Re:similar book for CS people?
on
Bioinformatics
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· Score: 3
As I mentioned in another posting, Dan Gusfield's "Algorithms on Strings, Trees and Sequences" is good, although getting a bit dated now. Another excellent book is Durbin, et al's "Biological Sequence Analysis: Probabilistic Models of Proteins and Nucleic Acids".
Perl (and other scripting languages) can call C/C++ routines fairly easily. I myself prefer to write the bulk of my bioinformatics code in a scripting language for easy modification, and only write the routines that really need speed in C++.
I haven't read the book myself, although I did know one of the authors (Per Jambeck) in grad school (in fact I still have his copy of Knuth's "The Metafont Book " if he's looking for it). I doubt the book is fluff, just not for CS folk. Like all new sciences, bioinformatics is done by people coming from other areas. If you are looking for a book about bioinformatics for CS folks who are non-biologists look at Dan Gusfield's "Algorithms on Strings, Trees, and Sequences", (1997) although it is beginning to be a bit dated.
Well, Python is in an awkward position right now -- it isn't the newest and coolest scripting language anymore -- that's Ruby these days, and at the same time it isn't the standard scripting language (which is still Perl). Without the coolness factor it had in the mid '90s, Python's hope for growth lies in people hired to maintain code written by the first generation Python hackers, and this means slow (if steady) growth.
Only if you are talking about experimental molecular biology. Theoretical molecular biology, or bioinformatics, is not some future development but rapidly becoming a major research area today. It is interesting that you bring up O'Reilly. Take a look at this
This has nothing to do with politics!
on
To the Moon, Alice
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· Score: 2
Oh, come on! This has nothing to do with politics. The Wall Street Journal is a reputable right-wing paper -- The Post is a tabloid.
This is in the New York Post, people!
on
To the Moon, Alice
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· Score: 2
For those who aren't familar with it, it is worth stating that the New York Post, although once a respectable paper in the 19th and earrly 20th centuries, is currently little better than the National Enquirer or Weekly World Sun, and generally prints stories like "Aliens kidnap hamster". Unless somebody can find a version of the story in a more serious source, I can only assume it is fictional.
Using this equation, it's been proven that Abraham Lincoln never existed historically, that in fact he was a mythological construct.
And they are right, if they mean the "Honest Abe" fellow who supposedly fought the South out of righteous anger over slavery, rather than a typical scheming politician who professed whatever beliefs he thought would get him elected. Even "historical" figures tend to become mythological constructs in time.
So you think ACC was the main person responsible for 2001? Then why did 2001 so resemble the other films of Kubrick in theme -- i.e. what does it mean to be "human", do we rule technology or does it rule us, etc. Certainly the short story "The Sentinel" was ACC's but that was just a small part of 2001.
Now 2010 was all ACC's -- and guess what -- none of the higher themes were there -- it was just a 1950ish pulp science fiction story more or less ripped off from "The Day the Earth Stood Still".
Exactly. I can't understand how anyone can miss the Nietzsche references. Rambling about bathroom tiles is crazy -- noticing obvious references that Kubrick included is not. BTW, besides the music and the general theme of evolution to higher forms, there is also the idea of being "beyond good and evil" -- the newly created ape-men use their intelligence in a way that is not very nice but which increases their power -- they attack the less developed apes.
If Kubrick had made 2010, I bet Bowman wouldn't have beeen standing around saying "Something wonderful is about to happen" -- he would be making himself the leader of Earth or something.
stupid comments. I think you have a laundry phobia. You also just quoted my sig line like it has anything to do with what I just posted.
Well, it certainly wasn't obvious to me that it was a sig line, which generally are some sort of clever quote rather than an ordinary sentence. You were talking about about XP and the line Consider the business model of your local laudromat -- they are in it for the long haul seemed to logically follow: Laundromats make money by renting time on their machines, and so in the end come out richer than if they just sold machines, which is presumably the strategy Microsoft hopes to accomplish with XP.
