Research is damned expensive and without assurance of return, it's not entirely feasible to invest the resources. Nobody has ever work solely for the public good, you know. Either they are seeking fame or they are being funded by someone higher up who has a vested interest in their results.
I am an active researcher in the field of plant biology, so
I can speak with some authority on the costs involved in doing basic research. I have an assay that I do routinely to directly measure the rate of transcription of a single gene, called a nuclear run-on-assay. Each one of these assays costs around 300 dollars to run and takes bout two weeks from start to finish. To get statistically valid numbers, I need to repeat each experiment twice, effectively tripling the cost (900.00) and the time to over a month (And this does not count the cost of paying me). If I want to ask any meaningful set of questions, I am going to need to run a lot more of these under different conditions. Can you see how the cost adds up? It would cost even more if I didn't make a lot of my own materials from scratch.
Other assays and techniques are equally expensive. A friend of mine is getting ready to clone a "promoter", which is the part of a gene that actually controls how it's expressed. The minimum cost for cloning and sequencing this promoter will be around 2000 dollars. Actually doing experiments on it later will cost even more.
I am getting pretty friggin' tired of the anti-biotech sentiment here at slashdot. Yes, companies are patenting genes left and right, but not so they can corner the market on therapies derived from these patents.
Gene patents serve to protect the massive investments required to a bring a cancer treatment, a potential AIDS cure, or a method of reversing a genetic disesase all the way from the basic science of discovery to the production and approval of the final product. It takes years and it costs millions or even billions of dollars.
Yes, I said "billions", and stockholders are not going to allow scientists such as myself to throw that kind of money around without legal protection of their investment. This is not software development: the resources involved are far more substantial in nature.
Yes, there is an element of greed, but come on, how innocent of this vice are you, my friend? Are you involved in a big programming project? Do you see it gaining dominance in the market? Wouldn't that be cool? Wouldn't that make some money and wouldn't that be nice? Yes, you say? Guess what: you're greedy. Welcome to the club of humanity.
No, you're not missing out on much. If you're into web surfing for written information, you're never going to miss x86. Now, if you're looking for entertainment (however much entertainment can be shoved down even a DSL line is up to debate in another thread), you'll feel left out not using Windows.
Every vote for Ralph Nader is a vote towards the creation of a watchdog political party that will empower civic groups and send a clear message to the two major parties: "shape up or shrink down." If you agree that Ralph Nader is the only presidential candidate capable of reforming politics, vote Nader. Do you expect your members of Congress to vote their conscience? Shouldn't you?
Ralph Nader fights corporate crime and welfare. Corporate crime kills far more people and costs taxpayers far more money than street crime. Corporate welfare siphons hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars away from where they are needed to rebuild America's bridges, schools, health and recreation centers, drinking water systems, mass transit systems and other public facilities
Ralph Nader is not for sale. Millions of corporate dollars and twenty-two thousand corporate lobbyists are choking American democracy. Nader is the only candidate running a clean money campaign. While Bush and Gore rake in millions of dollars in soft money and obligations to special interests, the Nader campaign refuses soft money, corporate contributions or PAC donations.
Yes, and it looks like we're going to go from an outstanding orator and statesman to a "likable fella" who I'm not sure can tie his own shoes let alone string together a few hundred words on the Constitutional implication of a bill.
You can EASILY recompile apache under MOSX. YOu can either just drop your version into/usr/sbin/apache or you can work for it a little and compile it so it exactly replaces the built-in installation (the target directories are a little different than in the stock install). Neither option is particularly hard if you're worth your paycheck as a hacker.
As for adding mod_perl and php support: it's trivial for the first option I described and it should be *fairly* trivial for the second option (I am doing it this afternoon, if all goes as planned)
Those directories are still there. The package structure is for installing high-level programs, drivers, and so on, but you're certainly free to slap things into the hidden directories as well.
I don't understand why having Mach/BSD linked tightly is a bad thing that will preclude a MacOSX Lite: NeXTStep ran on 33 MHz 68030s with 16M RAM while one can fit a working BSD system on a floppy (PicoBSD). It doesn't sound like its the kernel that's a problem. I think people in the Mac community who are writing this stuff are missing the fact that one of the beauties of UNIX is that the guts of the system are pretty darned small and that it's all the userland stuff that takes up space. Here's some data to back me up: I have the mach_kernel right here in front of my and I can assure you that it, even with x86 support compiled into it, would fit on a 6M flash ROM without any compression. Heading to the back room of my house, I can find a minimal install of NetBSD on a 40M Hard Drive, and that even includes X!
With the exception of reporting WHO has reviewed a paper (that's kept anonymous, at least in my neck of the woods), all journals offered by Stanford's Highwire Press (e-publishing middleman) offer exactly the functionality you ask: full text searches, citation monitors, etc. In fact, a feature of e-journals via HIghwire Press is that you can be alerted when someone cites a given paper, the assumption being that the citing paper is relavant to your interests as well,
So you have a conceptual model of how your auto works, having tinkered around building cars, an idea or two about how your television works, having worked at a manufacturing plant in Taiwan, you pretty much are an expert at how your oven works when you cook, having picked up a MS in food science, and you're have a firm underpinning of how the lights in your house come on when you flip the switch, having spent some time as a journeyman electrician? I'm impressed, my man, rather impressed!
