way off base, in many ways..the bug is Thermus aquaticus; isolation of heat stable DNA polymerase, called Taq, was first described by a russian group, then patented by cetus for use in PCR. Many other companies have patented isolation of similar enzymes from other organisms, eg stratagene has pfu polymerase, from pyroccocus furiosis, there is alos pwo polymerase, vent, etc etc
The patenting of a use for a natural product,or a method of obtaining a natural product is an intrinsic part of the patent system. It may not be fair, or right, but thems are the rules.
Actually, the cost of heat stable polymerase is not that great (related to other parts of the proces, such as dNTPS, etc) it is the cost of the license for the process, such as a pcr licence, that is exspensive.
HOw can one describe a potential discovery ? Perhaps you mean potential uses for already known things, or new versions of already known things. The antifreeze protein thing is OOOOLLLD. Also, there is little danger to these organisms: either they are abundant in their natural habitats, in which case harvesting a few for lab use is no problem, or they are rare in their native habitats, in which case they are species that have already lost the evolution lottery
What moron designs a system without triple redundant background ? Or,if you dont have it initally, what kind of morons let this conditon persist ? You geeks dont seriously expect me to beleive that loss of a single computer would actually effect anyting for more then a few milliseconds ? I think the whole thing is not so subtle pumping for verisign - look at us spending Mbucks on this free but super critical service...if the internet actually cared if A got hit by a bomb, then a LOT of people, in govt and academia and biz have a LOT of explaining to do..
is this what they ar trying to say:
all your groceries have rfid tags, and as u take them in and out of hte fridge, and put the empty jar in the trash, your pda gets downloaded a grocery list, and calls up the three local markets you go to and calculates the lowest cost shopping
Or, as your fridge breaks, it downloads to your laptop a message that you probably need this spare part, which can be installed using the following instructions
or, your washing machine lets you know you have put a wool sweater in with the synthetics, and wash cycle will be off
or, your boss emails that the mtg is delayed onehour, and you are in your car, and the pda tells you tht of the five things to do, the oil change is possible because your pda can schedule an appt with a shop at the next exit...
of course, it will all probably wind up advertiser drive, so your shopping cart reports what RFid tags are in the cart, and as you pass by other items, the LCD on the cart says, hey, you have pickles in the cart, how about some ketchup...
There are clearly a number of Research savy people on/.,who should be saying things like..Small studies that purport some miraculous cure are a dime a dozen; real drugs that have a Theraputic index are rare. Example: About 20 years ago, a surgeon in mexico reports ASTONISHING, MIRACULOUS results tranplanting fetal tissue into the brains of parkinsons patients - people virtually frozen for years are playing tennis.
As a result, scientists around the world devote scarce $$ and time on followup studies...and the result ? It dont work that well.
This alz study may be the one in a thousand that actually represents a real finding, but 1:1e3 aint good odds.
As to all this stuff about Li (aka lithium) I have seen Abeta1-40 aggregate in vitro, and it sure happens easily. Just to keep the stuff in solution, you need something like heptaflourobutyric acid as solvent.
translation: If metals promote plaque formation, it can happen with very low, trace concentrations, which implies that chelators (metal binding drugs) are not going to work, or at least chelation will not stop peptide from forming plaques; it might inhibit some protease, or some enzyme downstream of the plaque that is transducing the cell death signal
As to all this stuff about big pharma somehow blocking research on cheap Alz drugs... there are a lot of scientists and doctors out there with Alz+ parents; thats what you call motivation.