Consider the business model of your local laundromat.
Yes, you are right -- it is similar to XP in many ways:
1) The machines at the laundromat are overpriced.
2) The machines sometimes chew up the things you put into them, as they are poorly maintained.
3) The laundromat is not very secure -- you have to keep a sharp watchout so that some punk doesn't steal all your stuff.
No, Kierkegaard was far too interested in philosophy to worry about ports of yet-to-exist scripting languages to yet to exist hardware. In fact, I don't think he owned any sort of PDA or even knew how to program.
Well, I buy DVDs, which I play under Linux using Xine. Presumably (unless this hardware-based watermarking scheme is entirely transparent to playback software) these future DVDs would be unplayable under Linux even if I purchased the appropriate watermark-reading DVD drive. Yes, in the DeCSS case, the judge claimed that such fair-use arguments were irrelevant because fully-licensed closed-source DVD-players were in development for Linux, but these players appear to have been just vapor.
I just don't get the BSD license. I have written both closed and GPL code, the former because I was paid, the latter because I could benefit from others improving my code. Writing code under the BSD license seems to be the worst of both worlds, as I would gain neither of the two benefits. When the BSD license works (and it does, in a number of cases), it is because the community is treating it like the GPL license and submitting changes to the source. So why not choose the license that makes that behaviour mandatory?
Well, Rifkin *is* a twit (although finally he seems to have found a less annoying hobby than harrassing geneticists, which was his previous schtick, cf. Algeny, etc).
However, the old rhetoric of "central planning equals communism" is pretty mindless. There are quite a few countries that have more central planning than the US (Canada and Sweden come to mind), and far from being Stalinistic hellholes, they tend to beat the US in the UN's quality of life index, even if they have fewer billionares per capita
Perhaps the specification could include something that makes sense of incomprehensible comics like Zippy the Pinhead and its imitators
Honestly, Zippy isn't that hard to get if you realize that essentially every joke is based on a reference to pop culture, generally from the '60s or '70s. Of course, there's lots of times that I "get" the joke, but don't find it particularly amusing.
Come on now. Who wants to live forever? Don't get me started on the religous argument against this.
Well, assuming that the mind as well as the body is preserved, I certainly would want to live forever! Why would anyone *not* want to, unless they have been brainwashed to think that this is an evil thing to want?
the only reason that I can see provided by/. posters is "because I enjoyed it" What about those who didn't (and since it is publicly funded , payed for it regardless)?
Oddly enough, when I lived in the US I had to pay taxes for roads, schools, and the miltary, even though I had no car, no kids, and did not consider myself under threat from invasion.
I've read the first of Jeter's Blade Runner sequels and although it had some good ideas, it was rather poorly written. In fact, I've read fanfic which was better executed. Has he improved?
There was a post in comp.lang.python that was in "Kanji" (double-byte asian font). It looked like garbage to most people. There was a great reply to it though:
I think you want comp.lang.perl !!!
Why are English-speakers so insecure that they have to make snide comments whenever another language is used? The Internet isn't just the playground of American students anymore, you know.
Oh, man. Solaris in the context of Russians on a space station. This is getting entirely too Tarkovskyian for me. Did the dead wife of a cosmonaut show up there by any chance?
There are no end of recent examples that merely staying innocent of wrongdoing is not sufficient to keep you out of jail, if you get unlucky or piss off the wrong people
No. Pissing off the wrong people in *combination* with wrongdoing can send you to jail. Merely pissing off Intel drones wouldn't have meant a damn thing if Randall hadn't been cracking Intel computers at the time (a wrongdoing at least in Oregon).
He also used crack(1) to attempt to get passwords. If it isn't your computer, that's "hacking" (in the media usage of the word) and a felony under many state's laws. That's basically it. Probably Randall didn't mean any harm in it, but he did it, and even admitted it.
