary protein structures (foldings) from only the known DNA sequence mutations can only be A Good Thing, and having a crapload of computers around the world doing part of the job for free is nice.
But that's currently impossible, and it's doubtful when, if ever, doing this on computer will ever replace crystallography- especially given the pace at which crystallography improves. Folding@Home isn't even trying to do what you're talking aobut. They're investigating the dynamics of protein folding using a small peptide system. They already know the tertiary structure. Some groups have gotten good results in de novo simulations of protein folding, but nothing remotely near what you'd need to do computational drug design. You need high-res crystal structures for that.
There are some groups that are doing drug-receptor studies using known structures (also with distributed computing; see this for example). I don't know how accurate these will be, but there's a sounder baseisfor it than trying to do this from sequence info alone.
Doubtful. Other diseases, perhaps- prions and Alzheimer's are the ones I usually hear mentioned in relation to protein folding studies. Cancer is too broad a category, and I don't think most cancers involve misfolded proteins. Mutated proteins, certainly, but you need to take an entirely different computational approach to deal with those.
This seemed counterintuitive at first, but then I remembered that the name "Eoghan" (Irish) is pronounced the same as "Owen" (Welsh). Makes sense now, sort of.
Yes, when our elected officials realize that one tiny company can take out the largest and most successful software company, they'll be scared shitless about what patent abuse could do to our economy. I'm more-or-less on Microsoft's side here, because I despise the idea of using patents out of spite and for economic engineering. Mike Doyle's comments strike me as being exactly what's wrong with the system. But if Microsoft has to "take one for the team", all the better.
Wait! You left out the Zionist conspiracies! And what about alien plans to breed a race of super-soldiers to enable world domination? I don't think you're telling us everything. . .
Re:Fritz Hollings out as commerce committee chair!
on
Indecision 2002
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· Score: 2
Actually, I'm terrified by the possibility of the Republicans taking control of the Senate. IMO, Bush is doing enough damage now; having a Republican-controlled Congress to rubber-stamp everything he does is NOT something I'm in favor of.
My party affiliation is roughly the same as William Safire's (though he's more conservative than I am): vote for a split. I don't ever think it's a good idea for one party to control both houses and the presidency. If power is divided, both parties will be forced to compromise and the extreme elements on each side will (hopefully) be suppressed. When Clinton was battling the Republican congress, the country went through a huge economic boom. I'd like to think this isn't a coincidence.
Anyway, I think our country is fucked. I find I usually take a position right in the middle of the Democrat/Republican split, and the prospect of either the far left or the far right actually being able to push its agenda is terrifying. As Frank Rich pointed out, the most frightening thing about Ashcroft is his incompetence, but maybe he'll be able to do some real damage now.
This is the state that repeatedly sent Jesse Helms back to chair the Foreign Affairs committee. Clearly, there's been very little intelligent thought there for a while.
Actually, I kind of like the idea of Liddy and Hillary across the aisle in Congress. How appropriate. Bill and Bob, the Senate husbands. Heh heh.
There have always been alternatives. The issue was whether Microsoft was using its dominant position in the industry to strangle anyone it thought might be a competitor- e.g. using its near-monopoly on preloaded OSes to force OEMs into deals that prohibited loading competitor's software as well. It's not illegal to have a monopoly alone; you have to leverage that monopoly in restraint of trade. Rather than actually innovate their way into new markets, they simply used their existing strength to prevent others from participating.
(A related example: my parents home still has pieces of phone equipment that say "property of AT&T", because before their monopoly was split up you couldn't use non-AT&T equipment, even though in theory anyone could manufacture it.)
The antitrust thing was BS because browser tying was a bullshit example and the government made a crappy case. Microsoft did plenty of worse things that it deserved to get slapped down for. Like telling Apple that if it didn't make IE the default browser on OS 9 and hide Netscape, they'd drop Office for Mac.
And, um, you do realize that the antitrust suit was brought by the US government on behalf of US consumers, and not the Spanish government, right? Or would such facts get in the way of your misguided free-market cheerleading?
But I can tell you one thing -- China economy, under the Communist regime, has had double digit economic growth rates for a decade. We haven't had that. Not even with our boom in the late 90s.
Under the communist regime, on the order of 50 million people died due to economic policies that were stupid from the beginning and due to repression on a scale we can't imagine. Much of the supposed economic growth was actually a sham- steel production was vastly inflated by (literally) household industry, but the product was so poor that it was useless. Only massive subsidies and price-fixing kept the illusion of industrial growth going, while many impoverished Chinese died from food shortages. America's mixed economy may grow slowly, but it's stable at least. The past decade is largely China recovering from 40 years of criminal mismanagement.
