I've seen added value. The lab I work in does some modelling of protein movements. We can use multigifs or MPEGs, but this limits the viewer to the angles we incorporate. With VRML, you can view the protein from any angle. This is something that is of interest to people in the field- I don't think standard molecular graphics packages support this type of application.
Unfortunately changing VRML standards have broken all our files, and we do not intend to replace it. All of our content is created automatically on a Linux server, ruling out pretty much any alternative (and many of our viewers will use non-Windows platforms). For a good idea what VRML can be used for, though, look at the Protein Data Bank website. Try '1tim' as the search key- click on the 'view structure' link. They've done a fabulous job with this.
I know one of the people in the article. He lives the next entryway over. My freshman year suitemate was providing funding. You have no idea how fucking hilarious this all is.
I agree with your point, but when these people were still hot shit, the media- especially, of course, the campus media- couldn't wait to get down on their knees in front of these guys. They had a launching party for their incubator at a nightclub. They were on cellphones all the time. They were quoted as saying that people like me were wasting their time with student jobs.
This was the attitude then, as published by an obnoxious grad student in our student paper:
Have you registered a domain name? Do you participate in online chats or bulletin boards? Do you shop online? Does your cellular phone browse web pages? You can no longer afford to be a step behind the technological bandwagon.
All I can say is, "Eat me." Most of these people are back among us mere mortals, often after burning through massive amounts of cash. Meanwhile, I've learned four programming languages, gotten my name on scientific articles, and been promoted to positions that at least pay enough to keep the fiendish coffe habit going. I haven't missed any semesters, either.
These guys were full of crap up to their ears, and the only people who realized this were the tech people like me who didn't see the value in sabotaging our educations to buy Aerons and Sun servers. All most of these people had was flair, connections, and Dreamweaver 4, and I couldn't be more delighted to see them get burned.
[ not posting my name, thank you, but if you go to the same school you'll know where I'm from ]
PS. Want a dorm-room dotcom that works? Create an e-commerce site to sell weed to fellow undergrads. Can't fail.
The boxed set of RedHat stuff comes with extra goodies like commercial software and *gasp* manuals. Most users consider this worthwhile. I'm honestly not sure if you're allowed to burn and resell copies of the commercial software CD, but the manuals are not free.
I'm sure Stallman is pissing himself over that, but it looks like this business model might actually work. At any rate, if OEMs buy the full version from RedHat they can distribute the standard labelled CDs, the manuals, etc. Regardless of how useful much of this is, it adds credibility and marketability to their product.
They could do this themselves, too- it's just often easier to "license" the extra goodies from RedHat. And if they actually pay a per-box license fee to RH, they're more likely to see their hardware supported better, etc.
I meant on commodity hardware, fuckwit. Dell, Compaq, IBM, HP, etc., not your $400 chop-shop piece of shit with Bob's Wicked Video II or whatever. And I meant for the OEMs to set up, not Joe Sixpack.
I've found 90% of users can't set up a Windows machine properly (or at all), so it's a moot point anyway. As a programmer, and user of 4 different OSes, Linux is by far the easiest for me to get working- and I assuredly know what I'm doing. Windows 98 worked so badly on my NEC laptop that I nuked the partition and added it to the RedHat system. I'm probably doing something wrong, but I don't care enough to find out what. Geeks, too, can be complacent and lazy.
I don't expect the MSCEs at PC manufacturers to have an easier time setting up Linux than Windows. But for someone with proper training- which is really just a matter of messing around with the system- Linux can be a breeze to set up. At this point it's effortless for me, the same way it's effortless for you to install Windows. Got it?
But the license is free. Most of the Windows installations I've used have been quite heavily customized anyway by the PC maker. For most standard desktop PC hardware Linux is about as straightforward to set up as Windows, if you know what you're doing. Most of the PC hardware I've ever dealt with took less time to get working under Linux than under Windows. ( the rest, of course, took weeks. ah well.)
Forgive me from bringing up TCO here, but this applies too. A company like IBM or Dell can afford to run their own distro- or just an enhanced RedHat/Debian/whatever- and finally they can control what software is preinstalled, what icons show up, etc. And there will be no fee to any OS manufacturer. Long term, this is probably quite a bit less expensive than the bulk OEM Windows licenses.
On the other hand, the Dells I've seen with Linux preinstalled appear to have shipped with the standard version of RedHat, i.e. $50, so there's not too much savings. I don't know what RedHat's deals with OEMs are- perhaps it's still cheaper than Windows, perhaps not. However, I'd guess the costs involved in setting up dual Windows/RedHat for all machines wouldn't be worth it, given the number of people who'd actually use the second OS.
Given that a =SINGLE= computer can handle billions of operations a second, exactly how long is it going to take to do a minimum energy computation?
A long time. The programs CNS and XPlor are the standards for refinement of crystallographic data, and the insanse structural biologists at my university/work will have jobs running for weeks on multiproc Alphas.
I suspect you have no clue what you're talking about, since you mixed up DNA and proteins in a later post, but you should actually try dealing with molecular dynamics, energy minimization, and structural biology before posting this garbage. Several points:
- XPLOR and CNS do energy minimization on partially solved protein structures. There is still years of work required to get these structures.
- Both programs are at least 100,000 lines of F77 code, without comments. I may be miscounting- I don't know Fortran (yet)- XPLOR looks a lot bigger.
- Parallelization hasn't really caught on- but they've definitely tried. It's easier with something like genome mapping- we're buying a cluster just for parallel sequence alignment. Shared-memory MPPs will almost certainly be more effective.
- Macromolecular simulations on known structures are still iffy. I'm starting to work with a database of simulations, and a large number are duds. This is for attempting to morph similar conformations- a far, far less intensive task than what you're proposing.
- The above programs all use "energy minimization". You're talking about "molecular dynamics", which is much harder.
- Many, many researchers are attempting to do exactly what you're talking about, and they're having about as much luck as you'd suspect. I'd imagine some of them are extremely capable programmers. Certainly they know quite a bit more biophysics than you do. This includes Big Pharma, by the way.
- IBM thinks they can do this. They're building the world's most powerful computer just for the task. Few organizations can afford this.
