And the quickest way would be to just click Terminal on the launcher. I'm not sure what your point is. Whether the search box or tab completion is quicker isn't the point I was making. If you have a preferred workflow, fine, whatever. The point I'm making is that functionality exists in the new system that didn't in the old system. You don't need to use a terminal with tab completion now because of the search box. It is more discoverable than a menu system. Should Terminal be under System|Administration, Applications|System Tools, Applications|Accessories (I've seen it placed in all three)? You may have been happy with what you had before because you knew where everything was and exactly what you needed, but that doesn't mean the developers of Unity/Gnome3 were "retarded".
Uh, yeah, except the part where applications are still organized into categories, where they can be sorted in various ways (most frequently used, most recently installed, etc), and where the text searching applies to the description and.desktop information as well as the name (so that you can find things like Pithos when you search for "music"). Of course you already know that, right? Because you've actually used the interface you are criticizing?
Well, the problem is at some point both the Gnome project and Canonical decided a UI revamp was necessary, and they came up with Gnome 3 and Unity. This is on top of major structural and API changes as well. It's like Win 7 vs. XP. The only way to accommodate what you are asking for is to either:
1) Never change the UI (ie: the point the GP was making, that you don't like "new") 2) Maintain both the old and the new UI, backporting any core changes to the old UI (doubling the work of the already thin developer core).
Both are, of course, ridiculous. You have to be able to evolve the desktop. Personally, I like the changes. There are bugs and rough spots for sure, but I can get my work done faster and more efficiently in general. If what you really want to maintain is the old desktop "paradigm", there are a lot of Gnome 2 alternatives that will continue to be maintained into the future (ex: Xfce). Gnome applications, however, will evolve to have Gnome 3 dependencies. That is just inevitable.
What are you guys talking about? Have any of you actually used Unity/Gnome3?
First of all to answer the parent, if you know what you want, I think typing "Te" into the search box and selecting "Terminal" is much faster than navigating a menu structure. I don't see how that is retarded at all. In fact, it has been a feature of Spotlight on OS X for quite a while.
To get to the OPs question, which is what to do if you don't know what you want, the interface is still discoverable. You can do this in two ways. You can either type what you think you want, like "word" or "office" to get the Libreoffice writer. Or if you really don't know what you want, you can click applications, and expand the filter results menu to see the applications organized by categories.
So, in other words, this is about learning a new interface, which is relatively simple. Some people don't want to, obviously, but just because you have to learn something new doesn't mean it is retarded.
Yes, you're talking about an attitude, completely unsubstantiated by anything except a fictional tv show and your own (obvious) bias.
Anyway, it's not that hard to dig up an incriminating post from somewhere in the past simply to make the point that somebody is an asshole if you dislike them enough. Surely that would be quite easy to do for Linus or any of the other kernel developers. But, of course, any single post is not the whole story.
I don't really believe your assertion that Con Kolivas "did not use linux for anything but testing." The whole motivation behind his work was to make linux work better for him, on the desktop. You know, one of the major heralded benefits of open source software--you can scratch your own itch. Yes, you're probably right, he might not have understood the implications of some of his patches. But it is clear from the history of the patches that the major problem was a difference in approach and priorities. Linus wanted (and still wants, btw), an "elegant" approach. One that would seamlessly anticipate and adjust for different workloads. Con did not think that would work, and demonstrated it with his benchmarks. Flaming ensued. Furthermore, the clear priority of linux up to that point (and largely still now) was to support server and computational workloads, not desktop interactivity. So the benchmarks the kernel devs were using weren't testing for desktop interactivity. That was another of the major points Con made. More flaming ensued.
To say that he was "stabbing in the dark", "a newbie", and "he didn't give a shit" I think are precarious accusations. He didn't have the experience of Linus or Ingo, nobody does, but that doesn't (shouldn't) affect the value of his attempted contribution.
Wow, I'm not sure which is more shocking about this post: the fact that you seem to think House reflects reality in some way (note: the director of the show describes it more as a philosophical playground than a medi-drama), or the double whammy where you not only attribute Con Kolivas' conflicts with his "thinking he's an expert" but also that "he thinks he's an expert because he's a doctor!" Seriously, wtf?