So, it's obvious you're full of shit anyway, but if you'd actually read the NY Times instead of bashing it on Slashdot you'd understand that the last thing they have in mind is providing Mr. Ashcroft with information on its readership. They'd probably speak out very loudly against such a practice, in fact. People who don't trust the NYTimes can go read some other news source that doesn't ask for their personal information, and shut the fuck up.
I get a big laugh out of that phrase every time I see it; I've seen a few of that type in action. It's a great backhanded compliment; makes you think "Stop this man before he innovates again!"
Heh, and I bet your opposed to invading small countries too... Of course the main problem with hunger isn't growing/producing the food, it's the small dictators that would sell the food to buy guns instead of feeding the public. So... Do we spend money on getting rid of the bad guys (the people stealing the food), or do we just close our eyes and belive if we produce enough food people won't be hungry?
Bullshit. Most countries are crop importers, not exporters. Countries like Iraq and North Korea are the exception rather than the rule. Much of Africa is being lost to the desert; people in Asia are dying of malnutrition (this is what golden rice is supposed to solve). Obviously the political climate in many regions will need to change, perhaps by force, but this won't solve many problems.
I suppose I should have added eliminating contagious diseases as well. I'm not some left-wing fruitcake; these are all problems we have the power to solve, but the money is being wasted on things like crop subsidies and space travel. If we're going to have big government we should at least do things right. Invading small countries doesn't bug me one bit, as long as it's not to install US-friendly dictators again.
I would be happier to pay higher taxes if it would solve world hunger and provide universal healthcare. Space exploration is basically just a national ego trip- which is not to say it's a bad thing, but it should be one of our lowest priorities.
If we're going to spend immense amounts of money on new modes of travel, we should figure out a way to make gas-burning automobiles obsolete.
IRIX has been like this for years. Same kernel runs on my Indigo and on a 1024-processor Origin 3000-series machine. With IBM's efforts, and with SGI working on running Linux on huge Itanium-based Origin machines, we may see this capability as standard Linux pretty soon. Weird clustering technologies aren't really useful to have in a stock kernel, but it'd be great to have support for any arbitrary number of CPUs without messy patches and recompiles.
This is what I suspect will happen- but not the companies, just people like Bezos or the eBay founders. The latter already know that one crank with the right patent might be able to stir up a huge amount of trouble. They'd be well advised to pour a huge amount of money into these cases just to make an example of PanIP. With the type of money the dotcom moguls have, they could have PanIP's lawyers begging in the street in a short time. This is how big companies work all the time- I think Slashdot linked to an article in Forbes about how IBM used to extort license fees through sheer force of lawyers. Only now the big companies aren't really the agressors.
It'd send a pretty neat message- "fuck with us and you're through." It's sort of disturbing though, since the patent system is supposed to help the little guys especially. Too bad the little guy is a sleazebag in this case.
Okay, that's fair. And I probably sounded way too harsh- I do think understanding HOW proteins fold is a great idea. Certainly some interesting work has been/is being done with prions as well, along similar lines. What I object to is the notion some uninformed people seem to hold that in a few years we'll routinely be guessing the structures of proteins correctly with computers. (I guess I read Slashdot too much, otherwise this might not bother me.) So my beef isn't (or shouldn't be) with this research, but with people who are participating in it for the wrong reasons.
Sorry if I sound like a loose cannon. No offense intended- I liked the paper, really.
That said, yes there is a long way to go on this, but its still a really clever paper. No we haven't cured cure cancer yet, but its still progress. And forget an in silico structure of the ATPase, that's largely understood already (check the RSCB/PDB [rcsb.org] there's a bunch). The real challenge will be getting a structure that size that hasn't been solved by other methods and convincing anyone else that you're right! Disclosure- I don't have PhD in this area yet, but I'm close.
Um, you sort of made my point for me. Crystallography is solving these structures now, and even if it isn't perfect it can do a hell of a lot more than the current computational techniques ever will. The range of structures that can be solved by this method keeps growing- less than a decade ago I doubt anyone thought structures for the potassium or chloride channels could be determined.
I'm sure computing power will make it easy to simulate giant structures, but I still think the science behind this isn't good enough. How do you deal with chaperonins, transmembrane helix formation, association of subunits, functional conformational changes. . . sorry, but by the time the computational chemists figure out how to deal with these there may not be much of a point. And there's a huge difference between fold and atomic structure.
