I always thought more people would migrate from MS Office to OpenOffice to *avoid* the Ribbon and stick with a more familiar UI.
I say this as an OpenOffice user of many years, and as someone who has never used this fancy new Ribbon business in more recent versions of MS Office. The Ribbon in MS Office is one feature that helps keeps me in OpenOffice, and keeps me from upgrading the old version of MS Office that I have hanging around just in case I need it.
Ideally, both old and new interfaces would be available, and could be selected in the Options. In reality, this probably puts a lot more load on the developers to maintain two quite different interfaces....
The article is primarily about the situation in Australia. There are no Panera Bread outlets in Australia, so irrespective of the food quality (or lack thereof), this just isn't an option.
I think poor old Mandriva could have suffered due to the lack of good English documentation (including developer docs and community forums), and the bias toward French language hasn't been good for them overall. Then again, it's been a few years now since I used that distro, it may have changed.
It may be great for French speakers, but my experience back when I used Mandriva (and "Mandrake") daily on my Desktop PC was that good English technical documentation was lacking, although I noticed lots of developer docs in French on the wiki that I couldn't read. Ultimately this was a major driver that pushed me toward Ubuntu... the detailed technical documentation provided by the community (in English) beat Mandriva's docs hands down.
(aka Sim City[tm]) would be a nice addition.
The source is available under the GPL, but a bit of Googling didn't find me any pre-compiled Windows version. Anyone know where one might be ? There are certainly deb packages for Debian/Ubuntu around.
In theory, the problem of insurance companies and employers discriminating based on genetic information in the US has be 'solved' by the passing of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) this year.
I say in theory, because I expect they will find some loophole to enable them to exploit this information anyhow. But we will have to wait and see....
( http://spittoon.23andme.com/2008/05/21/its-official-bush-signs-gina/ )
the wii outsells all of those big 3 ...err.. maybe not.. unless maybe you make some distinction between 'gaming PCs' and 'business PCs'.
But the essence of your point is valid. The 'big three' are actually Xbox 360, PC and Wii, based on sales (assuming you don't count PS2, which still seems to be selling).
Yet, despite having more units in homes, developers still appear too proud or too lazy to downgrade the graphics a little for their latest 'blockbuster' and neglect to port many of these 'hardcore' games to the Wii... which is a shame since playing FPSs with a regular control pad sucks big time... the Wiimote is next best thing to a playing using a mouse, and at least as fun.
insert rant about the importance of gameplay, "graphics isn't everything". yadda yadda yadda
There is (was) an RSS feed which I used with DemocracyTV to watch The Show. Sure beat a little video window in the browser. However, I don't think the feed became available until sometime after the half way mark in the life of The Show... Ze must have changed his tune a little from the initial website-only policy.
.. and yet the mainstream media persist on calling it one, along with kazaa, grokster etc etc.
Phrases like "the music swapping website kazza" are all two frequent in the media. I find this really depressing because it highlights the general lack of understanding of technologies which the authors then proceed to make value judgements about.
Most of this is old news to Slashdotters, but just in case a "journalist" reads this post (yeh, right):
Napster / Kazaa etc are not websites. They were peer-to-peer filesharing networks, and associated software. After they were shutdown by legal action, the trademarks were retained and used to market services which sell music.
They were filesharing networks. This means potentially any data stored on a a computer, legal or illegal, can be shared. Not just music.
It's not file swapping, it's sharing. In a swap, two parties exchange goods. If I share a file with you, I do not lose a copy of it, and you don't need to offer me anything in return.
When anyone calls Napster a "website", they quickly expose that they have no experience with the software they are talking about.
Eh, got that off my chest, despite being a bit OT..
Maybe you are thinking of something like Ren'Py ? (made with pygame).
I played with Ren'Py about a year ago, trying out the game "Reconstruction 01". It seemed to work pretty well, but then again I'm no connoisseur... that was my first real foray into visual novels.
Personally I still prefer the Infocom-style interactive fiction, without all the nasty graphics.
Plus, NMR results or more vague than X-Ray crystallography, and can only be used with small proteins,
This is a common misconception, and while Xray structures are often more *precise*, they are not always more *accurate*. It is also somewhat like comparing apples and oranges, since one is in a crystal, the other is more free to move without distortion in solution
Protein structures determined by NMR are typically represented as an ensemble of possible 'best fits' to the observed NMR data, and so often they appear more 'vague' or 'fuzzy'. The pictures which are usually published show a number (~20) of the best structures all overlayed, and it can look a bit like a bundle of strands compared to an Xray structure, which are represented as the 'one true structure'.
