As you may have known, or guessed from the context, Jean Tourrilhes is involved in all things Linux/Wifi. He has written a great deal of code and documentation on the subject, not to mention research papers. See more at his page.
I very strongly disagree with the idea of being able to patent genetically altered crops, and I'm very suspicious about the motives of companies like Monsanto, but Schmeiser is obviously lying here. A few seeds from your neighbours field blowing across the road can't grow into the volume of crop that he had.
I'm from the same province as Schmeiser and I heard about him long before this whole Monsanto business. A friend of mine worked on a construction project around the area where Shmeiser lives, and Schmeiser was part of a coalition that was concerned about the effects of this project. He was completely uninformed about the entire project, and was an embarassment and liability to the people that were on the same side of the argument as him. Also, if you've ever seen any of the TV interviews with other farmers from around his area you can watch them roll their eyes and shake their heads in digust as soon as his name is mentioned.
Why do they always try to drop shows when they reach their peak? I'll be the first to admit that Enterprise doesn't live up to the standards of TNG or DS9 but IMHO Season 3 has been much better than the first 2 seasons.
According to the article it's not a confirmation at all. Microsoft has released no official statments about hardware requirements, these values are just estimates from developers, who may or may not have a clue.
Sharman Networks, has sent a Cease and Desist Letter to the maker of KCEasy because it interoperates with their FastTrack network.
I'm a bit suprised that the KCEasy authors have complied with the cease-and-desist this easily, since the above statement is not really true.
KCEasy is simply a front-end. KCEasy makes use of giFT, which is an interface program, connecting one or more front-ends to one or more protocol plug-ins. giFT then in turn makes use of the giFT-FastTrack plugin which actually communicates on the FastTrack network.
Anway, those of you using KCEasy might want to look into some of the other giFT front-ends, I don't know of any others for windows offhand but I'm guessing they are out there.
Googling for giFTcurs, appolon, giftui will bring up some for *NIX.
This boggles my mind, I couldn't live without broadband.
I'd be very interested to see how many of these people have ever experienced broadband, and if their attitudes would change if they had. I realize that broadband can be overkill for many people, but even casual web-surfing can be painfully slow on dial-up.
Bottom line: For broad hardware support, Windows is still much better than Linux. That's not bias--it's a demonstrable fact.
Even if we assume for the moment that this guy's sound card problems were, in fact Linux's fault and not the fault of the sound card vendor or himself, this is still a completely false statement.
Linux may indeed be behind Windows in supporting some of the latest and greatest hardware, particularly those where the vendor doesn't open the specs or provide linux binary drivers, but Windows only supports one architecture.
That fact alone means Linux supports a much broader hardware base than Windows.
Also, I notice that he doesn't mention what sound card he's using, I have to wonder why.
This may give you a limited working knowledge, but only formal education and real professional experience will provide you the depth of knowledge to become a competent bioinformatics programmer
Agreed. However, this seems like a good way to introduce the interested life scientist to Bioinformatics, or even Linux in general. Also, the CD appears to contain not just programming tools, but general purpose scientific applications which could be effectively used by life scientists even with no programming knowledge whatsoever.
A song, like a book (or book series), is a discrete unit of art.
Okay, my original post was a little inaccurate on this point. Some albums exist as a cohesive piece of art, may other don't. Consider shuffling entire albums in place of songs if you feel the album deserves it. My point is simply that shuffling in general is not indicative of short attention spans.
From the article: "Temporal order is an important element of how a work unfolds dynamically over time, an important factor underlying the aesthetic effect."
Well, sure it is within a song, but saying that the order of songs within an album is important to the "aesthetic effect", is like saying that if I read a book by J. Random Author without reading all of his other books, in the order they were written, that I'm missing the effect.
A song, like a book (or book series), is a discrete unit of art. Sure it's similar to the other songs on that album, and sure it can be nice to listen to an entire album, in order, but where on earth does he find evidence for the claim that random shuffle appeals to "brain damaged" kids with short attention span.
I hate to say it, but the site looks really slick. The search history, site info, diary feature, book searching are all really clever ideas. But this takes the whole Google privcy debate to another level doesn't it.