Well, to be fair, I don't think Folding@Home is useless (like SETI), just not particularly useful. I'm mainly just disappointed that people haven't put a lot of effort into distributed computing projects that actually have immediate scientific applications, and instead go wild over these stunts. I'm also more than a little peeved that people with little or no knowledge of structural biology, physics, chemistry, or scientific computing keep talking about how great protein folding simulation is.
And, to give Pande some credit, I read the Nature paper and I thought it was interesting and a good proof-of-concept. I stand by my intial assessment of the long-term prospects of this kind of research, however.
Slashdot Mirror
I had noticed. My point stands: why come up with a new UI, then slap a skin on it that looks exactly like an often-copied commercial OS? I realize this has nothing to do with functionality, but you're not making that point very well by posting all those Aqua-themed images on your webpage.
Anyone who's ever used an SGI would agree that they've made about as slick an X server as possible, largely because they've done such a good job integrating with hardware. It's smooth even on older computers, and the widgets (modified from Motif) look great. However, the underlying problems in X go way beyond the issues of specific implementations which shall remain nameless. Try reading the O'Reilly books like "Xlib Programming Manual" sometime, and see how long it takes for your brains to leak out your ears. Apple, on the other hand, has come out with a relatively consistent and polished API. Personally, I think Aqua is a bitch to actually use and prefer to deal with the clumsiness of Linux/XFree86 for running apps, but based on what I've read I'd much rather develop for OS X than Linux. I suppose I could use one of the many toolkits, but it'd be nice if I had one to choose from that didn't suck.
Yeah, but now that it's been featured on Slashdot I give you guys a week, max, before you get C&D'd by Apple's lawyers. Do free software developers really need to repeat this mistake every few months?
If you've really come up with something innovative and technically superior- which I'm not disputing- why copy the look and feel of an established interface?
I agree that Lucas has "admitted" to this, but I still think it's pretentious film-school bullshit invented after the fact to make Lucas sound like more of an artiste than he might otherwise. It's like Jerry Bruckheimer talking about how he tried to work Shakespearean themes into "Armageddon". Or like Ari Fleischer describing W.'s forays into the world's great thinkers- "he's been spending a lot of time reading classical political theorists." Yeah. Right.
Okay, the Kurosawa bit is obvious. The Campbell connection, however, sounds like a joke.
I figure GL might have had some artistic motivation for making Star Wars; perhaps he simply wanted to make the ultimate space opera. People viewed it as a big noisy blockbuster, and to a certain extent that's fine- everyone loved it, Lucas raked in cash, it became a cultural icon. But it ain't art, and I suspect Lucas wanted to be seen as an artist, not just a really good effects guy.
The nature of Campbell's work, from what I've seen, is such that anyone can make some half-assed epic and find the links to Campbell. Campbell basically distilled myth and legend into motifs, and when your movie is based on the past half-century of science fiction, and the works of many previous filmmakers, of course you're going to find Campbell in there. Campbell, in the meantime, was apparently only too happy to agree with Lucas: what academic wouldn't like to have his pet theories known as the inspiration behind one of the greatest movies ever made?
Star Wars is derivative as hell, but I find it pointless to try and find greater meaning to it; it's a pastiche with high production values. Lucas' only "art" is in making it so convincing, and a lesser filmmaker would have totally fucked it up. (Say, Lucas in the past decade, as Eps. I and II so painfully show.) There isn't anything original or insightful in the story, but those sure are some bitchin' spaces battles.
To be fair, it's hard to avoid many of the concepts in Star Wars if you're making a sci-fi movie, unless you make up some really freaky stuff (like, um, Vinge) that wouldn't fit in a two-hour movie. Galactic empires, desert planets, etc., are all pretty basic, and it's easy to slip these in. Frankly, I'd have more respect for Lucas if he dropped the mythical pretenses and just said, "I just wanted to entertain people, and get really fucking rich doing it."
That's not really fair; while these machines may be useless for running most modern 3D apps, they're still bitchin' X terminals. The latest version of Irix will run great on those things, and the OS and GUI are so smooth overall that the reduced horsepower isn't really a bother. They aren't for everyone, but they're wonderful machines for people who care more about stability and polish than speed. (Some say the same about Mac OS X, but I've found it has far more annoying hangups than Irix does.)
Being able to predict different tertiary protein structures (foldings) from only the known DNA sequence mutations can only be A Good Thing, and having a crapload of computers around the world doing part of the job for free is nice.
But that's currently impossible, and it's doubtful when, if ever, doing this on computer will ever replace crystallography- especially given the pace at which crystallography improves. Folding@Home isn't even trying to do what you're talking aobut. They're investigating the dynamics of protein folding using a small peptide system. They already know the tertiary structure. Some groups have gotten good results in de novo simulations of protein folding, but nothing remotely near what you'd need to do computational drug design. You need high-res crystal structures for that.