The Con Kolivas flame war will probably go down as a historic one in kernel-lore, but it is completely unfair and dishonest to say that Linus and Ingo were the benevolent and faultless gatekeepers, and the fault was entirely Con's. Con Kolivas wanted desktop performance to be better. He wrote a set of benchmarks to test for things that affect desktop usability and interaction. And he rewrote the scheduler to achieve better performance with those benchmarks. Yes, some (many) of his changes would have had a negative impact on performance in other areas (mostly very high-end NUMA computational workloads), but that was part of the point. The things that the kernel devs were optimizing for (how many concurrent make processes it could support was in one of Ingo's posts, as I recall) are not important to desktop users. Nor was the hardware they were using for many of their benchmarks (quad-core with multi-gigabyte ram, remember this was several years ago).
The most elegant solution would have been one that could accommodate both scenarios, and Con worked on the algorithm quite a bit to get it most of the way there. But Linus and Ingo insisted for a long time that their "anticipatory" approach was better. They finally admitted that Con's approach was better, but by then Con had quit, so Ingo rewrote it as the Completely Fair Scheduler (and didn't give him any credit for it).
Could Con Kolivas have been a little bit more patient and diplomatic? Of course, everybody could have. But there is plenty of blame to go around on both sides for this rift.
No, he was referring to the method by which software is distributed, not to the economics of it. An app store store is a dictatorship because it is controlled by someone--a device vendor--and you have no say in it, and you have to get your software there. Anyone who wants to distribute software through the app store has to pass an approval process and usually pay some kind of fee or percentage of their revenue. If they are disapproved or banned by some means, tough shit because there usually isn't any kind of appeal process. A linux repository is more like communism because it is controlled by a group of people who more or less volunteer their time to maintain it. You can choose to be a part of that community or not, and you can leave it and go somewhere else whenever you want. So a company can choose to distribute their software through a community-run ("communism") repository. It's true, there aren't many example of it right now. But then there weren't many examples of commercial software on linux a few years ago, and there are many more now. The landscape is ever changing....
I take it you're referring to the process used by GNU/Linux distributions' repositories. But the criteria for those tend to include being licensed as free software and free cultural works, which typically means no high-production-value video games and no tax return preparation software.
No, not really. There is no reason why commercial software cannot be distributed in a repository. Companies just choose not to do it. The Canonical partner repository is in fact intended for this purpose. It would be difficult to mix free and commercial software together in the same repository, simply because of the mechanics of how repositories work. Having multiple repositories seems like a fine solution, though.
Well, the Mac Pro uses standard ATI and NVidia video cards, so a text mode is definitely supported by the card. The operating system and bootloader don't support a text mode, but the hardware does. So if you get a different operating system on there it will be able to switch to a text mode just fine. Linux distributions have been doing this for ages, although there has been recent favor to using the framebuffer instead of a raw text mode for the console in distributions like Ubuntu.
Uh...what combination of hardware do you know of that Windows Server runs on (Intel-based) that doesn't support a text mode?
If it's really a problem, you can just use the framebuffer to draw a console without loading an entire graphics subsystem, which is what many linux distributions currently do.
Extremely good points...except for the fact that almost no commercial software versions this way. Let's see....
Endnote 8 9 X X1 X2 X3 X4 X5 (all new major versions every year with mostly insignificant changes) Office 2003 2007 2010 2011 (the 2003 -> 2007 was a pretty big UI bump, but otherwise mostly the same) Photoshop CS3 CS4 CS5 (some significant new features for sure, but not "learn the software product from scratch")
Those are some examples I can come up with in five minutes, but there are lots more. Let's face it, version numbers are for marketing. If you want to actually know something about the software, you have to read the changelogs and/or install it on a pilot box.
What the hell? Jesus, almost every Xerox printer natively supports Postscript 3 (ie: none of this "Postscript emulation" crap like HP has). That includes your Phaser 6100. What makes you think you need a special driver to get it to work? Just install the ppd and let it go.