Actually, according to the article there aren't just three vulnerablilies. There are 20 separate vulnerabilities in Windows and Outlook Express, 8 of which are critical, and 16 of which are remotely exploitable. Microsoft has bundled the patches for these into 4 separate downloads - 3 for Windows and 1 for Outlook Express.
won't the reponse of most newbies be, "Thanks, but I'll go back to Windows?"
If they have to spend too much time reading all of this stuff, then yes. However, I think it is fair to expect newbies to do a certain amount of research. Remember nobody is born a Windows expert either, you learned bit by bit, and were probably helped by people who already knew more than you.
If somebody raised on Linux tried Windows for the very first time, I'm sure they'd be confused and frustrated too.
Most distributions and many applications have FAQs,forums,mailing lists,irc channels, etc. which can be a lot of help. Forums and mailing list archives in particular are useful for when you get stuck, because even if nobody has put your problem into official documentation, it's very, very likely that somebody else has had your problem and has posted a question about it somewhere. And if they haven't, well then you can ask yourself.
if they can control the OS too what is to stop them from using that to further control (and while the GPL forces it to be open source, they can easily make it a political crime to use any clean/lite version of their distro)
True enough, but if they're going to settle on an official OS this seems like a best-case scenario. Imagine how much more control they would have if the Chinese government were to write their own, closed-source OS. Even if it is a crime to modify the OS, I wonder how easy that would be to enforce.
So, I'd say they must have some sort of ulterior motive behind this
Don't forget that Google has ads too. They may not be big and flashy but companies will pay a _lot_ of money to have their ad come out on top for certain search keywords.
The same will be true for Gmail. Remeber that they admit that machines will be crawling through our mail to allow them to bring us targeted ads. And if any internet activity is more popular than a google web search, it's email. The sheer volume of email flying around on something with the scope that Google is aiming for, will produce a whole lot of ads.
I'm not sure I like the idea of having authors pay to have their work accepted. Underfunded studies/authors may not be able to afford submissions.
Agreed. A flat rate required for publication would certainly be biased towards wealthier institutions. Perhaps a scheme could be established whereby the publication fee would be a function of your funding/institution wealth, so that the cost would be greater for the big corporations than the small university labs.
I'm glad to see that Nature is at least taking an interest in Open Science, since right now the high profile journals like Nature are the most difficult to get access to. The university I attend has a subscription of course, but only for the dead-tree version. I've asked the librarians about getting online access and they say it is simply prohibitively expensive.
I think that Scientific journals should take a cue for the mistakes of the music industry and embrace the abilities of new technology. By moving from paper magazines to web-published journals they can cut distribution costs enormously, hopefully to the levels where they can survive on ads (or other non-subscription means) alone. Also, unlike the music industry there's none of this controversy over file-sharing and authors not getting paid.
>The best solution is one that works and is maintainable. If you are willing to put in the extra work involved in making your from-source installations clearly maintainable and upgradable
>Premature optimization is/still/ the root of all evil. Building from source has both costs and benefits, and it sounds like you haven't analyzed either.
I agree completely that maintainability is an important point here. I guess I should have mentioned in my original post that I am most familiar with Gentoo, so to me compiling from source doesn't require any special tweaks or hacks. If the original submitter is not in a similar situation where the default package system doesn't handle source, then yes, compiling everything will be much more problematic.
If you are working for someone else, maintaining servers that are intended for peforming specific tasks, then I think the best solution is to do whatever is most efficient at performing those tasks. If you really don't need the peformance gains brought by compiling from source (and you probably don't) and it's going to take you a long time to do the compiling, time that could be better spend actually doing the research, then it's not worth your effort. If however the compiling doesn't affect the user's ability to be productive and that is what you as sysadmin are most comfortable with, then it seems reasonable that you should be able to maintain the boxes however you like.
Obviously content is the most important thing, but what possible reason could there be for not improving the presentation as well? Unless it somehow cuts into the time needed to prepare content (which is certainly shouldn't), it only makes sense to make things pretty.
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[ed note: We love you Jean Tourrilhes!]
As you may have known, or guessed from the context, Jean Tourrilhes is involved in all things Linux/Wifi. He has written a great deal of code and documentation on the subject, not to mention research papers.