There are some groups that are doing drug-receptor studies using known structures (also with distributed computing; see this for example). I don't know how accurate these will be, but there's a sounder baseisfor it than trying to do this from sequence info alone.
So what is the memory bandwidth of this baby?
12.8GB/s. What, you couldn't read the fucking product info before posting?
Doubtful. Other diseases, perhaps- prions and Alzheimer's are the ones I usually hear mentioned in relation to protein folding studies. Cancer is too broad a category, and I don't think most cancers involve misfolded proteins. Mutated proteins, certainly, but you need to take an entirely different computational approach to deal with those.
This seemed counterintuitive at first, but then I remembered that the name "Eoghan" (Irish) is pronounced the same as "Owen" (Welsh). Makes sense now, sort of.
Yes, when our elected officials realize that one tiny company can take out the largest and most successful software company, they'll be scared shitless about what patent abuse could do to our economy. I'm more-or-less on Microsoft's side here, because I despise the idea of using patents out of spite and for economic engineering. Mike Doyle's comments strike me as being exactly what's wrong with the system. But if Microsoft has to "take one for the team", all the better.
Wait! You left out the Zionist conspiracies! And what about alien plans to breed a race of super-soldiers to enable world domination? I don't think you're telling us everything. . .
Actually, I'm terrified by the possibility of the Republicans taking control of the Senate. IMO, Bush is doing enough damage now; having a Republican-controlled Congress to rubber-stamp everything he does is NOT something I'm in favor of.
My party affiliation is roughly the same as William Safire's (though he's more conservative than I am): vote for a split. I don't ever think it's a good idea for one party to control both houses and the presidency. If power is divided, both parties will be forced to compromise and the extreme elements on each side will (hopefully) be suppressed. When Clinton was battling the Republican congress, the country went through a huge economic boom. I'd like to think this isn't a coincidence.
Anyway, I think our country is fucked. I find I usually take a position right in the middle of the Democrat/Republican split, and the prospect of either the far left or the far right actually being able to push its agenda is terrifying. As Frank Rich pointed out, the most frightening thing about Ashcroft is his incompetence, but maybe he'll be able to do some real damage now.
This is the state that repeatedly sent Jesse Helms back to chair the Foreign Affairs committee. Clearly, there's been very little intelligent thought there for a while.
Actually, I kind of like the idea of Liddy and Hillary across the aisle in Congress. How appropriate. Bill and Bob, the Senate husbands. Heh heh.
Ooooh, goody, another libertarian troll!
There have always been alternatives. The issue was whether Microsoft was using its dominant position in the industry to strangle anyone it thought might be a competitor- e.g. using its near-monopoly on preloaded OSes to force OEMs into deals that prohibited loading competitor's software as well. It's not illegal to have a monopoly alone; you have to leverage that monopoly in restraint of trade. Rather than actually innovate their way into new markets, they simply used their existing strength to prevent others from participating.
(A related example: my parents home still has pieces of phone equipment that say "property of AT&T", because before their monopoly was split up you couldn't use non-AT&T equipment, even though in theory anyone could manufacture it.)
The antitrust thing was BS because browser tying was a bullshit example and the government made a crappy case. Microsoft did plenty of worse things that it deserved to get slapped down for. Like telling Apple that if it didn't make IE the default browser on OS 9 and hide Netscape, they'd drop Office for Mac.
And, um, you do realize that the antitrust suit was brought by the US government on behalf of US consumers, and not the Spanish government, right? Or would such facts get in the way of your misguided free-market cheerleading?
But I can tell you one thing -- China economy, under the Communist regime, has had double digit economic growth rates for a decade. We haven't had that. Not even with our boom in the late 90s.
Under the communist regime, on the order of 50 million people died due to economic policies that were stupid from the beginning and due to repression on a scale we can't imagine. Much of the supposed economic growth was actually a sham- steel production was vastly inflated by (literally) household industry, but the product was so poor that it was useless. Only massive subsidies and price-fixing kept the illusion of industrial growth going, while many impoverished Chinese died from food shortages. America's mixed economy may grow slowly, but it's stable at least. The past decade is largely China recovering from 40 years of criminal mismanagement.
So, it's obvious you're full of shit anyway, but if you'd actually read the NY Times instead of bashing it on Slashdot you'd understand that the last thing they have in mind is providing Mr. Ashcroft with information on its readership. They'd probably speak out very loudly against such a practice, in fact. People who don't trust the NYTimes can go read some other news source that doesn't ask for their personal information, and shut the fuck up.