Uh, reference please. Medicaid and CHIP, the only two broad general programs I know of, certainly do not allow that. And the way you worded that is a prime example of rhetoric: "a family of four with an income up to $82k can....". Well, "can" is not the same as "does", and if it is really true likely has some other fairly strict requirements.
(which, of course, we were told was 100% safe and not a shitty old design like Chernobyl, and that thered never be another meltdown).
Uhhh...it was a shitty old design not quite as bad as Chernobyl, but almost exactly the same as Three Mile Island. And, to stay on topic, do you know where the biggest problems from Fukushima came from? Spent fuel stored on site instead of in a friggin waste storage facility!!! So by all means, let's do everything we can to prevent implementing solutions to known problems.
Yes, that is the argument the pharmaceutical companies make, for sure. But first, the costs they quote are largely bunk. They say they spend $50M bringing a drug to market, but it doesn't cost $50M to do a clinical trial. It costs $50M to do their massive advertising campaign, political bribery, and to pay for their lawyers. Second, a large part of the high failure rate comes from the way we search for new drugs and treatments. Despite large changes in the basic scientific models, there has been almost no change in the way we approach treatments for about 40 years. The reason drug companies like to screen libraries and identify targets is because it is a method that ultimately works, despite the large failure rate. Learning how to approach treatments differently requires risk and investment in basic research that drug companies increasingly don't want to do. So here we are, perpetuating a broken system and paying through the nose for it instead of trying to come up with a better way. I think if we got rid of the drug patents, drug companies would be forced to adapt to survive, and that would ultimately be good for the industry. Destructive to some extent for sure, but it would also cut away a lot of the dead weight and allow new ideas and approaches to thrive.
So, I don't like the idea of gene patents. I think it is totally absurd and is just a means for a company to monopolize an entire area of diagnostic medicine and make a lot of money doing it, but here's the thing...they aren't patenting the gene. They are patenting the method by which mutations and/or SNPs can be identified in a patient with sufficient confidence to be able to say "Yes, you have an increased likelihood of getting breast cancer or no, you do not." It is far from trivial and requires a fairly significant investment in developing the methodology to do this accurately. While the impact on diagnostic medicine, then, is fairly significant, it is akin to drug patents. Other companies that want to compete in the same field by providing the same service will have to either break the patent or develop a completely new way to do this. But the impact on research science is pretty nonexistent. That doesn't mean it's right, but I'm not as concerned about inhibition of progress here as I am with patents in other areas (*cough* software patents *cough cough*).
It's not just about scripting and automation, though. If you want to do pretty much anything with Apache that is more complicated than a basic setup, you have to delve into the config file. Virtual hosts, url rewriting,.htpasswd authentication...nothing aside from setting the port and www_root is supported in the GUI. I haven't played around with Samba on OS X much, but I imagine the smb.conf file is pretty much the same way. This is the same story on linux too, by the way. Real configuration requires messing with the config file. There are GUIs out there that can make a few simple common tasks just a few mouse clicks, but if you are setting up a serious server, that is rarely sufficient.
I will say that the automagick directory configuration and management in OS X is pretty nice, though. The last time I had to mess around with ldap manually I was pulling my hair out....
Actually this research is really interesting...maybe not revolutionary, but interesting. I went to a talk by one of Church's postdocs at a conference recently and he was talking about this project. There are a lot of potential applications, but the example he was using was the optimization of the production of a metabolite. Traditionally this has been the hold up for synthetic biology. Getting microorganisms to produce industrially useful metabolites is not new. But engineering them to produce a large amount in and economical manner is where all the time and money goes because it requires some modeling, a lot of guessing, and mostly manual genetic manipulation. This technique uses the principal of directed evolution of a single gene (known for a few decades as you say) and applies it to an entire gene cluster, and potentially an entire organism. And it works! It's not a finished project, to be sure, but it can potentially become a very useful tool.