- You are vastly oversimplifying molecular dynamics with the ant/elephant bullshit. Modifications like glycosylation and helical packing may change structure quite a bit. Even if we could figure out the secondary structure correctly from amino acid sequences- which we can't with enough accuracy for real drug design- that doesn't tell how the loops turn and how the tertiary structure forms. It's not just a matter of local interactions- more like a hideously large backtracking algorithm, I'd say.
- Mapping protein-protein interactions is a different matter; at any rate, it currently requires high-resoltion crystal structures and is still computationally intensive. I believe co-crystallization is preferred.
[ disclaimer: I normally study genomics, and I'm still in college, so not everything I say is gospel. I do program though. Certainly none of this is as far off base as the drivel above. ]
Re:Informative - More like criminal action NOT
on
Hotmail Hacked
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Perhaps your middle school doesn't have email accounts and you have to use Hotmail, but the mere fact that you have a Hotmail account- which, apparently, you use at least for unimportant stuff- means Microsoft has one more user to brag about to advertisers. Obviously it isn't such a big piece of shit, or you'd use Yahoo! or some other free webmail service.
If you're really concerned about Microsoft's lack of security and quality control, don't buy their software or use their services. And it's the problem of millions of users like you who use Hotmail, many of whom either don't have much of a choice for email accounts or were using it before MS took over. Lastly, exploiting the flaw won't make them fix it any faster than they are right now. It'll just get criminal charges pressed against a few script kiddies, and rightly so.
Personally, I think anything beyond Pine is overkill. Not everyone is lucky enough to have email accounts on Unix servers, though. Passport sounds like an absurdly awful idea, but I don't think anyone could do it right. I'm worried about Microsoft taking over the Internet, but I don't think they'd necessarily do a worse job on Passport than, say, Sun. There's not a lot of practical work done so far involving such massive systems, and I don't think they've thought it through very clearly beyond the marketing department.
SGI effectively gives away their OS and you have to pay incredible prices for their hardware.
Aieeee! Don't I wish. Irix 6.5.11 = $600. Full MIPSpro compiler set = >$1000. (Support contract = firstborn child, but that's pretty standard)
I bought an Indigo2 online for $200. Fantastic machine- a supercomputer when it came out 8 years ago. Technology still superior to that in some modern PCs. Decent machine even today for my basic uses. But if I want to buy an OS so I can write papers and code and check email and NYTimes.com, I pay out the ass to SGI. Solution: borrow Irix from friendly sysadmins, or buy machine with "testing copy" preloaded.
*Sun* gives away the OS. SGI sadly has not seen any wisdom in this business model, making it difficult for hobbyists to enjoy these machines. They really are some of the best computers ever made, but there's just so much you can do with gcc and an outdated version of the OS. Which is really a shame, because most people who use Irix feel it is far superior to Linux as either a desktop or server platform, even aside from the limitations of PC hardware.
Re:Tech support load varies with configuration cou
on
Dorm Storm?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
No. My university only supports Windows and Macintosh on student machines. Our policy is that Linux is for people who know what they're doing. We won't do any setup- the basic network info can be deduced from Windows/Mac instructions.
On the other hand, we don't discourage Linux use. I've run Linux, Solaris, and now Irix from my dorm room, even though I only do Macintosh support (I've avoided Windows, thank god). You'll get nasty messages if you're insecure or sucking bandwidth, but there's no policy against Unix or even running (secured) servers. People just know not to call us for help because they can't get printing working under RedHat. It's not that hard.
And students usually pay for network access. The only fair rules are "don't make life difficult for other users or net admins". This means no bandwidth hogging, no warez/mp3z servers, no packet sniffing Linux boxes or trojaned Windows machines. As long as students play nice and don't fuck up the network, admins should not care what they run on it.
And in fact, we have proportionally far more network abuse (intentional or not) from Windows users than from anyone else. The few of us here who use Linux usually know what we're doing.
Re:Believe it or not...
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Dorm Storm?
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· Score: 2, Funny
Whoo boy. Glad to see I'm not the only one who was thinking this.
Once last semester I was stuck in my computer lab till about 1am on a Saturday night- not that I had anything better to do, but this was an unusually busy week. A girl I knew sent an email saying something to the effect of "I had this question you might be able to answer.... [etc] you should go out tonight!" Huh. So I reply, "Here's the answer. . . let me know if you're free later on, we could get something to eat."
I crawl back in my dorm room at 1:30, phone rings, it's this girl. We go out for ice cream. She's so stoned she can't walk straight. Why the fuck do I even bother? Sitting in front of a computer 8 hours straight on a Saturday may not be much of a social life, but I'd prefer to have conversations with conscious people. After that I pretty much gave up trying to have a social life at school.
Another time a girl asked me to fix her computer while her entire suite was preparing to go to a dance where "the less you wear, the less you pay." It sounds sort of sexy, except that she wouldn't ever have called if it didn't have anything to do with computers. I guess they figured I was gay or something and wouldn't mind.
I've always found the stereotype of guys who prefer computers to girls to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Jeez, if they don't care enough to ever hang out with me (while coherent), of course I'm going to sit in front of the computer and mope.
Not that I'm bitter, of course.:) Thank god I'm still not a CS major.
Re:Rogue DHCP Server
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Dorm Storm?
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· Score: 4, Funny
Not cool, dude.
At my university, a couple of years ago some idiot grad student thought he'd like to set up a Linux machine. This is one of the tools who thinks "hey, I know DOS- how different can Unix be?", the type who installs Linux because it's 133t. I believe he was running RedHat 5.2, which back then had some idiotic default configurations or some setup that made it very easy to run the DHCP daemon.
Oops. In one night at least 500 students lost network connectivity- and this was at the beginning of the school year when things were hellish anyway. My roommate noticed students' windows boxes showing "192.168.1.145" as their DHCP server. Of course pasting this into Netscape displayed the default Apache page. The network gods eventually figured out where he was and shut down his connection temporarily.
There's a reason we don't support Linux.:) [ even those of us who swear by it ]
I study bioinformatics. Back in the day, people used SGIs for this sort of work; now we mostly use Linux. We've been buying truckloads of those Dells (and now custom-assembling some Athlons) and they blow pretty much anything out of the water.
SGIs are good for very large, graphics-intensive "simulations" (e.g. modelling) because of high internal bandwidth. And those dual MIPS processors work together much better than your Pentium IIIs do. But for the tasks we do, x86 wastes pretty much anything.