I get a big laugh out of that phrase every time I see it; I've seen a few of that type in action. It's a great backhanded compliment; makes you think "Stop this man before he innovates again!"
Heh, and I bet your opposed to invading small countries too... Of course the main problem with hunger isn't growing/producing the food, it's the small dictators that would sell the food to buy guns instead of feeding the public. So... Do we spend money on getting rid of the bad guys (the people stealing the food), or do we just close our eyes and belive if we produce enough food people won't be hungry?
Bullshit. Most countries are crop importers, not exporters. Countries like Iraq and North Korea are the exception rather than the rule. Much of Africa is being lost to the desert; people in Asia are dying of malnutrition (this is what golden rice is supposed to solve). Obviously the political climate in many regions will need to change, perhaps by force, but this won't solve many problems.
I suppose I should have added eliminating contagious diseases as well. I'm not some left-wing fruitcake; these are all problems we have the power to solve, but the money is being wasted on things like crop subsidies and space travel. If we're going to have big government we should at least do things right. Invading small countries doesn't bug me one bit, as long as it's not to install US-friendly dictators again.
I would be happier to pay higher taxes if it would solve world hunger and provide universal healthcare. Space exploration is basically just a national ego trip- which is not to say it's a bad thing, but it should be one of our lowest priorities.
If we're going to spend immense amounts of money on new modes of travel, we should figure out a way to make gas-burning automobiles obsolete.
IRIX has been like this for years. Same kernel runs on my Indigo and on a 1024-processor Origin 3000-series machine. With IBM's efforts, and with SGI working on running Linux on huge Itanium-based Origin machines, we may see this capability as standard Linux pretty soon. Weird clustering technologies aren't really useful to have in a stock kernel, but it'd be great to have support for any arbitrary number of CPUs without messy patches and recompiles.
This is what I suspect will happen- but not the companies, just people like Bezos or the eBay founders. The latter already know that one crank with the right patent might be able to stir up a huge amount of trouble. They'd be well advised to pour a huge amount of money into these cases just to make an example of PanIP. With the type of money the dotcom moguls have, they could have PanIP's lawyers begging in the street in a short time. This is how big companies work all the time- I think Slashdot linked to an article in Forbes about how IBM used to extort license fees through sheer force of lawyers. Only now the big companies aren't really the agressors.
It'd send a pretty neat message- "fuck with us and you're through." It's sort of disturbing though, since the patent system is supposed to help the little guys especially. Too bad the little guy is a sleazebag in this case.
Okay, that's fair. And I probably sounded way too harsh- I do think understanding HOW proteins fold is a great idea. Certainly some interesting work has been/is being done with prions as well, along similar lines. What I object to is the notion some uninformed people seem to hold that in a few years we'll routinely be guessing the structures of proteins correctly with computers. (I guess I read Slashdot too much, otherwise this might not bother me.) So my beef isn't (or shouldn't be) with this research, but with people who are participating in it for the wrong reasons.
Sorry if I sound like a loose cannon. No offense intended- I liked the paper, really.
That said, yes there is a long way to go on this, but its still a really clever paper. No we haven't cured cure cancer yet, but its still progress. And forget an in silico structure of the ATPase, that's largely understood already (check the RSCB/PDB [rcsb.org] there's a bunch). The real challenge will be getting a structure that size that hasn't been solved by other methods and convincing anyone else that you're right! Disclosure- I don't have PhD in this area yet, but I'm close.
Um, you sort of made my point for me. Crystallography is solving these structures now, and even if it isn't perfect it can do a hell of a lot more than the current computational techniques ever will. The range of structures that can be solved by this method keeps growing- less than a decade ago I doubt anyone thought structures for the potassium or chloride channels could be determined.
I'm sure computing power will make it easy to simulate giant structures, but I still think the science behind this isn't good enough. How do you deal with chaperonins, transmembrane helix formation, association of subunits, functional conformational changes. . . sorry, but by the time the computational chemists figure out how to deal with these there may not be much of a point. And there's a huge difference between fold and atomic structure.
Well, to be fair, I don't think Folding@Home is useless (like SETI), just not particularly useful. I'm mainly just disappointed that people haven't put a lot of effort into distributed computing projects that actually have immediate scientific applications, and instead go wild over these stunts. I'm also more than a little peeved that people with little or no knowledge of structural biology, physics, chemistry, or scientific computing keep talking about how great protein folding simulation is.
And, to give Pande some credit, I read the Nature paper and I thought it was interesting and a good proof-of-concept. I stand by my intial assessment of the long-term prospects of this kind of research, however.