The "encrypting the genome" case refers to changing the codon code for the organism. Non-coding sequences won't be affected by it. The idea is that if you use a non-canonical genetic code for protein expression, foreign dna can still be inserted into the genome, but it can't be expressed. So viruses won't be able to replicate in the organism. It is immunity of sorts, but perhaps not really the way we normally think about it. It is useful because it potentially allows for the creation of stable genetically-engineered organisms. The biosafety concerns of genetically modified organisms come from the various mechanisms by which recombinant dna can "escape" and get out into the environment. An organism like this will be genetically isolated and therefore should mitigate many of those concerns. It also lessens the likelihood of further mutation over time, which can make your possibly $millions investment worthless.
Interesting that you thought that...it seems everybody on/. at least thought that. But has anyone at Canonical ever said that? I can't recall a statement like that. When you think about it, Unity is actually terrible as tablet UI. It borrows more ideas from OSX than iOS.
And how are you going to grow it cheaper and more efficiently than Columbia or Peru? Hawaii can grow coffee, so that must be where we get most of our supply...oh wait. And we get great mangoes from California...errr, hmm. Additionally, you have to consider land use management. While there may be a select few places where Coca might grow at least part of the year, we currently also have a demand for other tropical products. So if we want to include Coca, it will have to be balanced with those other demands.
Wait, so then we should have no problem growing sugarcane in the USA...interesting! There's a difference between constructing a highly artificial environment for growth--ex: defined soil, greenhouses, growing lights, etc--and actually growing the plant natively. The former allows you to grow the plant, but it is very expensive. Maybe good enough for personal use. The latter allows you to economically grow enough to sell to a large market, and it's the only way you will be able to compete with, even illegal, imports. The reason we were able to shut down imports after prohibition is because we were able to efficiently produce our own alcohol here.
Thanks for the ad hominem, though. It really contributed to the conversation.
Slashdot Mirror
And the quickest way would be to just click Terminal on the launcher. I'm not sure what your point is. Whether the search box or tab completion is quicker isn't the point I was making. If you have a preferred workflow, fine, whatever. The point I'm making is that functionality exists in the new system that didn't in the old system. You don't need to use a terminal with tab completion now because of the search box. It is more discoverable than a menu system. Should Terminal be under System|Administration, Applications|System Tools, Applications|Accessories (I've seen it placed in all three)? You may have been happy with what you had before because you knew where everything was and exactly what you needed, but that doesn't mean the developers of Unity/Gnome3 were "retarded".
Uh, yeah, except the part where applications are still organized into categories, where they can be sorted in various ways (most frequently used, most recently installed, etc), and where the text searching applies to the description and .desktop information as well as the name (so that you can find things like Pithos when you search for "music"). Of course you already know that, right? Because you've actually used the interface you are criticizing?
Well, the problem is at some point both the Gnome project and Canonical decided a UI revamp was necessary, and they came up with Gnome 3 and Unity. This is on top of major structural and API changes as well. It's like Win 7 vs. XP. The only way to accommodate what you are asking for is to either:
1) Never change the UI (ie: the point the GP was making, that you don't like "new")
2) Maintain both the old and the new UI, backporting any core changes to the old UI (doubling the work of the already thin developer core).
Both are, of course, ridiculous. You have to be able to evolve the desktop. Personally, I like the changes. There are bugs and rough spots for sure, but I can get my work done faster and more efficiently in general. If what you really want to maintain is the old desktop "paradigm", there are a lot of Gnome 2 alternatives that will continue to be maintained into the future (ex: Xfce). Gnome applications, however, will evolve to have Gnome 3 dependencies. That is just inevitable.
Ubuntu (specifically parts of GNOME) is flaky as hell in 11.04.
Try 11.10. It fixes a lot of the issues I was having with 11.04.
I dunno. I tried out Debian and for the life of me, could not figure out how to get Firefox. (Iceweasal is NOT Firefox).
You couldn't figure out how to go to the Mozilla website and download the installer?
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/
And how is Iceweasel not Firefox, exactly (not that I particularly like the name, either)?
What they need is gnome 3 with the gnome 2 interface.
Yeah, and we also need GNOME 2 with the KDE 4 interface...wait, what?
I think you meant to say you should just stick with GNOME 2, which begs the question, why don't you?
