Using a computer, Duke University chemists have redesigned proteins to perform entirely new, unnatural functions. Then, the scientists have created these customized proteins in the lab and showed that they do their assigned jobs well.
How soon untill they make a self-replicating protien that accomplishes ~s/bad_trait/good_trait ?
Re:Nothing Good Is Going To Come Of This
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 1
I agree. Here on/. we're constantly assailing congress for passing laws which make no sense, or enforcing good laws in bad ways. I think we all need to carefully think about the repercussions of enacting anti-spam laws, and eat our own "don't legislate, fix the problem in the technology" medicine. I know good laws do exist, and perfectly good spam laws could be written, but wouldn't it be better to *fix* smtp's flaws which enable spam to propogate?
The point is, during the beta period, the beta-testers were promised the use of the service for free, for ever. Also, most of the functionality of the system is derived from the spam filter, which is derived from the work of these beta testers. Without community support, their spam filter == useless IMHO
One little problem, CloudMark SpamNet has alienated the entire community it is based on. For 11 months, it was touted as totaly free community-based spam detection (using p2p bayesian filtering AFAIK), while the end-users beta-tested it. Now, as they reached their 1.0 release, a decision was made to charge $3.99/month for the "service" (which the community created by classifying mail as spam w/ their client). Read more on it here
Now, before I start here, let me just acknowledge up-front that what I'm about to raise is prime bike-shed material of the first order. It is a matter so trivial that it's not at all unreasonable to expect every man and his dog in this project to have a strong opinion on it, so in the name of bandwidth conservation and all that's holy I merely ask you to honestly ask yourself "do I really, truly care about this?" before sending off your personal 500 word screed on the subject that's to follow. Finally, and just for the record, I'll note that two of my dogs pretty much agree with me on this and the third, a small white poodle with an attitude problem, honestly doesn't give a damn and indicated as much by merely showed me his teeth when I asked him about it.
With all that out of the way, I'll get on with it. Here at Apple we've been merging this and that from FreeBSD, as is our usual custom, and today several engineers saw something go across in a cvs merge commit which raised more than a few eyebrows and led to various queries as to the origin of the following new errno in FreeBSD:
Doing a little digging, I also see that a certain Dane is responsible for both the original commit on 2002/08/09 and a spelling fix to it on 2002/08/21 (I guess the OED is pretty clear on the spelling of "doofus"). Most of you who know me at all will also know that I'm hardly the most reverent or humor-impaired person you'll ever meet and I certainly got a chuckle out of this when I first saw it, just as I've gotten a chuckle out of various man pages and function names in FreeBSD which showed that the programmer responsible for them was at least enjoying his or her work at the time. I'm all for that, particularly in situations where a developer or user has to go well out of their way to get offended by something and therefore isn't exactly an object of sympathy.
This, however, is a little more in-your-face than something like the infamous "die_you_gravy_sucking_pigdog()" function in shutdown (which I successfully defended when it came up) since it sort of makes an implied statement about the developer's competence, rightly or wrongly, and is far more likely to propagate into other code since if there's an errno value returned by something then it also needs to be checked by the client code. From the corporate perspective, and corporations are infamous for not being particularly inclined towards humor, this is one particular little "easter egg" in FreeBSD that sticks just a little too far above the ground to lend a professional image.
So, to make a long story short, this is one small area where Apple's going to have to gratuitously diverge from FreeBSD if it remains this way and I frankly hate that idea since it just makes diffing things that much more annoying and for reasons which could be best and most accurately described as "silly." That said, I'm sure the reactions of the various people reading this will still vary between "who gives a damn what Apple thinks of our errno values?! Get a life, Apple!" and "yeah, that's a pretty silly errno value and in rather colloquial english at that, let's pick a more descriptive name like ``EUSERERR'' or something which makes any code using it more clear."
I'm naturally hoping that more people will be of the latter opinion and we can just change it and move on, one more gratuitous and unnecessary code fork thus averted, but if the group consensus is that we should get bent and simply change our own value to one which potentially offends our developers less (or remove it entirely) and not bother the FreeBSD project with such requests, I'm willing to live with that too. I had to at least ask, however, rather than just making the change unilaterally on our side... Thanks, and let the bikeshed building begin!
-- Jordan K. Hubbard Engineering Manager, BSD technology group Apple Computer
Sony has done this with the PS2, but instead of custom designed controllers, they made the entire system "themed" as a special edition. Much nicer IMHO. Link to one of them here. Colors are interesting, a little too pastel and smells like hello kitty:)
Ebay created the system of social moderation and assignment of trustworthyness. People who abuse it should be dealt with in that system, but by no means is the system creator responsible. Just my $0.02
Did we mention there is enough material in THE MATRIX: RELOADED to support yet more than is currently released? Good, because the number of trailers are growing, daily, and they are in full assault-mode rotation on numerous television stations. Fast cuts and faster glimpses of things yet not seen are tauntingly found in each of the numerous spots. Should you see them? No. The best way to see THE MATRIX: RELOADED is cold, with no pre-knowledge (besides, of course, the small underground '99 film, THE MATRIX).