http://www.repairfaq.org/REPAIR/F_Repair.html lot s of very pratical stuff on how to repair thinkgs like CDs. HOwever, integrating many of the comments on/. suggests a need for a new open source software/web site: oem parts.net That is for any model #/serial number, or for any product code, of anything, you find an oem parts list and exploded view, just like for appliances on the sears web site
How many people in this country work as scientists on projects of interest to big oil and how many work on projects of intrest to alt energy ? Science is not as "empirical" as one might think Also, since most of science does not apply to real life (as Feynmen remarked, every textbook talks about fluid flow in a pipe, but no one can take a real pipe and give real predictions based on principals) it might turn out, given the complex behaviour of people, that, stipulating it is idiotic, deconstructionism might be more useful in dealing with things like illness and divorce etc
"In the Scrum meeting, no one is allowed to speak save for the Scrum Team and Master. Others may attend but may not speak. This is intended to keep to meeting focused and short" About two or three years ago, PBS had a documentary on how boeing was building its new airplane, a pretty large project with some severe failure consequences. A lot of interesting stuff, but the most pertinent were the sections where the camera sat in on a weekly status meetings. A person would say something like: " worked on the engine mount. No progress; problem with titanium cracking at temp. Looking into heat treatments". and for this large project, one had the impression that the mtg was really short. I don't know if the software writing field has anything to learn from good manufacturing companys, but in the biomedical (pharma + biotech) research, we certainly feel we can learn a lot from boeing and motorola and toyota
The problems listed by blaine fall into four categorys: (1) MS download/software problems; (2)non OS software problems; (3)hardware and (4)helping really clueless friends.
I think it self evident that open software does not have a big impact on (3), and that open software probably makes (4) worse (can u imagine helping yr clueless friend with getting updates for linux software ?)
As for (2) I would suspect, after listenign to all the gripes on/. about arcane things like "make" that problems with linux software are just as bad as non; the diff is that linux people are more computer oriented, so they can solve a problem a lot faster then YCF.
In regard to (1) again, just listening to all the gripes on/., I suspect linux is no easier to use then windows.
1) Server ? what is that ? Way beyond me.
2) Software is the key - I actually bought two programs, Retrospect/stomp - and they were worse then useless, as I could not actually figure out what was happening, so I could have been in a situation where I thought thinkgs were backedup and they werent. I am not going to use software that complicated and badly designed.
3) Is all this complicated stuff really necessary ? Can't I just buy a new computer and load the CD with My Docs on it ? So what if it isnt exactly like the old one, and doesnt have the same versions of the same programs - do u think i care ?
4) I have a few gigs of data. So, what works real easy, just buy a dvd burner, and burn My docs once a weeek. Not fancy, but it works. Since the whole thing is backedup everyweek, I dont have to worry about finding anything unless it is deleted. And you know something ? I dont care that much. If it is that important, I'll sift thru the DVDs, or rewrite the doc. Of course, you have to be organized enought to have all your files in one place, so may be I am not an avg user
What if 1 out of 100/.ers got invovled with their local school/ school system technology group... I don't know what our school system (town of ~ 90,000 people, dont know fraction in school) pays for software, but we must have close to a thousand seats, even at academic prices, thats a lot..not to mention the educational value of having High school students forced to learn something about software
It is well known that single crystal, isotopically pure diamond makes the best heatsink material, as this substance has the highest thermal conductivity of any known material.
Engagement cpu anyone ?
exactly right. The idea that some complicated command line is "good" in any sense of the word is rediculous. By definition, a good OS will recognize peripherals automatically
(2024, kid going to college)
K: Dad, this is embarrassing ! how can i use this old computer of yours, it only has a terabyte of ram, and like, this measily attobyte hard drive.
D: in my day we got by with a gig of ram and were happy
K: yeah, well I guess you just want me to me like a social outcast from the other side of hte tracks or somthing. Like, I want to run MovRep (an app that takes a full[dvd+ quality] movie and replace the main character with you, seamlessly)
D: Listen young lady....
At my company, we do a lot of engineering design with solidworks and pro/e. For our needs, we don't need more raw power. Some of the engineers have graphics cards in the multikilobuck range, so an increase in power/$ would mean a lot to us.
We also do a lot of science apps that involve analysis (= science version of photoshop) of tiff files that can be 200 - 500 Mb each. I can certainly envision needing to work with 50+ of these files at a time, say do a diff between file 1 Vs. file 2 - 50, and plot out the results. The cost of computers to handle these in real time (20 seconds) is prohibitive.
At least in my area of the market, lab equipment for scientist, a lot of stuff looses out in the market place - that is how markets work.
Assuming software is a standard product, which behaves like refridgerators and pdas, one would expect most of the launched products to have a small market share.