What are you guys talking about? Have any of you actually used Unity/Gnome3?
First of all to answer the parent, if you know what you want, I think typing "Te" into the search box and selecting "Terminal" is much faster than navigating a menu structure. I don't see how that is retarded at all. In fact, it has been a feature of Spotlight on OS X for quite a while.
To get to the OPs question, which is what to do if you don't know what you want, the interface is still discoverable. You can do this in two ways. You can either type what you think you want, like "word" or "office" to get the Libreoffice writer. Or if you really don't know what you want, you can click applications, and expand the filter results menu to see the applications organized by categories.
So, in other words, this is about learning a new interface, which is relatively simple. Some people don't want to, obviously, but just because you have to learn something new doesn't mean it is retarded.
Yes, you're talking about an attitude, completely unsubstantiated by anything except a fictional tv show and your own (obvious) bias.
Anyway, it's not that hard to dig up an incriminating post from somewhere in the past simply to make the point that somebody is an asshole if you dislike them enough. Surely that would be quite easy to do for Linus or any of the other kernel developers. But, of course, any single post is not the whole story.
I don't really believe your assertion that Con Kolivas "did not use linux for anything but testing." The whole motivation behind his work was to make linux work better for him, on the desktop. You know, one of the major heralded benefits of open source software--you can scratch your own itch. Yes, you're probably right, he might not have understood the implications of some of his patches. But it is clear from the history of the patches that the major problem was a difference in approach and priorities. Linus wanted (and still wants, btw), an "elegant" approach. One that would seamlessly anticipate and adjust for different workloads. Con did not think that would work, and demonstrated it with his benchmarks. Flaming ensued. Furthermore, the clear priority of linux up to that point (and largely still now) was to support server and computational workloads, not desktop interactivity. So the benchmarks the kernel devs were using weren't testing for desktop interactivity. That was another of the major points Con made. More flaming ensued.
To say that he was "stabbing in the dark", "a newbie", and "he didn't give a shit" I think are precarious accusations. He didn't have the experience of Linus or Ingo, nobody does, but that doesn't (shouldn't) affect the value of his attempted contribution.
Wow, I'm not sure which is more shocking about this post: the fact that you seem to think House reflects reality in some way (note: the director of the show describes it more as a philosophical playground than a medi-drama), or the double whammy where you not only attribute Con Kolivas' conflicts with his "thinking he's an expert" but also that "he thinks he's an expert because he's a doctor!" Seriously, wtf?
The Con Kolivas flame war will probably go down as a historic one in kernel-lore, but it is completely unfair and dishonest to say that Linus and Ingo were the benevolent and faultless gatekeepers, and the fault was entirely Con's. Con Kolivas wanted desktop performance to be better. He wrote a set of benchmarks to test for things that affect desktop usability and interaction. And he rewrote the scheduler to achieve better performance with those benchmarks. Yes, some (many) of his changes would have had a negative impact on performance in other areas (mostly very high-end NUMA computational workloads), but that was part of the point. The things that the kernel devs were optimizing for (how many concurrent make processes it could support was in one of Ingo's posts, as I recall) are not important to desktop users. Nor was the hardware they were using for many of their benchmarks (quad-core with multi-gigabyte ram, remember this was several years ago).
The most elegant solution would have been one that could accommodate both scenarios, and Con worked on the algorithm quite a bit to get it most of the way there. But Linus and Ingo insisted for a long time that their "anticipatory" approach was better. They finally admitted that Con's approach was better, but by then Con had quit, so Ingo rewrote it as the Completely Fair Scheduler (and didn't give him any credit for it).
Could Con Kolivas have been a little bit more patient and diplomatic? Of course, everybody could have. But there is plenty of blame to go around on both sides for this rift.