The truth is, that Xray structures are also simply a best fit to the observed data, which can be good in some places, and very poor and fuzzy in others. This goodness of fit is usually stored as the B-factor (or "temperature factor") along side the atomic coordinates, but the average non-structural biologist doesn't look at the B-factor, and just assumes that the Xray structure is reliable. The upshot is that some Xray structures appear much more *precise* in parts than they really are (and that's not even getting into the relevance of structures in a crystal vs. in a solution closer to their native environment).
It turns out that for proteins with both NMR and Xray structures available, generally (but not always) the regions which are fuzziest in an NMR structure correspond to the same regions with high B-factors in the Xray structure.
The one thing that Xray structures really don't tell us about is often the most important property when it comes to protein function... the dynamics.. the motion. NMR structures often reflect this mobility in the precision of the coordinates, and by analysis of NMR relaxtion data it can be verified that much of the time the fuzziness in the structure is not simply due to lack of structural data in this region of the protein, but also due to dynamic motion.
On a related note.. it is possible to measure residual dipolar couplings by NMR at a precision such that certain bond vectors are more precisely defined than the equivalent vectors in most Xray structures (Ad Bax did this... can't find the reference right now). While this technique is not in common enough usage to be producing super-precise NMR structures every day, it is helping close the gap considerably for those who are applying it.
That said, the smart approach is to use Xray and NMR in parallel. A few years ago I saw a talk summarising the findings of a prominent North American Structual Genomics program. In the first few years, they had basically solved the same amount of protein structures by NMR as they had by Xray. It goes to show that structure quality comparisons aside, both methods have their own strengths, and those that restrict themselves to only one of these techniques effectively halves their chances of producing a protein structure.
(I am a structural biologist by trade... probably explains the semi-rant on this topic. I could go on - encouragement accepted with gusto)
In that case, the care that the OpenBSD project takes in this respect will be very helpful for everyone, as long as the Anonym.OS developers endeavour to use binaries which match the hashes of the official build as much as possible. It should make peer-review of any parts that have been changed and don't match the official source easier too (for both compiled and interpreted code).
I briefly looked, and I can't find any Anonym.OS source code (other than the pf ruleset) on the kaos pages + sourceforce.
For the ultra-paranoid... if your IP address can be in any way traced back to you (via ISP account or a camera at Starbucks) *and* your associated with your activities, your anonymity is gone. For instance, the only thing any 'backdoor/trojan/whatever' needs to do is send your browser history to the attacker along with your real IP.
As I say, this stuff probably doesn't matter for all but the most paranoid.
(Also a livecd does not nessesarily leave the harddisk alone by definition, it can obviously touch the harddisk if it wants, and many do for persistent home directories & temp space... hell, why not just root your box as well)
While the intent of this project is very good, and I hate to pick holes....here's one for the ultra-paranoid:
Do you trust the precompiled binaries on the livecd ?
Sure, the OpenBSD source is available for you to comb over for backdoors & sniffers etc, but how do you know that Anonym.OS was compiled using that exact same source code ?
Maybe comparing hashes of the binaries to the offical OpenBSD versions would be a good start, but there are various reasons why this will only get you half way to validating that the build is kosher
I'm not even beginning to suggest this work is trojaned or anything - the last thing I want to do is spread FUD about something this cool and useful..[whoops, maybe too late], but this is a significant problem that I've come across personally when considering a "privacy" geared livecd. You place a lot of trust in the person(s) packaging the distro unless you pretty much compile the whole thing yourself.
One solution (which is very time consuming, and already dated), is the Trusted Build Live CD (TB) by the Hacktivismo group. It is basically a cookbook for rolling your own Gentoo livecd, with some tailoring for anonymity related applications like Tor (AFAIK, it doesn't do the nice packet filtering that Anonym.OS does, however).
It's nothing more than reinventing the wheel.
Much like the computer spreadsheet and the wordprocesser (and PDFs file with a reader) have reinvented paper...