Of course, the loosers are bitter, but our current capitilist system really does not care about loosers - you are suppose to retrain yourself and move on
why is "choice" good. I am serious here. For me, and my coworkers, all non geeks, having a single OS/office , eg windows 2000/XP and office 2000/xp is great - a guy emails me a complex doc, and it opens without problems, all of the support staff everywhere know this system, I have never run across an unsupported peripheral piece of hardware (dont flame me - i am a typical user and this is my experience).
It is really not clear to me that I, personnally, gain anything by having choice. True, I gain "freedom" to have my desktop do something else, but I loose "freedom" of interaction with others, the freedom have most of the IT people able to help me, the freedom to have plug and play (true, ms is not 100% great, but I will wager it will always be better then a fragmetned open source movement).
I guess "choice" of "freedom" from the evil MS empire is just not that important to me. I turn off my computer at the end of the day, go home, and don't worry about it. It is just not that big a deal. And as for the "ethical" issues, as long as there are starving children in the world, worrying about the gates monopoly is way way down on the list
As for the cost, if you factor in what I am paid, and how we work, and the cost of support and all that, at least for my company (we have a high proportion of high paid engineeers and scientists) the cost differential (only the diff is important right ?) is just not that important.
First of all, Iraq is, or at least was until years of US/UN sanctions crippled the economy, a fairly sophisticated country. I am sure there are many intellegint, well educated Iraqi geeks and computer scientists and power users who are quite capable of deciding for them selves what Iraq needs.
Second, there is this HUGE gulf between what we think and what appears to be thought, based on news accounts, in the Arab world. The clearest example is the widespread anger at the fall of Hussein as a humiliation, a view that I would wager is alien to most americans. People in the Mideast are just as smart as we are, and they are fully entitled to their opinions; if we don't like them, acting like a big bully, and telling people to shutup and do as we think is not going to help. I think there is a tinge of this in the post, we know best and you (children) will do what we want (unspoken or else)...
gee, just like the pop science article i read as a kid 30 years ago...can't wait !! (maybe they will have the 100 mile per gallon carb additive to - no wait, no more carbs !!!!)
Slashdot Mirror
way off base, in many ways..the bug is Thermus aquaticus; isolation of heat stable DNA polymerase, called Taq, was first described by a russian group, then patented by cetus for use in PCR. Many other companies have patented isolation of similar enzymes from other organisms, eg stratagene has pfu polymerase, from pyroccocus furiosis, there is alos pwo polymerase, vent, etc etc The patenting of a use for a natural product,or a method of obtaining a natural product is an intrinsic part of the patent system. It may not be fair, or right, but thems are the rules. Actually, the cost of heat stable polymerase is not that great (related to other parts of the proces, such as dNTPS, etc) it is the cost of the license for the process, such as a pcr licence, that is exspensive.
HOw can one describe a potential discovery ? Perhaps you mean potential uses for already known things, or new versions of already known things. The antifreeze protein thing is OOOOLLLD. Also, there is little danger to these organisms: either they are abundant in their natural habitats, in which case harvesting a few for lab use is no problem, or they are rare in their native habitats, in which case they are species that have already lost the evolution lottery
re point 4..so they ought to be flying 20 pieces of next gen hardware every mission to get flight time experience ?
What moron designs a system without triple redundant background ? Or,if you dont have it initally, what kind of morons let this conditon persist ? You geeks dont seriously expect me to beleive that loss of a single computer would actually effect anyting for more then a few milliseconds ? I think the whole thing is not so subtle pumping for verisign - look at us spending Mbucks on this free but super critical service...if the internet actually cared if A got hit by a bomb, then a LOT of people, in govt and academia and biz have a LOT of explaining to do..
is this what they ar trying to say: all your groceries have rfid tags, and as u take them in and out of hte fridge, and put the empty jar in the trash, your pda gets downloaded a grocery list, and calls up the three local markets you go to and calculates the lowest cost shopping Or, as your fridge breaks, it downloads to your laptop a message that you probably need this spare part, which can be installed using the following instructions or, your washing machine lets you know you have put a wool sweater in with the synthetics, and wash cycle will be off or, your boss emails that the mtg is delayed onehour, and you are in your car, and the pda tells you tht of the five things to do, the oil change is possible because your pda can schedule an appt with a shop at the next exit... of course, it will all probably wind up advertiser drive, so your shopping cart reports what RFid tags are in the cart, and as you pass by other items, the LCD on the cart says, hey, you have pickles in the cart, how about some ketchup...