No, he was referring to the method by which software is distributed, not to the economics of it. An app store store is a dictatorship because it is controlled by someone--a device vendor--and you have no say in it, and you have to get your software there. Anyone who wants to distribute software through the app store has to pass an approval process and usually pay some kind of fee or percentage of their revenue. If they are disapproved or banned by some means, tough shit because there usually isn't any kind of appeal process. A linux repository is more like communism because it is controlled by a group of people who more or less volunteer their time to maintain it. You can choose to be a part of that community or not, and you can leave it and go somewhere else whenever you want. So a company can choose to distribute their software through a community-run ("communism") repository. It's true, there aren't many example of it right now. But then there weren't many examples of commercial software on linux a few years ago, and there are many more now. The landscape is ever changing....
I take it you're referring to the process used by GNU/Linux distributions' repositories. But the criteria for those tend to include being licensed as free software and free cultural works, which typically means no high-production-value video games and no tax return preparation software.
No, not really. There is no reason why commercial software cannot be distributed in a repository. Companies just choose not to do it. The Canonical partner repository is in fact intended for this purpose. It would be difficult to mix free and commercial software together in the same repository, simply because of the mechanics of how repositories work. Having multiple repositories seems like a fine solution, though.
Well, the Mac Pro uses standard ATI and NVidia video cards, so a text mode is definitely supported by the card. The operating system and bootloader don't support a text mode, but the hardware does. So if you get a different operating system on there it will be able to switch to a text mode just fine. Linux distributions have been doing this for ages, although there has been recent favor to using the framebuffer instead of a raw text mode for the console in distributions like Ubuntu.
Uh...what combination of hardware do you know of that Windows Server runs on (Intel-based) that doesn't support a text mode?
If it's really a problem, you can just use the framebuffer to draw a console without loading an entire graphics subsystem, which is what many linux distributions currently do.
Extremely good points...except for the fact that almost no commercial software versions this way. Let's see....
Endnote 8 9 X X1 X2 X3 X4 X5 (all new major versions every year with mostly insignificant changes)
Office 2003 2007 2010 2011 (the 2003 -> 2007 was a pretty big UI bump, but otherwise mostly the same)
Photoshop CS3 CS4 CS5 (some significant new features for sure, but not "learn the software product from scratch")
Those are some examples I can come up with in five minutes, but there are lots more. Let's face it, version numbers are for marketing. If you want to actually know something about the software, you have to read the changelogs and/or install it on a pilot box.
What the hell? Jesus, almost every Xerox printer natively supports Postscript 3 (ie: none of this "Postscript emulation" crap like HP has). That includes your Phaser 6100. What makes you think you need a special driver to get it to work? Just install the ppd and let it go.
Uh, reference please. Medicaid and CHIP, the only two broad general programs I know of, certainly do not allow that. And the way you worded that is a prime example of rhetoric: "a family of four with an income up to $82k can....". Well, "can" is not the same as "does", and if it is really true likely has some other fairly strict requirements.
(which, of course, we were told was 100% safe and not a shitty old design like Chernobyl, and that thered never be another meltdown).
Uhhh...it was a shitty old design not quite as bad as Chernobyl, but almost exactly the same as Three Mile Island. And, to stay on topic, do you know where the biggest problems from Fukushima came from? Spent fuel stored on site instead of in a friggin waste storage facility!!! So by all means, let's do everything we can to prevent implementing solutions to known problems.
Yes, that is the argument the pharmaceutical companies make, for sure. But first, the costs they quote are largely bunk. They say they spend $50M bringing a drug to market, but it doesn't cost $50M to do a clinical trial. It costs $50M to do their massive advertising campaign, political bribery, and to pay for their lawyers. Second, a large part of the high failure rate comes from the way we search for new drugs and treatments. Despite large changes in the basic scientific models, there has been almost no change in the way we approach treatments for about 40 years. The reason drug companies like to screen libraries and identify targets is because it is a method that ultimately works, despite the large failure rate. Learning how to approach treatments differently requires risk and investment in basic research that drug companies increasingly don't want to do. So here we are, perpetuating a broken system and paying through the nose for it instead of trying to come up with a better way. I think if we got rid of the drug patents, drug companies would be forced to adapt to survive, and that would ultimately be good for the industry. Destructive to some extent for sure, but it would also cut away a lot of the dead weight and allow new ideas and approaches to thrive.