It's a shame, becuase PC hardware and OSes are such shit. Even Linux- a far superior OS for our purposes than anything else- pales in comparison to IRIX. I suppose since the entire world is moving towards Intel chips, it's a good thing we've got Linux. If I ever get told to do Windows development I'll probably quit and go to med school or something.
I will. Crays are vector supercomputers, which is something entirely different from your garden-variety Intel or RISC chip. There are several different types of computer you need to consider in the sort of comparison you're making:
- Vector supercomputers. This includes Cray, and some by Fujitsu and Hitachi (perhaps NEC as well, but I think those are MIPS-based).
- Massively parallel shared-memory supercomputers. The IBM SP2 and SGI Origin 2000/3000 come to mind. You take two of these, plug them into eachother, and get one computer twice the size with (I think) virtually no loss of bandwidth. I'm pretty sure these can also be connected just for high-bandwidth communications, but the real advantage is in shared memory. Cray makes these too, and SGI's MPPs are largely based on Cray technology (hence the "CrayLink" on Origins).
- Distributed computers. Beowulf is just a set of patches (primarily to Linux) to make distributed-memory programming easier (e.g. utilizing multiple ethernet cards for higher bandwidth). You still have to write programs specially to take advantage of the machine.
The difference lies primarily in programming techniques. You can not run a simple multithreaded program that would saturate an SP2 or Origin on a Beowulf cluster. You'd have to re-write it with PVM or something. PVM is not difficult, but it's not transparent. Some Fortran 90 compilers will do automatic parallelization, but not for a distributed-memory system.
Basically, there's a hell of a lot more difference between a Cray and a Beowulf cluster than between the Beowulf cluster and the SETI@home network.
-Nat
( disclaimer- I am not a supercomputer programmer, but a lot of the people I work with are. I do know something about parallel code, however. )
The symphony I'm in right now (Yale's, so it's not a "real" orchestra, but good anyway) did The Planets my freshman year. The director decided to do the whole projector thing. Almost ruined the experience for me. Like, shit, it's an allegory... astrology, not astronomy.
Quite a few people notice the similarity- sort of surprising. My mom heard Mars for the first time and immediately said "Wow, John Williams owes Holst quite a bit." It's not so much the tunes as the textures, and chord structures. A friend once pointed out that the chords in the prelude to the third act of Wagner's Parsifal are used in the Imperial March- which, I think, is still Williams' best work. Unfortunately, this familiarity really is at the expense of Holst- everyone loves The Planets, but I think few would consider it as a true masterpiece because it's so associated with movie music (not necessarily SW) and with hymns, if you're British. I think it's one of the greatest pieces of music of the century- up there with "Rite of Spring", "Elektra", Shostakovich's 7th Symphony and 8th string quartet, and others that I can't think of because it's 1am. God, I'm such a nerd.
Other music that comes to mind is R. Strauss, Bruckner, and especially Stravinsky. Listen to "Rite of Spring" and then listen to any of the Tatooine music in ep. IV. Shostakovich, perhaps. The problem is, when you've played a lot of big romantic and modern symphonic works (and I'm in the bassoon section, so I get the full power of the brass in my ear), every movie soundtrack sounds like an older orchestral piece. Or vice-versa.
Pardon me if I blather. I've been in front of a computer for 16 hours and it's nice to be a different kind of geek for a while.
Fella, the reason you have a high standard of living is because, in the third world, people are working in factories or massive farms for 50 cents an hour and being beaten by security guards for complaining -- and the profits from the enterprise get sent to the USA.
Fair enough, but this has really only applied to the past fifty years- the post-colonial era. The USA emerged from WWII and the Depression as an economic superpower; it's a shame that so much of our continued development has been based on exploitation of the developing world- but much of this based on military expansion, not just global corporations. I think most of the type of abuses you're referring to are even more recent.
Most Americans don't see any of those profits; Nike may have their shoes made for $2 by impoverished Indonesian teenagers, but that doesn't make them cheaper for the consumer. It allows Nike to spend more money on endorsements from superstars [I refuse to buy Nike for this reason]. It sure as hell isn't helping my standard of living, though Michael Jordan and the Nike execs have done quite nicely from the deal.
Dude, put down the bong and chill out. You're making Stallman's interview responses sound reasonable and calm. I know the '60s were rough, but shit, man, it's time to move on.
By the way, the US is what we call a "mixed economy". Real communism places all property in trust of the government (which is really just "the working class"); real capitalism doesn't let the government take anyone's property. If the US were a true free-market capitalist economy there'd be no income taxes, a very small fed. gov't., and we'd probably all be working in factories or massive farms for 50 cents an hour and being beaten by security guards for complaining.
I may take it up the ass when they calculate my paycheck, and I may have to (gasp!) pay for the music I listen to, but I still enjoy one of the highest standards of living in the world. Works for me.
Yes, but most people want these features, and will be very happy with Microsoft for providing these "free of charge" with XP, letting them save money on all sorts of add-ons.
I'm a sort of 'roll-your-own' type of guy myself when it comes to Linux system administration; I'm used to battling relatively bare systems like Irix/Solaris and think that web servers, database servers, and OSes-masquerading-as-text-editors are best installed by hand (at least, I can tweak the Makefile instead of blindly typing 'rpm -i'). But I wouldn't be caught dead installing RedHat without XMMS, Netscape, GV, etc. If I had to pay extra for that shit I'd still be using Macintosh. I'm sure happy RedHat includes it, and I only wish they had an extra package for some more quality WindowMaker themes, or a license for some Digital Blasphemy backgrounds.
What's _wrong_, on the other hand, is breaking your competitors' products, forcing OEMs into nasty licensing agreements, springing audits and resultant massive fines on impoverished school districts. Somewhat less wrong, but equally anti-competitive, is supplying products to supplant your competitors by adding proprietary extensions that force greater dependence on MS products. Adding new, desirable features to the OS is not in itself a bad thing, though.
Microsoft is a genuinely nasty company but there are some valid points to be made about government regulation of "innovation", even on MS's low and uninspiring level, and the usefulness of integrated software. Prior existence of a themes company shouldn't preclude MS from building that into their OS; let Stardock compete on quality and features.
