Trump said he would 'get' Apple to make their products in America, not 'make' Apple.
That may all be said and good, but it seems Apple (and many other electronics manufacturers) might be hard to convince, as Jobs explained to Obama in 2012. An excerpt that captures the gist of the article:
Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.
" The speed and flexibility is breathtaking," the executive said. "There’s no American plant that can match that."
Don't forget, there were several people that tried to stay "within the system" to stop trailblazer from ever getting the green light, and they were all pushed aside in one way or another. These include Thomas Drake, Jack Goldsmith, Diane Roark, and several of the NSA developers for the ThinThread program (which they thought was a much better choice over Trailblazer, the program Snowden revealed. This is the most heartbreaking part of the story, folks like Ed Loomis almost lost their sanity trying to fight the higher ups on Trailblazer). Working within the system was being shot down by Cheney, Addington and Gonzales.
Most divergent of all, he believed that increasing automatization of labor would spawn not inequality or joblessness, but spiritual malaise.
How is this different from what we have now, I insist and ask ?
The 60s were different in that they were one of the few times when there wasn't increasing inequality/joblesness - people married young and could hold on to a job for 50 years - which is the outlier, not the historical norm. Just look at the 19th century by comparison. For a bit more discussion, see here.
My bad. Those 900 or so errors were for one quarter. The whole year is 2776, with 2012Q1 being the worst. Also, the trend is increasing.
Of which, 1,904 (2/3) involved cases in which a foreigner whose cellphone was being wiretapped entered the United States, where court warrants are required for most eavesdropping. A spike in such problems in a single quarter, the report said, could be because of Chinese citizens visiting friends and family for the Chinese Lunar New Year holiday.
“Roamer incidents are largely unpreventable, even with good target awareness and traffic review, since target travel activities are often unannounced and not easily predicted,” the report says.
I think this is an important point to keep in mind, although that still leaves approximately 900 "real" errors.
Its also worth pointing out that his commentary tends to be unbiased, honest and refreshing in a world of pundits that will say just about anything with little to no conviction or evidence. Take away all the statistics, and I'd still read his site just as a reassurance that yes: there are other rational thinkers out there.
There is a fantastic TED talk by Kirby Ferguson that expands on this theme (loss aversion in behavioral economics) and discusses some of these exact quotes/points. In short: "great artists steal, but not from me."
You should check out some of the latest biologic-based treatments for psoriasis that are "in the pipeline:"
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nm0512-638
Biologics typically have the benefit of being very specific against their target with few - if any - side effects. The downside is usually the cost/method of treatment, but thats another story...
"What are the differences between Mark Zuckerberg and me? Lets take a look.
I give you private information on corporations for free, and I'm a villian. Mark Zuckerberg gives your private information to corporations for money, and he's man of the year.
Thanks to wikileaks, you can see how corrupt governments operate in the shadows, and then lie to those who elect them. Thanks to facebook, you can finally figure out which Sex and the City character you are."
I'm a postdoc that works mostly with biochemist-ey types, and I'd highly recommend adding a math package to whats available to your students. With something like mathematica, you can do:
curve fitting/minimization
general math (probability distributions, convolutions, Fourier transforms, etc)
peak integration
statistical analysis
image analysis
check formulas and their characteristics (being able to verify derivatives, for example, is very important for fitting models)
what I also like about the math packages is the ability to synthesize "test" data to illustrate what can't be done simply in lab (or not at all, depending). And I think its also a great way to start learning a bit of programming/scripting without requiring too much CS (for those not interested in CS), but at the same time getting enough exposure to it so that they won't be completely lost when they see a conditional loop. And, I can personally tell you that science types use them quite widely.
I'm a little surprised you seem more concerned about the OS the programs run on. As long as the students can run the stuff you've listed along with some sort of math package to learn about handling data, just go with what the IT guys are most comfortable with.