So, I don't like the idea of gene patents. I think it is totally absurd and is just a means for a company to monopolize an entire area of diagnostic medicine and make a lot of money doing it, but here's the thing...they aren't patenting the gene. They are patenting the method by which mutations and/or SNPs can be identified in a patient with sufficient confidence to be able to say "Yes, you have an increased likelihood of getting breast cancer or no, you do not." It is far from trivial and requires a fairly significant investment in developing the methodology to do this accurately. While the impact on diagnostic medicine, then, is fairly significant, it is akin to drug patents. Other companies that want to compete in the same field by providing the same service will have to either break the patent or develop a completely new way to do this. But the impact on research science is pretty nonexistent. That doesn't mean it's right, but I'm not as concerned about inhibition of progress here as I am with patents in other areas (*cough* software patents *cough cough*).
It's not just about scripting and automation, though. If you want to do pretty much anything with Apache that is more complicated than a basic setup, you have to delve into the config file. Virtual hosts, url rewriting, .htpasswd authentication...nothing aside from setting the port and www_root is supported in the GUI. I haven't played around with Samba on OS X much, but I imagine the smb.conf file is pretty much the same way. This is the same story on linux too, by the way. Real configuration requires messing with the config file. There are GUIs out there that can make a few simple common tasks just a few mouse clicks, but if you are setting up a serious server, that is rarely sufficient.
I will say that the automagick directory configuration and management in OS X is pretty nice, though. The last time I had to mess around with ldap manually I was pulling my hair out....
Actually this research is really interesting...maybe not revolutionary, but interesting. I went to a talk by one of Church's postdocs at a conference recently and he was talking about this project. There are a lot of potential applications, but the example he was using was the optimization of the production of a metabolite. Traditionally this has been the hold up for synthetic biology. Getting microorganisms to produce industrially useful metabolites is not new. But engineering them to produce a large amount in and economical manner is where all the time and money goes because it requires some modeling, a lot of guessing, and mostly manual genetic manipulation. This technique uses the principal of directed evolution of a single gene (known for a few decades as you say) and applies it to an entire gene cluster, and potentially an entire organism. And it works! It's not a finished project, to be sure, but it can potentially become a very useful tool.
The "encrypting the genome" case refers to changing the codon code for the organism. Non-coding sequences won't be affected by it. The idea is that if you use a non-canonical genetic code for protein expression, foreign dna can still be inserted into the genome, but it can't be expressed. So viruses won't be able to replicate in the organism. It is immunity of sorts, but perhaps not really the way we normally think about it. It is useful because it potentially allows for the creation of stable genetically-engineered organisms. The biosafety concerns of genetically modified organisms come from the various mechanisms by which recombinant dna can "escape" and get out into the environment. An organism like this will be genetically isolated and therefore should mitigate many of those concerns. It also lessens the likelihood of further mutation over time, which can make your possibly $millions investment worthless.
Interesting that you thought that...it seems everybody on /. at least thought that. But has anyone at Canonical ever said that? I can't recall a statement like that. When you think about it, Unity is actually terrible as tablet UI. It borrows more ideas from OSX than iOS.
You can add multiple destinations in Maps. I do it all the time.
And how are you going to grow it cheaper and more efficiently than Columbia or Peru? Hawaii can grow coffee, so that must be where we get most of our supply...oh wait. And we get great mangoes from California...errr, hmm. Additionally, you have to consider land use management. While there may be a select few places where Coca might grow at least part of the year, we currently also have a demand for other tropical products. So if we want to include Coca, it will have to be balanced with those other demands.
Wait, so then we should have no problem growing sugarcane in the USA...interesting! There's a difference between constructing a highly artificial environment for growth--ex: defined soil, greenhouses, growing lights, etc--and actually growing the plant natively. The former allows you to grow the plant, but it is very expensive. Maybe good enough for personal use. The latter allows you to economically grow enough to sell to a large market, and it's the only way you will be able to compete with, even illegal, imports. The reason we were able to shut down imports after prohibition is because we were able to efficiently produce our own alcohol here.
Thanks for the ad hominem, though. It really contributed to the conversation.