I agree with many posters that this is not really making organisms from scratch, but these highly modified, tricked-out organisms may be more useful than wildtype yeast... just like a computerized spreadsheet or wordprocesser has some advantages over using a pen a paper.
It is all about encouraging mass adoption for more legal uses. It is true that using mimetypes or whatever the browser/BT client integration can be pretty seamless. For me, that is fine, I'm happy to install an external client.
However, I'm thinking more along the lines of getting the 'mums-n-dads' to use BT... experience shows they don't usually care whats going on behind the scenes, they just want to click on the link and get the file. Period. No extra clients, no extra links for BT or ftp or gohper or whatever. A Firefox extension is scarily easy to install.. click on the xpi, and you are pretty much done (and usually integrates better than external clients). I'm guessing you just need to visit the right url to get a plugin automatically installed for IE too (zero-click-install[TM] !). My mother would do that if I sent instructions to her in an email. She probably wouldn't install Azureus.. particularly if it required a new JRE version too.
Additionally, if there was a way that websites could provide a _single_link_ which defaulted to 'normal' supported protocols, but could also provide a torrent to browsers which understand it, content providers wouldn't need to worry about losing 'customers' by scaring the mums-n-dads off by supplying torrent links... I know it sounds unnessecary to the tech savy, but that's not who this would be aimed at. It's aimed at getting the average drooling masses using BT for lots of everyday *legal* web usage, so there is enough momentum to keep BT from becoming another Napster/Kazaa/etc (if it isn't too far down that road already).
I completely agree with this. One of the best things to ensure BitTorrent's future without it being demonized by regulatory bodies (..etc) is to make it *the* standard accepted method for large downloads on the WWW. A simple no-frills BT client extension to Firefox, and dare I say it even a plugin for IE, would be a good idea to help get the widest acceptance possible.
For instance, if an online publisher provides a torrent option, the browser could automatically + silently use BT instead of the usual http or ftp.
Anyone have some ideas how torrents could be integrated into HTML seamlessly alongside normal http:/// or ftp:// urls as an alternative url that the browser could chose if it has the capabilities ?
Just another idea I have not the time (and/or the skills) to code....
Slashdot Mirror
Makes me think of an extension to the Ubuntu tagline: "Linux for human beings".
"Linux for human beings, by human beings."
I always thought more people would migrate from MS Office to OpenOffice to *avoid* the Ribbon and stick with a more familiar UI.
....
I say this as an OpenOffice user of many years, and as someone who has never used this fancy new Ribbon business in more recent versions of MS Office. The Ribbon in MS Office is one feature that helps keeps me in OpenOffice, and keeps me from upgrading the old version of MS Office that I have hanging around just in case I need it.
Ideally, both old and new interfaces would be available, and could be selected in the Options. In reality, this probably puts a lot more load on the developers to maintain two quite different interfaces
Moving to gravel roads sounds like a strategy to combat unemployment ... now more people can be employed to maintain the high-maintenance roads.
The article is primarily about the situation in Australia. There are no Panera Bread outlets in Australia, so irrespective of the food quality (or lack thereof), this just isn't an option.
I think poor old Mandriva could have suffered due to the lack of good English documentation (including developer docs and community forums), and the bias toward French language hasn't been good for them overall. Then again, it's been a few years now since I used that distro, it may have changed.
... the detailed technical documentation provided by the community (in English) beat Mandriva's docs hands down.
It may be great for French speakers, but my experience back when I used Mandriva (and "Mandrake") daily on my Desktop PC was that good English technical documentation was lacking, although I noticed lots of developer docs in French on the wiki that I couldn't read. Ultimately this was a major driver that pushed me toward Ubuntu
(aka Sim City[tm]) would be a nice addition. The source is available under the GPL, but a bit of Googling didn't find me any pre-compiled Windows version. Anyone know where one might be ? There are certainly deb packages for Debian/Ubuntu around.
For your sake, I hope wk2 is a pseudonym ... "Choose Your Own Adventure" is trademarked ...
In theory, the problem of insurance companies and employers discriminating based on genetic information in the US has be 'solved' by the passing of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) this year. I say in theory, because I expect they will find some loophole to enable them to exploit this information anyhow. But we will have to wait and see ....