With that said, be carefull viewing the trailer for this game. Lots of plot is revealed, and if you are a true movie-suprise purist, you might have some plot divulged;)
Yellow Dog Linux version 3.0 is Terra Soft's most recent release which offers a completely rebuilt Installer, 1300 packages on 6 CDs (3 Install, 3 Source), a unified KDE and GNOME desktop environment featuring shared menus, applications, and user interface.
With enhanced support for the latest ATI and NVidia graphics cards (full 3D support for the ATI Radeon series), "video issues" are a thing of the past.
The RIAA cannot continue prosecuting their customer base for long, lest everyone will pack up their things and stop buying CDs outright. Especially for reasons that arent even legally clear.
It appears as if these students didn't make any of the copywrited material available to anyone other then themselves. This is step one in prosecuting the individual music downloader. In addition, the practice of selective enforcement, also referred to as "making an example," is hugely detrimental to everyone involved. The few unlucky saps that get caught will be screwed to the tune of thousands of dollars while their buddies are snickering away clicking "find more sources." It just isn't right.
Also, the media HAS to cover these stories! Atrocities to students such as this should be on the front page of every newspaper. The worst thing that can happen to these kids is this story gets forgotten in a few days and they are stuck with their ass up paying three grand a year. How much are the artists getting from this settlement?
Perl isn't always good by Reuven Lerner
Length: 5min Language: Hebrew
Content:
The Perl community -- and similar open-source language communities --
seems to think that Perl is the One True Language, and is appropriate
for just about everything you can imagine.
And here I thought Hebrew was the One true language
My high school television studio runs a multi-mac FCP shop, and swears by it. Most of the production that comes out of the lab is just as good as packages you'd see on CNN. Keep in mind that the students need about a week of training before they are off cutting news packages.
As far as software costs go, if a well-designed, full-featured commercial product comes out, there is no reason Slashdot should ignore it. When you spend your money on an Apple product, you get a tightly integrated piece of hardware/software that will work right, the first time, when you have no clue how to use it.
Also, what Free OSS tools? I did a search and came up only with Kino. A far cry from FCP or even iMovie.
On the other hand, I think professional applications like 3D animation software, pro audio editing, and the like is needed in the OSS/Linux arena. It's these apps that sell the OS.
Wow, sounds pretty easy eh? How is the responsiveness of the editing environment? Are changes reflected immediately, and if so, what is the latency between parties?
Sig. Love conquers all... except CANCER
How would you intelligently coordinate multiple editors of the same document, be it a C source or a legal draft? I can see nightmares of delete-key wars.
If there was a privelage system in place, where certain editors could only modify certain text, that would help things, but at the same time complicate the editing process greatly.
I just don't see a need for this, anywhere. Collaborative editing is definetly a good thing, but not like this.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. Here on /. we're constantly assailing congress for passing laws which make no sense, or enforcing good laws in bad ways. I think we all need to carefully think about the repercussions of enacting anti-spam laws, and eat our own "don't legislate, fix the problem in the technology" medicine. I know good laws do exist, and perfectly good spam laws could be written, but wouldn't it be better to *fix* smtp's flaws which enable spam to propogate?
Damn, I had thought of this many years ago but discarded it as a novelty. Good job!
On a side note, this will help keep me off my computer while drunk too!!
The point is, during the beta period, the beta-testers were promised the use of the service for free, for ever. Also, most of the functionality of the system is derived from the spam filter, which is derived from the work of these beta testers. Without community support, their spam filter == useless IMHO
One little problem, CloudMark SpamNet has alienated the entire community it is based on. For 11 months, it was touted as totaly free community-based spam detection (using p2p bayesian filtering AFAIK), while the end-users beta-tested it. Now, as they reached their 1.0 release, a decision was made to charge $3.99/month for the "service" (which the community created by classifying mail as spam w/ their client). Read more on it here
Looks like a great system to implement the Chromium project on!
Now, before I start here, let me just acknowledge up-front that what
/usr/include/sys/errno.h /* Programming error */
I'm about to raise is prime bike-shed material of the first order. It
is a matter so trivial that it's not at all unreasonable to expect
every man and his dog in this project to have a strong opinion on it,
so in the name of bandwidth conservation and all that's holy I merely
ask you to honestly ask yourself "do I really, truly care about this?"
before sending off your personal 500 word screed on the subject that's
to follow. Finally, and just for the record, I'll note that two of my
dogs pretty much agree with me on this and the third, a small white
poodle with an attitude problem, honestly doesn't give a damn and
indicated as much by merely showed me his teeth when I asked him about
it.
With all that out of the way, I'll get on with it. Here at Apple we've
been merging this and that from FreeBSD, as is our usual custom, and
today several engineers saw something go across in a cvs merge commit
which raised more than a few eyebrows and led to various queries as to
the origin of the following new errno in FreeBSD:
jkh@freebsd-> grep DOOFUS
#define EDOOFUS 88
Doing a little digging, I also see that a certain Dane is responsible
for both the original commit on 2002/08/09 and a spelling fix to it on
2002/08/21 (I guess the OED is pretty clear on the spelling of
"doofus"). Most of you who know me at all will also know that I'm
hardly the most reverent or humor-impaired person you'll ever meet and
I certainly got a chuckle out of this when I first saw it, just as I've
gotten a chuckle out of various man pages and function names in FreeBSD
which showed that the programmer responsible for them was at least
enjoying his or her work at the time. I'm all for that, particularly
in situations where a developer or user has to go well out of their way
to get offended by something and therefore isn't exactly an object of
sympathy.