Jeez, my computer is an SGI Indigo2. I don't need concrete for security. Fucker weighs a ton already. Good thing I didn't go for a Crimson.
-Nat
Re:Translation of press release
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Adobe Backs Down
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· Score: 1
It might be illegal, immoral, largely redundant, and will lead to weak encryption that helps pirates and hurts legitimate users
Oh crap, hasn't anyone had basic Am. Gov't.? Or are you all still in high school? A law passed by US Congress is never "illegal", just possibly unconstitutional. A government agent or agency may act illegally, or congress might, but a law itself cannot be illegal. Like, duh.
And "immoral" is a poor term to use for a law. "Immoral" might be, say, imprisoning Japanese civilians or castrating persons of low IQ, but certainly not depriving us of fair use rights. You're also assuming prior knowledge of the effect of the DMCA on free speech. Knowing our Congress, do you really think anyone thought twice about the results of the law, other than stopping piracy and protecting copyright holders (both good things, in most peoples' minds)? It's just plain stupidity, not immorality.
Acrobat does blow, though. I am not happy with Distiller. Way to fuck up line art, guys.
There's some point to that babbling. Taking advantage of scientific breakthroughs without years of experience and failure can be dangerous. An assortment of no-namers and hacks are trying to clone humans now, with little or no thought for the results- only for the notoriety. Unfortunately these attempts are likely to fail disasterously, and public opinion will be so inflamed that useful research involving somatic cell nuclear transfer and genomic manipulation will be in trouble as a result of a thoroughly useless and risky investigation.
Similar thing in the book. They've got the technology to make dinosaurs, so they go nuts and build a theme park with barely any study. That's not _real_ science.
Anyway, I just say a high-quality MPEG (with Chinese subtitles) of JP3. Not so great, but if certain characters had been munched I'd have enjoyed it a lot more. Sam Neill is always a pleasure, at least.
Remember, the character in the book is totally different. I read an article (part of a larger book about Hollywood vs. history) by Stephen Jay Gould that described this quite nicely: basically, Crichton's Ian Malcolm is ranting about how the park system is too complex, how the science and technology involved is beyond current understanding- thus it's inevitable that something will fail, because "shit happens."
In the movie, however, it's "life will find a way", the usual Hollywood BS about the limitations of human endeavor, arrogant scientists destroying us all, etc. The point is _totally_ changed into something Joe Sixpack and the scriptwriters can understand. There's a world of difference between these worldviews, which most people miss- it's the single largest difference between the book and the movie.
By the way, you should watch "Silverado", a mid-80s western (along with "Unforgiven", one of the few great movies in the genre to come out in the last 20 years). It's got a superb cast (Kevin Kline, Danny Glover, Scott Glenn, Kevin Costner, Brian Dennehy, etc.), and Jeff Goldblum plays a very oily bad guy. Much different.
Okay...
Well, the CIA hasn't butchered American civilians. And I'd classify W. as a lout, not a thug. Furthermore, Gore would have stolen the election if he could have- let's give credit where credit is due. You're approaching this from the "paranoid Democratic" point of view; I'm inclined to agree, but try to look at it objectively.
"Banana republic"? Again, you know nothing about world affairs- take a closer look at the history of Central America in the past 30 years, and you'll see what a banana republic is like. How many South American countries have not suffered civil war, Marxist rebels, or military juntas in that period.
Hoffa? I thought the Mafia got him. And organized labor is far stronger than it's ever been- or at least doesn't have to worry about the army and police being used to break strikes.
Why do you bring up Scopes? You should realize that's a virtual non-issue- creationists are on the run. The Kansas school board has recanted, and several of the most influential right-wingers were kicked out in the last election. Read fucking CNN, for God's sake.
I am paying attention. I read the NY Times article about Florida too. I've read quite a few books on the religious right. I voted for McCain in the primaries and Gore in the general, but your characterizations of the Bushes are far more pessimistic and inflammatory than is called for.
I'm not claiming there are no threats to our liberty, or that the US is one big happy free-thinking paradise. I stand by my original point: the Constitution almost always prevails.
We are no longer the land of the free. For your own safety, stay out.
Horseshit. Few other countries have legal precedents and a bill of rights as strong as ours. The DMCA and related court decisions are pretty sorry pieces of work that fly in the face of established precedent- as Touretsky points out. I doubt much of the current nonsense would survive a Supreme Court challenge, even with the current collection of sociopaths on the bench.
Just get a fucking clue and take a look elsewhere in the world. Say, Russia, where a former KGB thug became president and is trying to suppress independent media (makes W. look stellar). Or Italy, where journalists, online or not, must be "registered" and regulated. Or France, which forces US sites to tailor their content for French IP addresses. Or the Third World, where US companies- freed from our watchful government and Constitution- have dissidents murdered (Nigeria) or ethnic minorities massacred (Myanmar) by the local despots to pave the way for new pipelines. Or China, where you can get shot in the head and harvested for organs for - guess what?- tax evasion.
I'll admit the US record on civil rights and liberties is spotty at best. In few cases, however, has the moral high ground failed to win. An innocent black man beaten by police nearly 40 years ago is now a congressman. Pornography is legally protected in most cases. Sure, the corpos would eat us alive if they could, and the Right is pushing filtering in libraries, prayer in schools, and closeting of gays. I'm confident none of this will last long enough to do real damage- can't say I'd feel so great about Europe in similar cases.
The DMCA should of course piss everyone off. It's hardly on par with, say, Jim Crow, sedition laws, local theocracies, internment camps, etc., all of which our country has suffered through and survived with stronger freedoms. So pull your head out of your ass, read some history and world news, and be very thankful you live in a country where you can wail about the DMCA all you want.
I don't think of Sun as a parasite. They've been supportive of Java under Linux, and more importantly, they're pretty open about letting people look at the Java source, write their own compilers/VMs, etc. And aren't they supporting Ximian or GNOME in general, as part of replacing CDE on Solaris 9?
I can't think of any reason for Sun to GPL Solaris, though. Different market entirely, even though they're shooting for the low end. Even under relatively restrictive licenses, viewable source code is valuable- prevents the kind of single-vendor lock-in nightmares caused by Microsoft, and allows users to customize systems to a greater degree. My school uses Solaris for a number of central servers, with a number of customized apps, and a friend who used to adminster them says being able to access the source would be helpful, if not essential.