( http://spittoon.23andme.com/2008/05/21/its-official-bush-signs-gina/ )
@Commander Tariq ... I didn't quite get all of that last Twitter .. did you go over the 140 character limit ?
to come out of the ARS ...
captial 'N', capital 'I', captial 'A'. It's new, it's from OCZ, and it's here... right now.
But the essence of your point is valid. The 'big three' are actually Xbox 360, PC and Wii, based on sales (assuming you don't count PS2, which still seems to be selling).
Yet, despite having more units in homes, developers still appear too proud or too lazy to downgrade the graphics a little for their latest 'blockbuster' and neglect to port many of these 'hardcore' games to the Wii
insert rant about the importance of gameplay, "graphics isn't everything". yadda yadda yadda
There is (was) an RSS feed which I used with DemocracyTV to watch The Show. Sure beat a little video window in the browser. However, I don't think the feed became available until sometime after the half way mark in the life of The Show ... Ze must have changed his tune a little from the initial website-only policy.
Time to clean my shower.
With bleach.
Phrases like "the music swapping website kazza" are all two frequent in the media. I find this really depressing because it highlights the general lack of understanding of technologies which the authors then proceed to make value judgements about.
Most of this is old news to Slashdotters, but just in case a "journalist" reads this post (yeh, right):
When anyone calls Napster a "website", they quickly expose that they have no experience with the software they are talking about.
Eh, got that off my chest, despite being a bit OT
... China welcomes the one child per laptop program with open arms.
Maybe you are thinking of something like Ren'Py ? (made with pygame).
I played with Ren'Py about a year ago, trying out the game "Reconstruction 01". It seemed to work pretty well, but then again I'm no connoisseur ... that was my first real foray into visual novels.
Personally I still prefer the Infocom-style interactive fiction, without all the nasty graphics.
Plus, NMR results or more vague than X-Ray crystallography, and can only be used with small proteins,
... the dynamics .. the motion. NMR structures often reflect this mobility in the precision of the coordinates, and by analysis of NMR relaxtion data it can be verified that much of the time the fuzziness in the structure is not simply due to lack of structural data in this region of the protein, but also due to dynamic motion.
.. it is possible to measure residual dipolar couplings by NMR at a precision such that certain bond vectors are more precisely defined than the equivalent vectors in most Xray structures (Ad Bax did this ... can't find the reference right now). While this technique is not in common enough usage to be producing super-precise NMR structures every day, it is helping close the gap considerably for those who are applying it.
That said, the smart approach is to use Xray and NMR in parallel. A few years ago I saw a talk summarising the findings of a prominent North American Structual Genomics program. In the first few years, they had basically solved the same amount of protein structures by NMR as they had by Xray. It goes to show that structure quality comparisons aside, both methods have their own strengths, and those that restrict themselves to only one of these techniques effectively halves their chances of producing a protein structure.
... probably explains the semi-rant on this topic. I could go on - encouragement accepted with gusto)
This is a common misconception, and while Xray structures are often more *precise*, they are not always more *accurate*. It is also somewhat like comparing apples and oranges, since one is in a crystal, the other is more free to move without distortion in solution
Protein structures determined by NMR are typically represented as an ensemble of possible 'best fits' to the observed NMR data, and so often they appear more 'vague' or 'fuzzy'. The pictures which are usually published show a number (~20) of the best structures all overlayed, and it can look a bit like a bundle of strands compared to an Xray structure, which are represented as the 'one true structure'.
The truth is, that Xray structures are also simply a best fit to the observed data, which can be good in some places, and very poor and fuzzy in others. This goodness of fit is usually stored as the B-factor (or "temperature factor") along side the atomic coordinates, but the average non-structural biologist doesn't look at the B-factor, and just assumes that the Xray structure is reliable. The upshot is that some Xray structures appear much more *precise* in parts than they really are (and that's not even getting into the relevance of structures in a crystal vs. in a solution closer to their native environment).
It turns out that for proteins with both NMR and Xray structures available, generally (but not always) the regions which are fuzziest in an NMR structure correspond to the same regions with high B-factors in the Xray structure.
The one thing that Xray structures really don't tell us about is often the most important property when it comes to protein function
On a related note
(I am a structural biologist by trade
In that case, the care that the OpenBSD project takes in this respect will be very helpful for everyone, as long as the Anonym.OS developers endeavour to use binaries which match the hashes of the official build as much as possible. It should make peer-review of any parts that have been changed and don't match the official source easier too (for both compiled and interpreted code).