But to answer your question: most science labs run whatever they want, but some hardware and/or proprietary analysis software for some equipment can dictate the OS.
It took me a minute to dig this up on Robb Toploski's Journal, I think its worth posting here:
ACTION REQUIRED - IMPORTANT: To opt-out from the settlement, simply write "I want to opt-out of the settlement" along with your name and address and mail it by May 13th to: P2P Congestion Settlement Claims Administrator; c/o Rust Consulting; P.O. Box 9454; Minneapolis, MN 55440-9454. Ask your friends to please do the same. If we want a meaningful settlement in this case and open Internet in our future, it's important to spread the word and send a strong message to Comcast and the industry.
When I moved in with some friends that wanted to split an internet connection back in '99, there weren't too many all-in-one routers, and those that did exist were either expensive or sucked. One of my roomies and I figured "hey, we can make our own router using linux!" So we dug through a trash bin near the CS building, found an old 386 with a dead disk controller and patched it up and added 2 ethernet cards. With a few bucks we bought a cheap 8 port hub and installed redhat 6.0 (it had just been released, and it was all that was cool in those days). We had done some internet research beforehand to learn ipchains enough to set up forwarding, and away we went. It worked so well we eventually started using the linux box as a common fileserver, name server, print server, web server, etc.
The converse is also true -- I use the journal's screening to figure out what to read because I don't have time to read every single thing, even preliminarily.... IMO, what will actually happen is that a free/open system is that the loss of the imprimatur of journal publication will mean increased reliance on other ways to quickly evaluate works.
I have an idea for this. I sometimes hang out on this website where lots of people are submitting things to be published. I don't feel like reading all of the submissions, but the great part is that other users can score up some of the submitted content so I can filter through the chaff and just look at the stuff that is most likely interesting or worthwhile. And I can just go to subsections of content that I'm primarily interested in. Then - and this is the cool part - every submission is debated in a moderated, open forum - where again, I can filter through the comments using a number of criteria and read only the "top rated" information, if I so choose.
I think the website is called slashdot. Have you ever checked out how it works?
Without name-brand journals, name-recognition will become even more important, which will lead to even more of the sort of "superstar" science in which funding and interest is ever more concentrated in a few research groups.
I would argue that without name-brand journals, name recognition will rely on more realistic metrics (like the quality of the work, not necessarily where stuff gets published) and therefore may be a better measure than the current system.
I'm surprised no one has suggested forensics yet. If you're not able to get the students into an actual lab, its a great way to keep them interested in a physics problem:
- given a ballistic pattern of a bullet OR
- given a blood splatter pattern OR
- a fall OR
- from a position of a body:
determine trajectories, velocities, etc. and likelihood a death is suicide or homicide.
- use momentum to analyze a car crash, or any force-related accident, and reconstruct it.
I find the article to be more of a review of past work than actual news. It covers several topics that anyone could read about by picking up a recent biology textbook (siRNA, the ribosome, alternative splicing, etc). I'm surprised this is on the front page of slashdot, while Nature dedicated almost an entire issue regarding the future of DNA technology, including the current state-of-the-art on personalized genomes. Now that is news for nerds.
The reason federal funding puts the IP rights into the hands of universities is a result of the Bayh Dole act. Regardless, it only makes universities the bad guys rather than the government. Its worth noting, though: the NIH has taken steps so research tools (patents granted for processes that do not lead to commercialization) that are developed with federal funds must be made available to other scientists under reasonable terms. Not ideal, but its a step. Read NIH 64 FR 72090 for the full details.
It depends on what you wanted access to, at least historically. Before the public access to publication initiative, NIH only really required that the data be made publicly available - i.e. if after reading a publication I wanted to look at the data from that publication for my own use, the lab I requested it from had to provide it (given that they had published it at that point). This is elaborated in NIH NOT-OD-03-032 and the NIH grant policy statement. Of course this all requires that I have access to the publication that talks about the data in the first place, so it was a bit of a chicken and egg problem.