Anyway, I've never taken advantage of the "freedoms" under the GPL/BSD licenses. I just think it's a good thing any time a company decides to be more open and responsive with its products, and stops treating its users like the enemy.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen added value. The lab I work in does some modelling of protein movements. We can use multigifs or MPEGs, but this limits the viewer to the angles we incorporate. With VRML, you can view the protein from any angle. This is something that is of interest to people in the field- I don't think standard molecular graphics packages support this type of application.
Unfortunately changing VRML standards have broken all our files, and we do not intend to replace it. All of our content is created automatically on a Linux server, ruling out pretty much any alternative (and many of our viewers will use non-Windows platforms). For a good idea what VRML can be used for, though, look at the Protein Data Bank website. Try '1tim' as the search key- click on the 'view structure' link. They've done a fabulous job with this.
I agree with your point, but when these people were still hot shit, the media- especially, of course, the campus media- couldn't wait to get down on their knees in front of these guys. They had a launching party for their incubator at a nightclub. They were on cellphones all the time. They were quoted as saying that people like me were wasting their time with student jobs.
This was the attitude then, as published by an obnoxious grad student in our student paper:
All I can say is, "Eat me." Most of these people are back among us mere mortals, often after burning through massive amounts of cash. Meanwhile, I've learned four programming languages, gotten my name on scientific articles, and been promoted to positions that at least pay enough to keep the fiendish coffe habit going. I haven't missed any semesters, either.
These guys were full of crap up to their ears, and the only people who realized this were the tech people like me who didn't see the value in sabotaging our educations to buy Aerons and Sun servers. All most of these people had was flair, connections, and Dreamweaver 4, and I couldn't be more delighted to see them get burned.
[ not posting my name, thank you, but if you go to the same school you'll know where I'm from ]
PS. Want a dorm-room dotcom that works? Create an e-commerce site to sell weed to fellow undergrads. Can't fail.
The boxed set of RedHat stuff comes with extra goodies like commercial software and *gasp* manuals. Most users consider this worthwhile. I'm honestly not sure if you're allowed to burn and resell copies of the commercial software CD, but the manuals are not free.
I'm sure Stallman is pissing himself over that, but it looks like this business model might actually work. At any rate, if OEMs buy the full version from RedHat they can distribute the standard labelled CDs, the manuals, etc. Regardless of how useful much of this is, it adds credibility and marketability to their product.
They could do this themselves, too- it's just often easier to "license" the extra goodies from RedHat. And if they actually pay a per-box license fee to RH, they're more likely to see their hardware supported better, etc.
Give me a fucking break.
I meant on commodity hardware, fuckwit. Dell, Compaq, IBM, HP, etc., not your $400 chop-shop piece of shit with Bob's Wicked Video II or whatever. And I meant for the OEMs to set up, not Joe Sixpack.
I've found 90% of users can't set up a Windows machine properly (or at all), so it's a moot point anyway. As a programmer, and user of 4 different OSes, Linux is by far the easiest for me to get working- and I assuredly know what I'm doing. Windows 98 worked so badly on my NEC laptop that I nuked the partition and added it to the RedHat system. I'm probably doing something wrong, but I don't care enough to find out what. Geeks, too, can be complacent and lazy.
I don't expect the MSCEs at PC manufacturers to have an easier time setting up Linux than Windows. But for someone with proper training- which is really just a matter of messing around with the system- Linux can be a breeze to set up. At this point it's effortless for me, the same way it's effortless for you to install Windows. Got it?
But the license is free. Most of the Windows installations I've used have been quite heavily customized anyway by the PC maker. For most standard desktop PC hardware Linux is about as straightforward to set up as Windows, if you know what you're doing. Most of the PC hardware I've ever dealt with took less time to get working under Linux than under Windows. ( the rest, of course, took weeks. ah well.)
Forgive me from bringing up TCO here, but this applies too. A company like IBM or Dell can afford to run their own distro- or just an enhanced RedHat/Debian/whatever- and finally they can control what software is preinstalled, what icons show up, etc. And there will be no fee to any OS manufacturer. Long term, this is probably quite a bit less expensive than the bulk OEM Windows licenses.
On the other hand, the Dells I've seen with Linux preinstalled appear to have shipped with the standard version of RedHat, i.e. $50, so there's not too much savings. I don't know what RedHat's deals with OEMs are- perhaps it's still cheaper than Windows, perhaps not. However, I'd guess the costs involved in setting up dual Windows/RedHat for all machines wouldn't be worth it, given the number of people who'd actually use the second OS.
Given that a =SINGLE= computer can handle billions of operations a second, exactly how long is it going to take to do a minimum energy computation?
A long time. The programs CNS and XPlor are the standards for refinement of crystallographic data, and the insanse structural biologists at my university/work will have jobs running for weeks on multiproc Alphas.
I suspect you have no clue what you're talking about, since you mixed up DNA and proteins in a later post, but you should actually try dealing with molecular dynamics, energy minimization, and structural biology before posting this garbage. Several points:
- XPLOR and CNS do energy minimization on partially solved protein structures. There is still years of work required to get these structures.
- Both programs are at least 100,000 lines of F77 code, without comments. I may be miscounting- I don't know Fortran (yet)- XPLOR looks a lot bigger.
- Parallelization hasn't really caught on- but they've definitely tried. It's easier with something like genome mapping- we're buying a cluster just for parallel sequence alignment. Shared-memory MPPs will almost certainly be more effective.
- Macromolecular simulations on known structures are still iffy. I'm starting to work with a database of simulations, and a large number are duds. This is for attempting to morph similar conformations- a far, far less intensive task than what you're proposing.
- The above programs all use "energy minimization". You're talking about "molecular dynamics", which is much harder.
- Many, many researchers are attempting to do exactly what you're talking about, and they're having about as much luck as you'd suspect. I'd imagine some of them are extremely capable programmers. Certainly they know quite a bit more biophysics than you do. This includes Big Pharma, by the way.
- IBM thinks they can do this. They're building the world's most powerful computer just for the task. Few organizations can afford this.