See more at his page.
I very strongly disagree with the idea of being able to patent genetically altered crops, and I'm very suspicious about the motives of companies like Monsanto, but Schmeiser is obviously lying here. A few seeds from your neighbours field blowing across the road can't grow into the volume of crop that he had.
I'm from the same province as Schmeiser and I heard about him long before this whole Monsanto business. A friend of mine worked on a construction project around the area where Shmeiser lives, and Schmeiser was part of a coalition that was concerned about the effects of this project. He was completely uninformed about the entire project, and was an embarassment and liability to the people that were on the same side of the argument as him. Also, if you've ever seen any of the TV interviews with other farmers from around his area you can watch them roll their eyes and shake their heads in digust as soon as his name is mentioned.
Why do they always try to drop shows when they reach their peak?
I'll be the first to admit that Enterprise doesn't live up to the standards of TNG or DS9 but IMHO Season 3 has been much better than the first 2 seasons.
but this article from Microsoft Watch confirms it
According to the article it's not a confirmation at all. Microsoft has released no official statments about hardware requirements, these values are just estimates from developers, who may or may not have a clue.
Of course if it is accurate, then wow.
Sharman Networks, has sent a Cease and Desist Letter to the maker of KCEasy because it interoperates with their FastTrack network.
I'm a bit suprised that the KCEasy authors have complied with the cease-and-desist this easily, since the above statement is not really true.
KCEasy is simply a front-end. KCEasy makes use of giFT, which is an interface program, connecting one or more front-ends to one or more protocol plug-ins. giFT then in turn makes use of the giFT-FastTrack plugin which actually communicates on the FastTrack network.
Anway, those of you using KCEasy might want to look into some of the other giFT front-ends, I don't know of any others for windows offhand but I'm guessing they are out there.
Googling for giFTcurs, appolon, giftui will bring up some for *NIX.
This boggles my mind, I couldn't live without broadband.
:)
I'd be very interested to see how many of these people have ever experienced broadband, and if their attitudes would change if they had.
I realize that broadband can be overkill for many people, but even casual web-surfing can be painfully slow on dial-up.
Oh well, more bandwidth for me
Bottom line: For broad hardware support, Windows is still much better than Linux. That's not bias--it's a demonstrable fact.
Even if we assume for the moment that this guy's sound card problems were, in fact Linux's fault and not the fault of the sound card vendor or himself, this is still a completely false statement.
Linux may indeed be behind Windows in supporting some of the latest and greatest hardware, particularly those where the vendor doesn't open the specs or provide linux binary drivers, but Windows only supports one architecture.
That fact alone means Linux supports a much broader hardware base than Windows.
Also, I notice that he doesn't mention what sound card he's using, I have to wonder why.
This may give you a limited working knowledge, but only formal education and real professional experience will provide you the depth of knowledge to become a competent bioinformatics programmer
Agreed. However, this seems like a good way to introduce the interested life scientist to Bioinformatics, or even Linux in general. Also, the CD appears to contain not just programming tools, but general purpose scientific applications which could be effectively used by life scientists even with no programming knowledge whatsoever.
A song, like a book (or book series), is a discrete unit of art.
Okay, my original post was a little inaccurate on this point. Some albums exist as a cohesive piece of art, may other don't. Consider shuffling entire albums in place of songs if you feel the album deserves it. My point is simply that shuffling in general is not indicative of short attention spans.
From the article:
"Temporal order is an important element of how a work unfolds dynamically over time, an important factor underlying the aesthetic effect."
Well, sure it is within a song, but saying that the order of songs within an album is important to the "aesthetic effect", is like saying that if I read a book by J. Random Author without reading all of his other books, in the order they were written, that I'm missing the effect.
A song, like a book (or book series), is a discrete unit of art. Sure it's similar to the other songs on that album, and sure it can be nice to listen to an entire album, in order, but where on earth does he find evidence for the claim that random shuffle appeals to "brain damaged" kids with short attention span.
Well, this certainly has the potential to become a really big deal for tHe FOSS community, one way or the other.
For the legally inclined, there's another discussion about this going on over at Groklaw.