Amen! That guy has done a good job with leading development of OpenBSD but he needs to go to charm school. And who says they won't grab the OpenBSD source and give it a looksee? After all this *IS* Open Source, right?
Katz's stuff may be slightly "lowest-common-denominator", but it's certainly not for the absolute layperson. He writes at a level where everyobdy *who comes here and who is intelligent* can understand what he's writing about. When he writes about computers, I can understand him even though I'm a biologist. When he writes about bioethics or whatnot you (may) be able to understand hom even though you're a computer geek. That's the function of his "dumbed-down" writing.. to make these topics accessible to everyone. It seems like sport here to rag on people who don't know much about computers and hardware so let me assure you that I spend a bit of time laughing my ass off at what most of the people here don't know about, say, cloning or bioethics. Some of the stuff posted on these topics is just inane. And you people call yourselves smart? Come on...
Since the Mac platform moved to PowerPC, virtual memory is also used in the MacOS to do filemapping. In the case of PPC code execution, this means only active, needed chunks of the code are loaded into RAM. The net result is that RAM usage for PowerPC native apps drops by 10-50% with MacOS virtual memory on. A side effect of this mapping is that once an executable has been loaded once, it can be relaunched several times faster than it was during the initial loading. So, it's not just that MacOS spills its RAM onto disk when it runs out. This is why even Mac systems with a couple hundred Megs of RAM perform better with VM on.
Considering that you'd be writing code to bring Apple HFS+ compatibility to Linux/UNIX and it'd likely be GOOD code AND that they still might come up with a way to derive some other benefits from it, I suspec they wouldn't mind if you developed an iTools option for Linux
Hate to tell you but Tarantino did NOT do the Star Wars / Pulp Fiction spoof films. They were done by a total no-name graphic designer guy with a penchant for gay humor and Star Wars figures.
Now that the 13 colonies kicked their red-coated asses, India ran them out on their ear, Australia is getting ready to depose the Queen, and there's peace in Ireland, the English have realized they have noone left to oppress and dehumanize but themselves. More power to them, I say. Too long on that rainy island.
Slashdot Mirror
After hours of deliberation and a pass through my extra-terrestrial bound communications decoding algorithm, i find that the message reads
FIRST POST!!!!
Research is damned expensive and without assurance of return, it's not entirely feasible to invest the resources. Nobody has ever work solely for the public good, you know. Either they are seeking fame or they are being funded by someone higher up who has a vested interest in their results.
I am an active researcher in the field of plant biology, so
I can speak with some authority on the costs involved in doing basic research. I have an assay that I do routinely to directly measure the rate of transcription of a single gene, called a nuclear run-on-assay. Each one of these assays costs around 300 dollars to run and takes bout two weeks from start to finish. To get statistically valid numbers, I need to repeat each experiment twice, effectively tripling the cost (900.00) and the time to over a month (And this does not count the cost of paying me). If I want to ask any meaningful set of questions, I am going to need to run a lot more of these under different conditions. Can you see how the cost adds up? It would cost even more if I didn't make a lot of my own materials from scratch.
Other assays and techniques are equally expensive. A friend of mine is getting ready to clone a "promoter", which is the part of a gene that actually controls how it's expressed. The minimum cost for cloning and sequencing this promoter will be around 2000 dollars. Actually doing experiments on it later will cost even more.
I am getting pretty friggin' tired of the anti-biotech sentiment here at slashdot. Yes, companies are patenting genes left and right, but not so they can corner the market on therapies derived from these patents.
Gene patents serve to protect the massive investments required to a bring a cancer treatment, a potential AIDS cure, or a method of reversing a genetic disesase all the way from the basic science of discovery to the production and approval of the final product. It takes years and it costs millions or even billions of dollars.
Yes, I said "billions", and stockholders are not going to allow scientists such as myself to throw that kind of money around without legal protection of their investment. This is not software development: the resources involved are far more substantial in nature.
Yes, there is an element of greed, but come on, how innocent of this vice are you, my friend? Are you involved in a big programming project? Do you see it gaining dominance in the market? Wouldn't that be cool? Wouldn't that make some money and wouldn't that be nice? Yes, you say? Guess what: you're greedy. Welcome to the club of humanity.
No, you're not missing out on much. If you're into web surfing for written information, you're never going to miss x86. Now, if you're looking for entertainment (however much entertainment can be shoved down even a DSL line is up to debate in another thread), you'll feel left out not using Windows.
Every vote for Ralph Nader is a vote towards the creation of a watchdog political party that will empower civic groups and send a clear message to the two major parties: "shape up or shrink down." If you agree that Ralph Nader is the only presidential candidate capable of reforming politics, vote Nader. Do you expect your members of Congress to vote their conscience? Shouldn't you?