- You are vastly oversimplifying molecular dynamics with the ant/elephant bullshit. Modifications like glycosylation and helical packing may change structure quite a bit. Even if we could figure out the secondary structure correctly from amino acid sequences- which we can't with enough accuracy for real drug design- that doesn't tell how the loops turn and how the tertiary structure forms. It's not just a matter of local interactions- more like a hideously large backtracking algorithm, I'd say.
- Mapping protein-protein interactions is a different matter; at any rate, it currently requires high-resoltion crystal structures and is still computationally intensive. I believe co-crystallization is preferred.
[ disclaimer: I normally study genomics, and I'm still in college, so not everything I say is gospel. I do program though. Certainly none of this is as far off base as the drivel above. ]
Perhaps your middle school doesn't have email accounts and you have to use Hotmail, but the mere fact that you have a Hotmail account- which, apparently, you use at least for unimportant stuff- means Microsoft has one more user to brag about to advertisers. Obviously it isn't such a big piece of shit, or you'd use Yahoo! or some other free webmail service.
If you're really concerned about Microsoft's lack of security and quality control, don't buy their software or use their services. And it's the problem of millions of users like you who use Hotmail, many of whom either don't have much of a choice for email accounts or were using it before MS took over. Lastly, exploiting the flaw won't make them fix it any faster than they are right now. It'll just get criminal charges pressed against a few script kiddies, and rightly so.
Personally, I think anything beyond Pine is overkill. Not everyone is lucky enough to have email accounts on Unix servers, though. Passport sounds like an absurdly awful idea, but I don't think anyone could do it right. I'm worried about Microsoft taking over the Internet, but I don't think they'd necessarily do a worse job on Passport than, say, Sun. There's not a lot of practical work done so far involving such massive systems, and I don't think they've thought it through very clearly beyond the marketing department.
SGI effectively gives away their OS and you have to pay incredible prices for their hardware.
Aieeee! Don't I wish. Irix 6.5.11 = $600. Full MIPSpro compiler set = >$1000. (Support contract = firstborn child, but that's pretty standard)
I bought an Indigo2 online for $200. Fantastic machine- a supercomputer when it came out 8 years ago. Technology still superior to that in some modern PCs. Decent machine even today for my basic uses. But if I want to buy an OS so I can write papers and code and check email and NYTimes.com, I pay out the ass to SGI. Solution: borrow Irix from friendly sysadmins, or buy machine with "testing copy" preloaded.
*Sun* gives away the OS. SGI sadly has not seen any wisdom in this business model, making it difficult for hobbyists to enjoy these machines. They really are some of the best computers ever made, but there's just so much you can do with gcc and an outdated version of the OS. Which is really a shame, because most people who use Irix feel it is far superior to Linux as either a desktop or server platform, even aside from the limitations of PC hardware.
No. My university only supports Windows and Macintosh on student machines. Our policy is that Linux is for people who know what they're doing. We won't do any setup- the basic network info can be deduced from Windows/Mac instructions.
On the other hand, we don't discourage Linux use. I've run Linux, Solaris, and now Irix from my dorm room, even though I only do Macintosh support (I've avoided Windows, thank god). You'll get nasty messages if you're insecure or sucking bandwidth, but there's no policy against Unix or even running (secured) servers. People just know not to call us for help because they can't get printing working under RedHat. It's not that hard.
And students usually pay for network access. The only fair rules are "don't make life difficult for other users or net admins". This means no bandwidth hogging, no warez/mp3z servers, no packet sniffing Linux boxes or trojaned Windows machines. As long as students play nice and don't fuck up the network, admins should not care what they run on it.
And in fact, we have proportionally far more network abuse (intentional or not) from Windows users than from anyone else. The few of us here who use Linux usually know what we're doing.
Whoo boy. Glad to see I'm not the only one who was thinking this.
:) Thank god I'm still not a CS major.
Once last semester I was stuck in my computer lab till about 1am on a Saturday night- not that I had anything better to do, but this was an unusually busy week. A girl I knew sent an email saying something to the effect of "I had this question you might be able to answer.... [etc] you should go out tonight!" Huh. So I reply, "Here's the answer. . . let me know if you're free later on, we could get something to eat."
I crawl back in my dorm room at 1:30, phone rings, it's this girl. We go out for ice cream. She's so stoned she can't walk straight. Why the fuck do I even bother? Sitting in front of a computer 8 hours straight on a Saturday may not be much of a social life, but I'd prefer to have conversations with conscious people. After that I pretty much gave up trying to have a social life at school.
Another time a girl asked me to fix her computer while her entire suite was preparing to go to a dance where "the less you wear, the less you pay." It sounds sort of sexy, except that she wouldn't ever have called if it didn't have anything to do with computers. I guess they figured I was gay or something and wouldn't mind.
I've always found the stereotype of guys who prefer computers to girls to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Jeez, if they don't care enough to ever hang out with me (while coherent), of course I'm going to sit in front of the computer and mope.
Not that I'm bitter, of course.
Not cool, dude.
:) [ even those of us who swear by it ]
At my university, a couple of years ago some idiot grad student thought he'd like to set up a Linux machine. This is one of the tools who thinks "hey, I know DOS- how different can Unix be?", the type who installs Linux because it's 133t. I believe he was running RedHat 5.2, which back then had some idiotic default configurations or some setup that made it very easy to run the DHCP daemon.
Oops. In one night at least 500 students lost network connectivity- and this was at the beginning of the school year when things were hellish anyway. My roommate noticed students' windows boxes showing "192.168.1.145" as their DHCP server. Of course pasting this into Netscape displayed the default Apache page. The network gods eventually figured out where he was and shut down his connection temporarily.
There's a reason we don't support Linux.
-Nat
I study bioinformatics. Back in the day, people used SGIs for this sort of work; now we mostly use Linux. We've been buying truckloads of those Dells (and now custom-assembling some Athlons) and they blow pretty much anything out of the water.
SGIs are good for very large, graphics-intensive "simulations" (e.g. modelling) because of high internal bandwidth. And those dual MIPS processors work together much better than your Pentium IIIs do. But for the tasks we do, x86 wastes pretty much anything.
It's a shame, becuase PC hardware and OSes are such shit. Even Linux- a far superior OS for our purposes than anything else- pales in comparison to IRIX. I suppose since the entire world is moving towards Intel chips, it's a good thing we've got Linux. If I ever get told to do Windows development I'll probably quit and go to med school or something.
-Nat
I won't waste my breath.