So along came the initiative to make the publication itself open access (see the nih public access site for more info). Publishers are worried they'll lose cash, and thus the shitstorm you see in front of you.
They're specifically in the market for 3D CAD, 3DS, Maya, that sort of stuff, of which there really isn't a heavy weight open source equivalent.
I don't do 3D CAD, but being a biochemist type, I actually hang out with lots of folks that do work with all kinds of 3D data such as molecular models and volumetric MRI datasets. Workstation cards are especially useful for their stereo support, which many bio-folks find helpful when modelling. Most of the development is done on linux using stuff like VTK or VMD - its not just the engineering guys doing CAD in windows that want workstation cards.
As a scientist that uses linux daily for 3D applications, I would like to see an open source workstation card for 3D graphics, dangit.
non-experts have no way of distinguishing what is a good paper from what is not. The experts sometimes can't distinguish a well written paper either. The physicist Alan Sokol wrote a pomo paper that was deliberate nonsense, and it got puiblished: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_Affair Bad example: experts weren't consulted in the Sokal affair - Social Text didn't peer review the submission, so it was never evaluated by experts in the first place.
And previously on slashdot, a scientist claims that most scientific papers are wrong: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/3 0/2048236 Thats the whole reason most of us science folk get involved in science: no theory is perfect, the interesting part is testing 'em out and fixing the parts that are broke. If most scientific papers were 100% correct, we wouldn't have anything to argue about, would we?
And then there are the fakes, which get published despite outrageous claims, like the one about a year ago by Hwang Woo Suk who claimed major advances in stem cell research. After it was debunked, his peers said that it was obviously BS and should have been recognized as such. Again: no one said science was perfect, and neither is the peer review process (I'm in favor of Paul Ginsparg's idea re. peer review, but thats another story), but as you say: it was his peers that noticed the problem, not laymen. So yes: experts can tell the difference.
Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of computing in this country. The Xeon was the chip to own. Then the other guy came out with a 64 bit CPU. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with a little thing called the Pentium D. That's 64 bit processing and two cores. For supercomputing. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened--the bastards went to four cores. Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling 64 bit CPUs with two cores. Dual cores or no, suddenly we're the chumps. Well, fuck it. We're going to eight cores.
I still don't understand cellular devices, period. The only time I wish I had one (I've never owned one) is when I have no access to any other form of long distance communication, such as when my car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. Otherwise, I use a pay phone (which I carry around a phone card for), email, IM, whatever in order to stay in touch. If I'm not in reach of any such mechanism of communication, then there are plenty of ways of leaving a message and/or note. I've realized cellphones just add more extraneous, unnecessary junk to a lifestyle thats already too network-connected, too self-ignorant, too concerned with always "being in touch."
Thoreau was right:
When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor; and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is, that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not. In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office.
Replace post-office with cellphone, and its the same argument. Life should not be "frittered away by detail," but be more focused on the self and its development. That is the path to enlightenment.
Sorry, I wasn't paying attention. MythTV flagged the commercials and spliced them out of my recording.
Oh, I'm also lathered in illegitimately acquired free Buffalo Snackers as I type this.
Arrest me now!
The main point of this article that tends to be overlooked/ignored, even by the OP, is this:
The Royal Society fears it could lead to the demise of journals published by not-for-profit societies, which put out about a third of all journals. "Funders should remember that the primary aims should be to improve the exchange of knowledge between researchers and wider society," The Royal Society said.
Also, its worth linking the entire Royal Society position on open access, so those who read it would realize the OP is presenting a very selective view of the Royal Society's position.
The Royal Society's point is that free stuff might make non-profit/commercial organizations lose big money, possibly forcing them to stop producing their peer-reviewed journal. This is obviously bad for a scientific community trying to reach a larger audience, and thusly the above quote on exchanging knowledge and what-not. As scientists/free-as-in-beer advocates, this is the sort of concern/fear that we need to squash, and pronto.