There are clearly a number of Research savy people on /.,who should be saying things like..Small studies that purport some miraculous cure are a dime a dozen; real drugs that have a Theraputic index are rare. Example: About 20 years ago, a surgeon in mexico reports ASTONISHING, MIRACULOUS results tranplanting fetal tissue into the brains of parkinsons patients - people virtually frozen for years are playing tennis.
As a result, scientists around the world devote scarce $$ and time on followup studies ...and the result ? It dont work that well.
This alz study may be the one in a thousand that actually represents a real finding, but 1:1e3 aint good odds.
As to all this stuff about Li (aka lithium) I have seen Abeta1-40 aggregate in vitro, and it sure happens easily. Just to keep the stuff in solution, you need something like heptaflourobutyric acid as solvent.
translation: If metals promote plaque formation, it can happen with very low, trace concentrations, which implies that chelators (metal binding drugs) are not going to work, or at least chelation will not stop peptide from forming plaques; it might inhibit some protease, or some enzyme downstream of the plaque that is transducing the cell death signal
As to all this stuff about big pharma somehow blocking research on cheap Alz drugs... there are a lot of scientists and doctors out there with Alz+ parents; thats what you call motivation.
http://www.repairfaq.org/REPAIR/F_Repair.htmlt s of very pratical stuff on how to repair thinkgs like CDs. HOwever, integrating many of the comments on /. suggests a need for a new open source software/web site: oem parts.net
lo
That is for any model #/serial number, or for any product code, of anything, you find an oem parts list and exploded view, just like for appliances on the sears web site
and therefore not in the best posistion to be hurling stones about other peoples writing.
How many people in this country work as scientists on projects of interest to big oil and how many work on projects of intrest to alt energy ? Science is not as "empirical" as one might think
Also, since most of science does not apply to real life (as Feynmen remarked, every textbook talks about fluid flow in a pipe, but no one can take a real pipe and give real predictions based on principals) it might turn out, given the complex behaviour of people, that, stipulating it is idiotic, deconstructionism might be more useful in dealing with things like illness and divorce etc
"In the Scrum meeting, no one is allowed to speak save for the Scrum Team and Master. Others may attend but may not speak. This is intended to keep to meeting focused and short"
About two or three years ago, PBS had a documentary on how boeing was building its new airplane, a pretty large project with some severe failure consequences. A lot of interesting stuff, but the most pertinent were the sections where the camera sat in on a weekly status meetings. A person would say something like: " worked on the engine mount. No progress; problem with titanium cracking at temp. Looking into heat treatments".
and for this large project, one had the impression that the mtg was really short.
I don't know if the software writing field has anything to learn from good manufacturing companys, but in the biomedical (pharma + biotech) research, we certainly feel we can learn a lot from boeing and motorola and toyota
The problems listed by blaine fall into four categorys: (1) MS download/software problems; (2)non OS software problems; (3)hardware and (4)helping really clueless friends. I think it self evident that open software does not have a big impact on (3), and that open software probably makes (4) worse (can u imagine helping yr clueless friend with getting updates for linux software ?) As for (2) I would suspect, after listenign to all the gripes on/. about arcane things like "make" that problems with linux software are just as bad as non; the diff is that linux people are more computer oriented, so they can solve a problem a lot faster then YCF. In regard to (1) again, just listening to all the gripes on /., I suspect linux is no easier to use then windows.
1) Server ? what is that ? Way beyond me. 2) Software is the key - I actually bought two programs, Retrospect/stomp - and they were worse then useless, as I could not actually figure out what was happening, so I could have been in a situation where I thought thinkgs were backedup and they werent. I am not going to use software that complicated and badly designed. 3) Is all this complicated stuff really necessary ? Can't I just buy a new computer and load the CD with My Docs on it ? So what if it isnt exactly like the old one, and doesnt have the same versions of the same programs - do u think i care ? 4) I have a few gigs of data. So, what works real easy, just buy a dvd burner, and burn My docs once a weeek. Not fancy, but it works. Since the whole thing is backedup everyweek, I dont have to worry about finding anything unless it is deleted. And you know something ? I dont care that much. If it is that important, I'll sift thru the DVDs, or rewrite the doc. Of course, you have to be organized enought to have all your files in one place, so may be I am not an avg user
What if 1 out of 100 /.ers got invovled with their local school/ school system technology group... I don't know what our school system (town of ~ 90,000 people, dont know fraction in school) pays for software, but we must have close to a thousand seats, even at academic prices, thats a lot..not to mention the educational value of having High school students forced to learn something about software
It is well known that single crystal, isotopically pure diamond makes the best heatsink material, as this substance has the highest thermal conductivity of any known material. Engagement cpu anyone ?