... if your IP address can be in any way traced back to you (via ISP account or a camera at Starbucks) *and* your associated with your activities, your anonymity is gone. For instance, the only thing any 'backdoor/trojan/whatever' needs to do is send your browser history to the attacker along with your real IP.
... hell, why not just root your box as well)
I briefly looked, and I can't find any Anonym.OS source code (other than the pf ruleset) on the kaos pages + sourceforce.
For the ultra-paranoid
As I say, this stuff probably doesn't matter for all but the most paranoid.
(Also a livecd does not nessesarily leave the harddisk alone by definition, it can obviously touch the harddisk if it wants, and many do for persistent home directories & temp space
While the intent of this project is very good, and I hate to pick holes ....here's one for the ultra-paranoid:
..[whoops, maybe too late], but this is a significant problem that I've come across personally when considering a "privacy" geared livecd. You place a lot of trust in the person(s) packaging the distro unless you pretty much compile the whole thing yourself.
Do you trust the precompiled binaries on the livecd ?
Sure, the OpenBSD source is available for you to comb over for backdoors & sniffers etc, but how do you know that Anonym.OS was compiled using that exact same source code ?
Maybe comparing hashes of the binaries to the offical OpenBSD versions would be a good start, but there are various reasons why this will only get you half way to validating that the build is kosher
I'm not even beginning to suggest this work is trojaned or anything - the last thing I want to do is spread FUD about something this cool and useful
One solution (which is very time consuming, and already dated), is the Trusted Build Live CD (TB) by the Hacktivismo group. It is basically a cookbook for rolling your own Gentoo livecd, with some tailoring for anonymity related applications like Tor (AFAIK, it doesn't do the nice packet filtering that Anonym.OS does, however).
But without cinematic cutscences, what would publishers use for screenshots on the back of the box ?!?
It's nothing more than reinventing the wheel. Much like the computer spreadsheet and the wordprocesser (and PDFs file with a reader) have reinvented paper ...
I agree with many posters that this is not really making organisms from scratch, but these highly modified, tricked-out organisms may be more useful than wildtype yeast ... just like a computerized spreadsheet or wordprocesser has some advantages over using a pen a paper.
No, the US defense force would never use a "crowd control" technology that hurt anyone. Especially innocent Iraqis.
It is all about encouraging mass adoption for more legal uses.
... experience shows they don't usually care whats going on behind the scenes, they just want to click on the link and get the file. Period. No extra clients, no extra links for BT or ftp or gohper or whatever. A Firefox extension is scarily easy to install .. click on the xpi, and you are pretty much done (and usually integrates better than external clients). I'm guessing you just need to visit the right url to get a plugin automatically installed for IE too (zero-click-install[TM] !). My mother would do that if I sent instructions to her in an email. She probably wouldn't install Azureus .. particularly if it required a new JRE version too.
... I know it sounds unnessecary to the tech savy, but that's not who this would be aimed at. It's aimed at getting the average drooling masses using BT for lots of everyday *legal* web usage, so there is enough momentum to keep BT from becoming another Napster/Kazaa/etc (if it isn't too far down that road already).
It is true that using mimetypes or whatever the browser/BT client integration can be pretty seamless. For me, that is fine, I'm happy to install an external client.
However, I'm thinking more along the lines of getting the 'mums-n-dads' to use BT
Additionally, if there was a way that websites could provide a _single_link_ which defaulted to 'normal' supported protocols, but could also provide a torrent to browsers which understand it, content providers wouldn't need to worry about losing 'customers' by scaring the mums-n-dads off by supplying torrent links
I completely agree with this. One of the best things to ensure BitTorrent's future without it being demonized by regulatory bodies (..etc) is to make it *the* standard accepted method for large downloads on the WWW. A simple no-frills BT client extension to Firefox, and dare I say it even a plugin for IE, would be a good idea to help get the widest acceptance possible.
....
For instance, if an online publisher provides a torrent option, the browser could automatically + silently use BT instead of the usual http or ftp.
Anyone have some ideas how torrents could be integrated into HTML seamlessly alongside normal http:/// or ftp:// urls as an alternative url that the browser could chose if it has the capabilities ?
Just another idea I have not the time (and/or the skills) to code