What I believe the Research Council UK and the Royal Society should consider is a position put forth by Paul Ginsparg, who helps run arxiv.org (an open access system primarily for math/physics based papers). His idea, contrary to the Research Council UK plan of concurrently publishing research on the web at the same time as in such journals as Philosophical Transactions, is to publish research of refereeable quality immediately in a "standard tier" system primarily interested in dissemenation, rather than review of, the information - similar to that provided by arxiv.org. That way, experts in the field have immediate access to the work, can review/comment on the work so that the authors can improve upon it, respond to comments, post updates, etc. Upon meeting some guidelines put forth by an "upper tier", the work could then be submitted for peer review knowing it had met the standards for that tier. Only upon acceptance through peer review would the article reach the larger audience via publication, thereby fulfilling both the needs of open-access advocates and commercial/non-profit societies.
As an aside, Paul Ginsparg makes the interesting note that this system would also put the power of publication back in the non-profit sector: commercial entities only got involved due to the enormous costs associated with mass-production quality control of submissions. However, the dissemination of information and communication across the 'net essentially eliminates this requirement.
Funny thing is, publicly funded researchers aren't required to publish/make available their source code. In other words, your tax money is going towards scientific software development that, if the researcher chooses, can be through a closed source model. Thats doubly evil since peer review isn't possible, either. Not only would I like to know how the breathalyzer works, but I'd like to be know my physicist buddy didn't mess up his math while calculating the stress limit on the latest panels for a NASA space shuttle.
Slashdot Mirror
Trump said he would 'get' Apple to make their products in America, not 'make' Apple.
That may all be said and good, but it seems Apple (and many other electronics manufacturers) might be hard to convince, as Jobs explained to Obama in 2012. An excerpt that captures the gist of the article:
Don't forget, there were several people that tried to stay "within the system" to stop trailblazer from ever getting the green light, and they were all pushed aside in one way or another. These include Thomas Drake, Jack Goldsmith, Diane Roark, and several of the NSA developers for the ThinThread program (which they thought was a much better choice over Trailblazer, the program Snowden revealed. This is the most heartbreaking part of the story, folks like Ed Loomis almost lost their sanity trying to fight the higher ups on Trailblazer). Working within the system was being shot down by Cheney, Addington and Gonzales.
Most divergent of all, he believed that increasing automatization of labor would spawn not inequality or joblessness, but spiritual malaise.
How is this different from what we have now, I insist and ask ?
The 60s were different in that they were one of the few times when there wasn't increasing inequality/joblesness - people married young and could hold on to a job for 50 years - which is the outlier, not the historical norm. Just look at the 19th century by comparison. For a bit more discussion, see here.
My bad. Those 900 or so errors were for one quarter. The whole year is 2776, with 2012Q1 being the worst. Also, the trend is increasing.
Of which, 1,904 (2/3) involved cases in which a foreigner whose cellphone was being wiretapped entered the United States, where court warrants are required for most eavesdropping. A spike in such problems in a single quarter, the report said, could be because of Chinese citizens visiting friends and family for the Chinese Lunar New Year holiday. “Roamer incidents are largely unpreventable, even with good target awareness and traffic review, since target travel activities are often unannounced and not easily predicted,” the report says.
I think this is an important point to keep in mind, although that still leaves approximately 900 "real" errors.
Its also worth pointing out that his commentary tends to be unbiased, honest and refreshing in a world of pundits that will say just about anything with little to no conviction or evidence. Take away all the statistics, and I'd still read his site just as a reassurance that yes: there are other rational thinkers out there.
There is a fantastic TED talk by Kirby Ferguson that expands on this theme (loss aversion in behavioral economics) and discusses some of these exact quotes/points. In short: "great artists steal, but not from me."
You should check out some of the latest biologic-based treatments for psoriasis that are "in the pipeline:" http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nm0512-638
Biologics typically have the benefit of being very specific against their target with few - if any - side effects. The downside is usually the cost/method of treatment, but thats another story...