Ralph Nader fights corporate crime and welfare. Corporate crime kills far more people and costs taxpayers far more money than street crime. Corporate welfare siphons hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars away from where they are needed to rebuild America's bridges, schools, health and recreation centers, drinking water systems, mass transit systems and other public facilities
Ralph Nader is not for sale. Millions of corporate dollars and twenty-two thousand corporate lobbyists are choking American democracy. Nader is the only candidate running a clean money campaign. While Bush and Gore rake in millions of dollars in soft money and obligations to special interests, the Nader campaign refuses soft money, corporate contributions or PAC donations.
http://www.votenader.com/
Yes, and it looks like we're going to go from an outstanding orator and statesman to a "likable fella" who I'm not sure can tie his own shoes let alone string together a few hundred words on the Constitutional implication of a bill.
You can EASILY recompile apache under MOSX. YOu can either just drop your version into /usr/sbin/apache or you can work for it a little and compile it so it exactly replaces the built-in installation (the target directories are a little different than in the stock install). Neither option is particularly hard if you're worth your paycheck as a hacker.
As for adding mod_perl and php support: it's trivial for the first option I described and it should be *fairly* trivial for the second option (I am doing it this afternoon, if all goes as planned)
Those directories are still there. The package structure is for installing high-level programs, drivers, and so on, but you're certainly free to slap things into the hidden directories as well.
He is entirely wrong.
Actually, fsck under MacOS X works with HFS+, too.
Maybe it's because Apple is designing a cooler than hell UNIX-based operating system that has an open-source core...
Is this Geek news? Yes, if you're an impartial geek and no if all you want to hear is Linux, Linux, Linux.
I don't understand why having Mach/BSD linked tightly is a bad thing that will preclude a MacOSX Lite: NeXTStep ran on 33 MHz 68030s with 16M RAM while one can fit a working BSD system on a floppy (PicoBSD). It doesn't sound like its the kernel that's a problem. I think people in the Mac community who are writing this stuff are missing the fact that one of the beauties of UNIX is that the guts of the system are pretty darned small and that it's all the userland stuff that takes up space.
Here's some data to back me up: I have the mach_kernel right here in front of my and I can assure you that it, even with x86 support compiled into it, would fit on a 6M flash ROM without any compression. Heading to the back room of my house, I can find a minimal install of NetBSD on a 40M Hard Drive, and that even includes X!
With the exception of reporting WHO has reviewed a paper (that's kept anonymous, at least in my neck of the woods), all journals offered by Stanford's Highwire Press (e-publishing middleman) offer exactly the functionality you ask: full text searches, citation monitors, etc. In fact, a feature of e-journals via HIghwire Press is that you can be alerted when someone cites a given paper, the assumption being that the citing paper is relavant to your interests as well,
So you have a conceptual model of how your auto works, having tinkered around building cars, an idea or two about how your television works, having worked at a manufacturing plant in Taiwan, you pretty much are an expert at how your oven works when you cook, having picked up a MS in food science, and you're have a firm underpinning of how the lights in your house come on when you flip the switch, having spent some time as a journeyman electrician? I'm impressed, my man, rather impressed!
Amen! That guy has done a good job with leading development of OpenBSD but he needs to go to charm school.
And who says they won't grab the OpenBSD source and give it a looksee? After all this *IS* Open Source, right?
Oh, go fuck yourself you retarded OS zealot.
Katz's stuff may be slightly "lowest-common-denominator", but it's certainly not for the absolute layperson. He writes at a level where everyobdy *who comes here and who is intelligent* can understand what he's writing about. When he writes about computers, I can understand him even though I'm a biologist. When he writes about bioethics or whatnot you (may) be able to understand hom even though you're a computer geek. That's the function of his "dumbed-down" writing.. to make these topics accessible to everyone.
It seems like sport here to rag on people who don't know much about computers and hardware so let me assure you that I spend a bit of time laughing my ass off at what most of the people here don't know about, say, cloning or bioethics. Some of the stuff posted on these topics is just inane. And you people call yourselves smart? Come on...
Since the Mac platform moved to PowerPC, virtual memory is also used in the MacOS to do filemapping. In the case of PPC code execution, this means only active, needed chunks of the code are loaded into RAM. The net result is that RAM usage for PowerPC native apps drops by 10-50% with MacOS virtual memory on. A side effect of this mapping is that once an executable has been loaded once, it can be relaunched several times faster than it was during the initial loading.
So, it's not just that MacOS spills its RAM onto disk when it runs out. This is why even Mac systems with a couple hundred Megs of RAM perform better with VM on.
Considering that you'd be writing code to bring Apple HFS+ compatibility to Linux/UNIX and it'd likely be GOOD code AND that they still might come up with a way to derive some other benefits from it, I suspec they wouldn't mind if you developed an iTools option for Linux
Hate to tell you but Tarantino did NOT do the Star Wars / Pulp Fiction spoof films. They were done by a total no-name graphic designer guy with a penchant for gay humor and Star Wars figures.
The Palm isn't you problem, it's your dumbass computer that you have to reboot to plug in a simple device. Place blame where blame is due, my boy...
Now that the 13 colonies kicked their red-coated asses, India ran them out on their ear, Australia is getting ready to depose the Queen, and there's peace in Ireland, the English have realized they have noone left to oppress and dehumanize but themselves. More power to them, I say. Too long on that rainy island.