This, however, is a little more in-your-face than something like the
infamous "die_you_gravy_sucking_pigdog()" function in shutdown (which I
successfully defended when it came up) since it sort of makes an
implied statement about the developer's competence, rightly or wrongly,
and is far more likely to propagate into other code since if there's an
errno value returned by something then it also needs to be checked by
the client code. From the corporate perspective, and corporations are
infamous for not being particularly inclined towards humor, this is one
particular little "easter egg" in FreeBSD that sticks just a little too
far above the ground to lend a professional image.
So, to make a long story short, this is one small area where Apple's
going to have to gratuitously diverge from FreeBSD if it remains this
way and I frankly hate that idea since it just makes diffing things
that much more annoying and for reasons which could be best and most
accurately described as "silly." That said, I'm sure the reactions
of the various people reading this will still vary between "who gives a
damn what Apple thinks of our errno values?! Get a life, Apple!" and
"yeah, that's a pretty silly errno value and in rather colloquial
english at that, let's pick a more descriptive name like ``EUSERERR''
or something which makes any code using it more clear."
I'm naturally hoping that more people will be of the latter opinion and
we can just change it and move on, one more gratuitous and unnecessary
code fork thus averted, but if the group consensus is that we should
get bent and simply change our own value to one which potentially
offends our developers less (or remove it entirely) and not bother the
FreeBSD project with such requests, I'm willing to live with that too.
I had to at least ask, however, rather than just making the change
unilaterally on our side... Thanks, and let the bikeshed building
begin!
--
Jordan K. Hubbard
Engineering Manager, BSD technology group
Apple Computer
...for another year!!
Sony has done this with the PS2, but instead of custom designed controllers, they made the entire system "themed" as a special edition. Much nicer IMHO. Link to one of them here. Colors are interesting, a little too pastel and smells like hello kitty :)
Hmm, I had just assumed it wouldn't because of my unsuccessful attempts to conquer gravity with love
Ebay created the system of social moderation and assignment of trustworthyness. People who abuse it should be dealt with in that system, but by no means is the system creator responsible. Just my $0.02
Very nice!
The RIAA cannot continue prosecuting their customer base for long, lest everyone will pack up their things and stop buying CDs outright. Especially for reasons that arent even legally clear.
It appears as if these students didn't make any of the copywrited material available to anyone other then themselves. This is step one in prosecuting the individual music downloader. In addition, the practice of selective enforcement, also referred to as "making an example," is hugely detrimental to everyone involved. The few unlucky saps that get caught will be screwed to the tune of thousands of dollars while their buddies are snickering away clicking "find more sources." It just isn't right.
Also, the media HAS to cover these stories! Atrocities to students such as this should be on the front page of every newspaper. The worst thing that can happen to these kids is this story gets forgotten in a few days and they are stuck with their ass up paying three grand a year. How much are the artists getting from this settlement?
Oops, looks like its this (jukebox) that you want instead.
GNU MP3d is what you are looking for :)
I suppose slagging is out of the question
Parents, be forewarned, sky pornography is the leading cause of eyestrain for children of the age 12-18
And here I thought Hebrew was the One true language
Sell the handles (cheap HP/Epson/Cannon/etc printers) for cheap, and the blades (Cartridges) for way more then they are worth.
One equation to rule them all, one equation to find them one equation to bring them all and in the darkness bind them...
now THAT's a nice ring-shape
Just another example of Saber Tattling by weapon manufacturers
My high school television studio runs a multi-mac FCP shop, and swears by it. Most of the production that comes out of the lab is just as good as packages you'd see on CNN. Keep in mind that the students need about a week of training before they are off cutting news packages.
As far as software costs go, if a well-designed, full-featured commercial product comes out, there is no reason Slashdot should ignore it. When you spend your money on an Apple product, you get a tightly integrated piece of hardware/software that will work right, the first time, when you have no clue how to use it.
Also, what Free OSS tools? I did a search and came up only with Kino. A far cry from FCP or even iMovie.
On the other hand, I think professional applications like 3D animation software, pro audio editing, and the like is needed in the OSS/Linux arena. It's these apps that sell the OS.
Wow, sounds pretty easy eh? How is the responsiveness of the editing environment? Are changes reflected immediately, and if so, what is the latency between parties? Sig. Love conquers all... except CANCER
How would you intelligently coordinate multiple editors of the same document, be it a C source or a legal draft? I can see nightmares of delete-key wars.
If there was a privelage system in place, where certain editors could only modify certain text, that would help things, but at the same time complicate the editing process greatly.
I just don't see a need for this, anywhere. Collaborative editing is definetly a good thing, but not like this.