BTW: Randall wasn't an Intel employee -- he was a contractor.
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As I mentioned in another posting, Dan Gusfield's "Algorithms on Strings, Trees and Sequences" is good, although getting a bit dated now. Another excellent book is Durbin, et al's "Biological Sequence Analysis: Probabilistic Models of Proteins and Nucleic Acids".
Perl (and other scripting languages) can call C/C++ routines fairly easily. I myself prefer to write the bulk of my bioinformatics code in a scripting language for easy modification, and only write the routines that really need speed in C++.
I haven't read the book myself, although I did know one of the authors (Per Jambeck) in grad school (in fact I still have his copy of Knuth's "The Metafont Book " if he's looking for it). I doubt the book is fluff, just not for CS folk. Like all new sciences, bioinformatics is done by people coming from other areas. If you are looking for a book about bioinformatics for CS folks who are non-biologists look at Dan Gusfield's "Algorithms on Strings, Trees, and Sequences", (1997) although it is beginning to be a bit dated.
Well, Python is in an awkward position right now -- it isn't the newest and coolest scripting language anymore -- that's Ruby these days, and at the same time it isn't the standard scripting language (which is still Perl). Without the coolness factor it had in the mid '90s, Python's hope for growth lies in people hired to maintain code written by the first generation Python hackers, and this means slow (if steady) growth.
Only if you are talking about experimental molecular biology. Theoretical molecular biology, or bioinformatics, is not some future development but rapidly becoming a major research area today. It is interesting that you bring up O'Reilly. Take a look at this
Oh, come on! This has nothing to do with politics. The Wall Street Journal is a reputable right-wing paper -- The Post is a tabloid.
For those who aren't familar with it, it is worth stating that the New York Post, although once a respectable paper in the 19th and earrly 20th centuries, is currently little better than the National Enquirer or Weekly World Sun, and generally prints stories like "Aliens kidnap hamster". Unless somebody can find a version of the story in a more serious source, I can only assume it is fictional.
Using this equation, it's been proven that Abraham Lincoln never existed historically, that in fact he was a mythological construct.
And they are right, if they mean the "Honest Abe" fellow who supposedly fought the South out of righteous anger over slavery, rather than a typical scheming politician who professed whatever beliefs he thought would get him elected. Even "historical" figures tend to become mythological constructs in time.
So you think ACC was the main person responsible for 2001? Then why did 2001 so resemble the other films of Kubrick in theme -- i.e. what does it mean to be "human", do we rule technology or does it rule us, etc. Certainly the short story "The Sentinel" was ACC's but that was just a small part of 2001.
Now 2010 was all ACC's -- and guess what -- none of the higher themes were there -- it was just a 1950ish pulp science fiction story more or less ripped off from "The Day the Earth Stood Still".
Exactly. I can't understand how anyone can miss the Nietzsche references. Rambling about bathroom tiles is crazy -- noticing obvious references that Kubrick included is not. BTW, besides the music and the general theme of evolution to higher forms, there is also the idea of being "beyond good and evil" -- the newly created ape-men use their intelligence in a way that is not very nice but which increases their power -- they attack the less developed apes.
If Kubrick had made 2010, I bet Bowman wouldn't have beeen standing around saying "Something wonderful is about to happen" -- he would be making himself the leader of Earth or something.
stupid comments. I think you have a laundry phobia. You also just quoted my sig line like it has anything to do with what I just posted.
Well, it certainly wasn't obvious to me that it was a sig line, which generally are some sort of clever quote rather than an ordinary sentence. You were talking about about XP and the line Consider the business model of your local laudromat -- they are in it for the long haul seemed to logically follow: Laundromats make money by renting time on their machines, and so in the end come out richer than if they just sold machines, which is presumably the strategy Microsoft hopes to accomplish with XP.
Consider the business model of your local laundromat.
Yes, you are right -- it is similar to XP in many ways:
1) The machines at the laundromat are overpriced.