I guess so my def of an OS is automatic regcognition of new hardware, with seamless web access to drivers. So, i guess there are no good OSs
exactly right. The idea that some complicated command line is "good" in any sense of the word is rediculous.
By definition, a good OS will recognize peripherals automatically
(2024, kid going to college) K: Dad, this is embarrassing ! how can i use this old computer of yours, it only has a terabyte of ram, and like, this measily attobyte hard drive. D: in my day we got by with a gig of ram and were happy K: yeah, well I guess you just want me to me like a social outcast from the other side of hte tracks or somthing. Like, I want to run MovRep (an app that takes a full[dvd+ quality] movie and replace the main character with you, seamlessly) D: Listen young lady....
At my company, we do a lot of engineering design with solidworks and pro/e. For our needs, we don't need more raw power. Some of the engineers have graphics cards in the multikilobuck range, so an increase in power/$ would mean a lot to us. We also do a lot of science apps that involve analysis (= science version of photoshop) of tiff files that can be 200 - 500 Mb each. I can certainly envision needing to work with 50+ of these files at a time, say do a diff between file 1 Vs. file 2 - 50, and plot out the results. The cost of computers to handle these in real time (20 seconds) is prohibitive.
At least in my area of the market, lab equipment for scientist, a lot of stuff looses out in the market place - that is how markets work. Assuming software is a standard product, which behaves like refridgerators and pdas, one would expect most of the launched products to have a small market share. Of course, the loosers are bitter, but our current capitilist system really does not care about loosers - you are suppose to retrain yourself and move on
why is "choice" good. I am serious here. For me, and my coworkers, all non geeks, having a single OS/office , eg windows 2000/XP and office 2000/xp is great - a guy emails me a complex doc, and it opens without problems, all of the support staff everywhere know this system, I have never run across an unsupported peripheral piece of hardware (dont flame me - i am a typical user and this is my experience). It is really not clear to me that I, personnally, gain anything by having choice. True, I gain "freedom" to have my desktop do something else, but I loose "freedom" of interaction with others, the freedom have most of the IT people able to help me, the freedom to have plug and play (true, ms is not 100% great, but I will wager it will always be better then a fragmetned open source movement). I guess "choice" of "freedom" from the evil MS empire is just not that important to me. I turn off my computer at the end of the day, go home, and don't worry about it. It is just not that big a deal. And as for the "ethical" issues, as long as there are starving children in the world, worrying about the gates monopoly is way way down on the list As for the cost, if you factor in what I am paid, and how we work, and the cost of support and all that, at least for my company (we have a high proportion of high paid engineeers and scientists) the cost differential (only the diff is important right ?) is just not that important.
First of all, Iraq is, or at least was until years of US/UN sanctions crippled the economy, a fairly sophisticated country. I am sure there are many intellegint, well educated Iraqi geeks and computer scientists and power users who are quite capable of deciding for them selves what Iraq needs. Second, there is this HUGE gulf between what we think and what appears to be thought, based on news accounts, in the Arab world. The clearest example is the widespread anger at the fall of Hussein as a humiliation, a view that I would wager is alien to most americans. People in the Mideast are just as smart as we are, and they are fully entitled to their opinions; if we don't like them, acting like a big bully, and telling people to shutup and do as we think is not going to help. I think there is a tinge of this in the post, we know best and you (children) will do what we want (unspoken or else)...
gee, just like the pop science article i read as a kid 30 years ago...can't wait !! (maybe they will have the 100 mile per gallon carb additive to - no wait, no more carbs !!!!)