I hate to say it, but the site looks really slick. The search history, site info, diary feature, book searching are all really clever ideas. But this takes the whole Google privcy debate to another level doesn't it.
Color scheme kind of turns me of tho'
The article actually reads 1994, not 1984, after all perl wasn't released until 1987
Actually, according to the article there aren't just three vulnerablilies. There are 20 separate vulnerabilities in Windows and Outlook Express, 8 of which are critical, and 16 of which are remotely exploitable. Microsoft has bundled the patches for these into 4 separate downloads - 3 for Windows and 1 for Outlook Express.
won't the reponse of most newbies be, "Thanks, but I'll go back to Windows?"
If they have to spend too much time reading all of this stuff, then yes. However, I think it is fair to expect newbies to do a certain amount of research. Remember nobody is born a Windows expert either, you learned bit by bit, and were probably helped by people who already knew more than you.
If somebody raised on Linux tried Windows for the very first time, I'm sure they'd be confused and frustrated too.
Most distributions and many applications have FAQs,forums,mailing lists,irc channels, etc. which can be a lot of help. Forums and mailing list archives in particular are useful for when you get stuck, because even if nobody has put your problem into official documentation, it's very, very likely that somebody else has had your problem and has posted a question about it somewhere. And if they haven't, well then you can ask yourself.
if they can control the OS too what is to stop them from using that to further control (and while the GPL forces it to be open source, they can easily make it a political crime to use any clean/lite version of their distro)
True enough, but if they're going to settle on an official OS this seems like a best-case scenario. Imagine how much more control they would have if the Chinese government were to write their own, closed-source OS. Even if it is a crime to modify the OS, I wonder how easy that would be to enforce.
So, I'd say they must have some sort of ulterior motive behind this
Don't forget that Google has ads too. They may not be big and flashy but companies will pay a _lot_ of money to have their ad come out on top for certain search keywords.
The same will be true for Gmail. Remeber that they admit that machines will be crawling through our mail to allow them to bring us targeted ads. And if any internet activity is more popular than a google web search, it's email. The sheer volume of email flying around on something with the scope that Google is aiming for, will produce a whole lot of ads.
I'm not sure I like the idea of having authors pay to have their work accepted. Underfunded studies/authors may not be able to afford submissions.
/institution wealth, so that the cost would be greater for the big corporations than the small university labs.
Agreed. A flat rate required for publication would certainly be biased towards wealthier institutions. Perhaps a scheme could be established whereby the publication fee would be a function of your funding
I'm glad to see that Nature is at least taking an interest in Open Science, since right now the high profile journals like Nature are the most difficult to get access to. The university I attend has a subscription of course, but only for the dead-tree version. I've asked the librarians about getting online access and they say it is simply prohibitively expensive.
I think that Scientific journals should take a cue for the mistakes of the music industry and embrace the abilities of new technology. By moving from paper magazines to web-published journals they can cut distribution costs enormously, hopefully to the levels where they can survive on ads (or other non-subscription means) alone. Also, unlike the music industry there's none of this controversy over file-sharing and authors not getting paid.
I'm not disputing what you say, because I really don't know anything about this, but what about cable? Not many of my 53 cable channels are Canadian.
I agree completely that maintainability is an important point here. I guess I should have mentioned in my original post that I am most familiar with Gentoo, so to me compiling from source doesn't require any special tweaks or hacks. If the original submitter is not in a similar situation where the default package system doesn't handle source, then yes, compiling everything will be much more problematic.
If you are working for someone else, maintaining servers that are intended for peforming specific tasks, then I think the best solution is to do whatever is most efficient at performing those tasks. If you really don't need the peformance gains brought by compiling from source (and you probably don't) and it's going to take you a long time to do the compiling, time that could be better spend actually doing the research, then it's not worth your effort. If however the compiling doesn't affect the user's ability to be productive and that is what you as sysadmin are most comfortable with, then it seems reasonable that you should be able to maintain the boxes however you like.
Obviously content is the most important thing, but what possible reason could there be for not improving the presentation as well? Unless it somehow cuts into the time needed to prepare content (which is certainly shouldn't), it only makes sense to make things pretty.