I will. Crays are vector supercomputers, which is something entirely different from your garden-variety Intel or RISC chip. There are several different types of computer you need to consider in the sort of comparison you're making:
- Vector supercomputers. This includes Cray, and some by Fujitsu and Hitachi (perhaps NEC as well, but I think those are MIPS-based).
- Massively parallel shared-memory supercomputers. The IBM SP2 and SGI Origin 2000/3000 come to mind. You take two of these, plug them into eachother, and get one computer twice the size with (I think) virtually no loss of bandwidth. I'm pretty sure these can also be connected just for high-bandwidth communications, but the real advantage is in shared memory. Cray makes these too, and SGI's MPPs are largely based on Cray technology (hence the "CrayLink" on Origins).
- Distributed computers. Beowulf is just a set of patches (primarily to Linux) to make distributed-memory programming easier (e.g. utilizing multiple ethernet cards for higher bandwidth). You still have to write programs specially to take advantage of the machine.
The difference lies primarily in programming techniques. You can not run a simple multithreaded program that would saturate an SP2 or Origin on a Beowulf cluster. You'd have to re-write it with PVM or something. PVM is not difficult, but it's not transparent. Some Fortran 90 compilers will do automatic parallelization, but not for a distributed-memory system.
Basically, there's a hell of a lot more difference between a Cray and a Beowulf cluster than between the Beowulf cluster and the SETI@home network.
-Nat
( disclaimer- I am not a supercomputer programmer, but a lot of the people I work with are. I do know something about parallel code, however. )
Hell yeah!
The symphony I'm in right now (Yale's, so it's not a "real" orchestra, but good anyway) did The Planets my freshman year. The director decided to do the whole projector thing. Almost ruined the experience for me. Like, shit, it's an allegory... astrology, not astronomy.
Quite a few people notice the similarity- sort of surprising. My mom heard Mars for the first time and immediately said "Wow, John Williams owes Holst quite a bit." It's not so much the tunes as the textures, and chord structures. A friend once pointed out that the chords in the prelude to the third act of Wagner's Parsifal are used in the Imperial March- which, I think, is still Williams' best work. Unfortunately, this familiarity really is at the expense of Holst- everyone loves The Planets, but I think few would consider it as a true masterpiece because it's so associated with movie music (not necessarily SW) and with hymns, if you're British. I think it's one of the greatest pieces of music of the century- up there with "Rite of Spring", "Elektra", Shostakovich's 7th Symphony and 8th string quartet, and others that I can't think of because it's 1am. God, I'm such a nerd.
Other music that comes to mind is R. Strauss, Bruckner, and especially Stravinsky. Listen to "Rite of Spring" and then listen to any of the Tatooine music in ep. IV. Shostakovich, perhaps. The problem is, when you've played a lot of big romantic and modern symphonic works (and I'm in the bassoon section, so I get the full power of the brass in my ear), every movie soundtrack sounds like an older orchestral piece. Or vice-versa.
Pardon me if I blather. I've been in front of a computer for 16 hours and it's nice to be a different kind of geek for a while.
-Nat
Fella, the reason you have a high standard of living is because, in the third world, people are working in factories or massive farms for 50 cents an hour and being beaten by security guards for complaining -- and the profits from the enterprise get sent to the USA.
Fair enough, but this has really only applied to the past fifty years- the post-colonial era. The USA emerged from WWII and the Depression as an economic superpower; it's a shame that so much of our continued development has been based on exploitation of the developing world- but much of this based on military expansion, not just global corporations. I think most of the type of abuses you're referring to are even more recent.
Most Americans don't see any of those profits; Nike may have their shoes made for $2 by impoverished Indonesian teenagers, but that doesn't make them cheaper for the consumer. It allows Nike to spend more money on endorsements from superstars [I refuse to buy Nike for this reason]. It sure as hell isn't helping my standard of living, though Michael Jordan and the Nike execs have done quite nicely from the deal.
Dude, put down the bong and chill out. You're making Stallman's interview responses sound reasonable and calm. I know the '60s were rough, but shit, man, it's time to move on.
By the way, the US is what we call a "mixed economy". Real communism places all property in trust of the government (which is really just "the working class"); real capitalism doesn't let the government take anyone's property. If the US were a true free-market capitalist economy there'd be no income taxes, a very small fed. gov't., and we'd probably all be working in factories or massive farms for 50 cents an hour and being beaten by security guards for complaining.
I may take it up the ass when they calculate my paycheck, and I may have to (gasp!) pay for the music I listen to, but I still enjoy one of the highest standards of living in the world. Works for me.
-Nat
Yes, but most people want these features, and will be very happy with Microsoft for providing these "free of charge" with XP, letting them save money on all sorts of add-ons.
I'm a sort of 'roll-your-own' type of guy myself when it comes to Linux system administration; I'm used to battling relatively bare systems like Irix/Solaris and think that web servers, database servers, and OSes-masquerading-as-text-editors are best installed by hand (at least, I can tweak the Makefile instead of blindly typing 'rpm -i'). But I wouldn't be caught dead installing RedHat without XMMS, Netscape, GV, etc. If I had to pay extra for that shit I'd still be using Macintosh. I'm sure happy RedHat includes it, and I only wish they had an extra package for some more quality WindowMaker themes, or a license for some Digital Blasphemy backgrounds.
What's _wrong_, on the other hand, is breaking your competitors' products, forcing OEMs into nasty licensing agreements, springing audits and resultant massive fines on impoverished school districts. Somewhat less wrong, but equally anti-competitive, is supplying products to supplant your competitors by adding proprietary extensions that force greater dependence on MS products. Adding new, desirable features to the OS is not in itself a bad thing, though.
Microsoft is a genuinely nasty company but there are some valid points to be made about government regulation of "innovation", even on MS's low and uninspiring level, and the usefulness of integrated software. Prior existence of a themes company shouldn't preclude MS from building that into their OS; let Stardock compete on quality and features.
-Nat
Jeez, my computer is an SGI Indigo2. I don't need concrete for security. Fucker weighs a ton already. Good thing I didn't go for a Crimson.