2) The machines sometimes chew up the things you put into them, as they are poorly maintained.
3) The laundromat is not very secure -- you have to keep a sharp watchout so that some punk doesn't steal all your stuff.
No, Kierkegaard was far too interested in philosophy to worry about ports of yet-to-exist scripting languages to yet to exist hardware. In fact, I don't think he owned any sort of PDA or even knew how to program.
Well, I buy DVDs, which I play under Linux using Xine. Presumably (unless this hardware-based watermarking scheme is entirely transparent to playback software) these future DVDs would be unplayable under Linux even if I purchased the appropriate watermark-reading DVD drive. Yes, in the DeCSS case, the judge claimed that such fair-use arguments were irrelevant because fully-licensed closed-source DVD-players were in development for Linux, but these players appear to have been just vapor.
I just don't get the BSD license. I have written both closed and GPL code, the former because I was paid, the latter because I could benefit from others improving my code. Writing code under the BSD license seems to be the worst of both worlds, as I would gain neither of the two benefits. When the BSD license works (and it does, in a number of cases), it is because the community is treating it like the GPL license and submitting changes to the source. So why not choose the license that makes that behaviour mandatory?
Well, Rifkin *is* a twit (although finally he seems to have found a less annoying hobby than harrassing geneticists, which was his previous schtick, cf. Algeny, etc).
However, the old rhetoric of "central planning equals communism" is pretty mindless. There are quite a few countries that have more central planning than the US (Canada and Sweden come to mind), and far from being Stalinistic hellholes, they tend to beat the US in the UN's quality of life index, even if they have fewer billionares per capita
Anti globalization is one of the FEW things that people on both the far left and far right agree on
It's worth remembering that another point of agreement is on the need to send "enemies of the state" to concentration camps....
Perhaps the specification could include something that makes sense of incomprehensible comics like Zippy the Pinhead and its imitators
Honestly, Zippy isn't that hard to get if you realize that essentially every joke is based on a reference to pop culture, generally from the '60s or '70s. Of course, there's lots of times that I "get" the joke, but don't find it particularly amusing.
Come on now. Who wants to live forever? Don't get me started on the religous argument against this.
Well, assuming that the mind as well as the body is preserved, I certainly would want to live forever! Why would anyone *not* want to, unless they have been brainwashed to think that this is an evil thing to want?
the only reason that I can see provided by /. posters is "because I enjoyed it" What about those who didn't (and since it is publicly funded , payed for it regardless)?
Oddly enough, when I lived in the US I had to pay taxes for roads, schools, and the miltary, even though I had no car, no kids, and did not consider myself under threat from invasion.
I've read the first of Jeter's Blade Runner sequels and although it had some good ideas, it was rather poorly written. In fact, I've read fanfic which was better executed. Has he improved?
There was a post in comp.lang.python that was in "Kanji" (double-byte asian font). It looked like garbage to most people. There was a great reply to it though:
I think you want comp.lang.perl !!!
Why are English-speakers so insecure that they have to make snide comments whenever another language is used? The Internet isn't just the playground of American students anymore, you know.
Oh, man. Solaris in the context of Russians on a space station. This is getting entirely too Tarkovskyian for me. Did the dead wife of a cosmonaut show up there by any chance?
There are no end of recent examples that merely staying innocent of wrongdoing is not sufficient to keep you out of jail, if you get unlucky or piss off the wrong people
No. Pissing off the wrong people in *combination* with wrongdoing can send you to jail. Merely pissing off Intel drones wouldn't have meant a damn thing if Randall hadn't been cracking Intel computers at the time (a wrongdoing at least in Oregon).
He also used crack(1) to attempt to get passwords. If it isn't your computer, that's "hacking" (in the media usage of the word) and a felony under many state's laws. That's basically it. Probably Randall didn't mean any harm in it, but he did it, and even admitted it.
BTW: Randall wasn't an Intel employee -- he was a contractor.