-Nat
It might be illegal, immoral, largely redundant, and will lead to weak encryption that helps pirates and hurts legitimate users
Oh crap, hasn't anyone had basic Am. Gov't.? Or are you all still in high school? A law passed by US Congress is never "illegal", just possibly unconstitutional. A government agent or agency may act illegally, or congress might, but a law itself cannot be illegal. Like, duh.
And "immoral" is a poor term to use for a law. "Immoral" might be, say, imprisoning Japanese civilians or castrating persons of low IQ, but certainly not depriving us of fair use rights. You're also assuming prior knowledge of the effect of the DMCA on free speech. Knowing our Congress, do you really think anyone thought twice about the results of the law, other than stopping piracy and protecting copyright holders (both good things, in most peoples' minds)? It's just plain stupidity, not immorality.
Acrobat does blow, though. I am not happy with Distiller. Way to fuck up line art, guys.
-Nat
There's some point to that babbling. Taking advantage of scientific breakthroughs without years of experience and failure can be dangerous. An assortment of no-namers and hacks are trying to clone humans now, with little or no thought for the results- only for the notoriety. Unfortunately these attempts are likely to fail disasterously, and public opinion will be so inflamed that useful research involving somatic cell nuclear transfer and genomic manipulation will be in trouble as a result of a thoroughly useless and risky investigation.
Similar thing in the book. They've got the technology to make dinosaurs, so they go nuts and build a theme park with barely any study. That's not _real_ science.
Anyway, I just say a high-quality MPEG (with Chinese subtitles) of JP3. Not so great, but if certain characters had been munched I'd have enjoyed it a lot more. Sam Neill is always a pleasure, at least.
There's a world of difference between these worldviews
God, college has destroyed my writing skills. I should just stick to Perl.
-Nat
Remember, the character in the book is totally different. I read an article (part of a larger book about Hollywood vs. history) by Stephen Jay Gould that described this quite nicely: basically, Crichton's Ian Malcolm is ranting about how the park system is too complex, how the science and technology involved is beyond current understanding- thus it's inevitable that something will fail, because "shit happens."
In the movie, however, it's "life will find a way", the usual Hollywood BS about the limitations of human endeavor, arrogant scientists destroying us all, etc. The point is _totally_ changed into something Joe Sixpack and the scriptwriters can understand. There's a world of difference between these worldviews, which most people miss- it's the single largest difference between the book and the movie.
By the way, you should watch "Silverado", a mid-80s western (along with "Unforgiven", one of the few great movies in the genre to come out in the last 20 years). It's got a superb cast (Kevin Kline, Danny Glover, Scott Glenn, Kevin Costner, Brian Dennehy, etc.), and Jeff Goldblum plays a very oily bad guy. Much different.
-Nat
Okay... Well, the CIA hasn't butchered American civilians. And I'd classify W. as a lout, not a thug. Furthermore, Gore would have stolen the election if he could have- let's give credit where credit is due. You're approaching this from the "paranoid Democratic" point of view; I'm inclined to agree, but try to look at it objectively. "Banana republic"? Again, you know nothing about world affairs- take a closer look at the history of Central America in the past 30 years, and you'll see what a banana republic is like. How many South American countries have not suffered civil war, Marxist rebels, or military juntas in that period. Hoffa? I thought the Mafia got him. And organized labor is far stronger than it's ever been- or at least doesn't have to worry about the army and police being used to break strikes. Why do you bring up Scopes? You should realize that's a virtual non-issue- creationists are on the run. The Kansas school board has recanted, and several of the most influential right-wingers were kicked out in the last election. Read fucking CNN, for God's sake. I am paying attention. I read the NY Times article about Florida too. I've read quite a few books on the religious right. I voted for McCain in the primaries and Gore in the general, but your characterizations of the Bushes are far more pessimistic and inflammatory than is called for. I'm not claiming there are no threats to our liberty, or that the US is one big happy free-thinking paradise. I stand by my original point: the Constitution almost always prevails.
We are no longer the land of the free. For your own safety, stay out.
Horseshit. Few other countries have legal precedents and a bill of rights as strong as ours. The DMCA and related court decisions are pretty sorry pieces of work that fly in the face of established precedent- as Touretsky points out. I doubt much of the current nonsense would survive a Supreme Court challenge, even with the current collection of sociopaths on the bench.
Just get a fucking clue and take a look elsewhere in the world. Say, Russia, where a former KGB thug became president and is trying to suppress independent media (makes W. look stellar). Or Italy, where journalists, online or not, must be "registered" and regulated. Or France, which forces US sites to tailor their content for French IP addresses. Or the Third World, where US companies- freed from our watchful government and Constitution- have dissidents murdered (Nigeria) or ethnic minorities massacred (Myanmar) by the local despots to pave the way for new pipelines. Or China, where you can get shot in the head and harvested for organs for - guess what?- tax evasion.
I'll admit the US record on civil rights and liberties is spotty at best. In few cases, however, has the moral high ground failed to win. An innocent black man beaten by police nearly 40 years ago is now a congressman. Pornography is legally protected in most cases. Sure, the corpos would eat us alive if they could, and the Right is pushing filtering in libraries, prayer in schools, and closeting of gays. I'm confident none of this will last long enough to do real damage- can't say I'd feel so great about Europe in similar cases.
The DMCA should of course piss everyone off. It's hardly on par with, say, Jim Crow, sedition laws, local theocracies, internment camps, etc., all of which our country has suffered through and survived with stronger freedoms. So pull your head out of your ass, read some history and world news, and be very thankful you live in a country where you can wail about the DMCA all you want.
-Nat
I don't think of Sun as a parasite. They've been supportive of Java under Linux, and more importantly, they're pretty open about letting people look at the Java source, write their own compilers/VMs, etc. And aren't they supporting Ximian or GNOME in general, as part of replacing CDE on Solaris 9?
I can't think of any reason for Sun to GPL Solaris, though. Different market entirely, even though they're shooting for the low end. Even under relatively restrictive licenses, viewable source code is valuable- prevents the kind of single-vendor lock-in nightmares caused by Microsoft, and allows users to customize systems to a greater degree. My school uses Solaris for a number of central servers, with a number of customized apps, and a friend who used to adminster them says being able to access the source would be helpful, if not essential.
Anyway, I've never taken advantage of the "freedoms" under the GPL/BSD licenses. I just think it's a good thing any time a company decides to be more open and responsive with its products, and stops treating its users like the enemy.