"What are the differences between Mark Zuckerberg and me? Lets take a look.
I give you private information on corporations for free, and I'm a villian. Mark Zuckerberg gives your private information to corporations for money, and he's man of the year.
Thanks to wikileaks, you can see how corrupt governments operate in the shadows, and then lie to those who elect them. Thanks to facebook, you can finally figure out which Sex and the City character you are."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9LqnowYVQE
I'm a postdoc that works mostly with biochemist-ey types, and I'd highly recommend adding a math package to whats available to your students. With something like mathematica, you can do:
what I also like about the math packages is the ability to synthesize "test" data to illustrate what can't be done simply in lab (or not at all, depending). And I think its also a great way to start learning a bit of programming/scripting without requiring too much CS (for those not interested in CS), but at the same time getting enough exposure to it so that they won't be completely lost when they see a conditional loop. And, I can personally tell you that science types use them quite widely.
I'm a little surprised you seem more concerned about the OS the programs run on. As long as the students can run the stuff you've listed along with some sort of math package to learn about handling data, just go with what the IT guys are most comfortable with.
But to answer your question: most science labs run whatever they want, but some hardware and/or proprietary analysis software for some equipment can dictate the OS.
ACTION REQUIRED - IMPORTANT: To opt-out from the settlement, simply write "I want to opt-out of the settlement" along with your name and address and mail it by May 13th to: P2P Congestion Settlement Claims Administrator; c/o Rust Consulting; P.O. Box 9454; Minneapolis, MN 55440-9454. Ask your friends to please do the same. If we want a meaningful settlement in this case and open Internet in our future, it's important to spread the word and send a strong message to Comcast and the industry.
When I moved in with some friends that wanted to split an internet connection back in '99, there weren't too many all-in-one routers, and those that did exist were either expensive or sucked. One of my roomies and I figured "hey, we can make our own router using linux!" So we dug through a trash bin near the CS building, found an old 386 with a dead disk controller and patched it up and added 2 ethernet cards. With a few bucks we bought a cheap 8 port hub and installed redhat 6.0 (it had just been released, and it was all that was cool in those days). We had done some internet research beforehand to learn ipchains enough to set up forwarding, and away we went. It worked so well we eventually started using the linux box as a common fileserver, name server, print server, web server, etc.
I've been a RH/fedora user ever since.
The converse is also true -- I use the journal's screening to figure out what to read because I don't have time to read every single thing, even preliminarily. ... IMO, what will actually happen is that a free/open system is that the loss of the imprimatur of journal publication will mean increased reliance on other ways to quickly evaluate works.
I have an idea for this. I sometimes hang out on this website where lots of people are submitting things to be published. I don't feel like reading all of the submissions, but the great part is that other users can score up some of the submitted content so I can filter through the chaff and just look at the stuff that is most likely interesting or worthwhile. And I can just go to subsections of content that I'm primarily interested in. Then - and this is the cool part - every submission is debated in a moderated, open forum - where again, I can filter through the comments using a number of criteria and read only the "top rated" information, if I so choose.
I think the website is called slashdot. Have you ever checked out how it works?
Without name-brand journals, name-recognition will become even more important, which will lead to even more of the sort of "superstar" science in which funding and interest is ever more concentrated in a few research groups.
I would argue that without name-brand journals, name recognition will rely on more realistic metrics (like the quality of the work, not necessarily where stuff gets published) and therefore may be a better measure than the current system.
I'm surprised no one has suggested forensics yet. If you're not able to get the students into an actual lab, its a great way to keep them interested in a physics problem:
- given a ballistic pattern of a bullet OR
- given a blood splatter pattern OR
- a fall OR
- from a position of a body:
determine trajectories, velocities, etc. and likelihood a death is suicide or homicide.
- use momentum to analyze a car crash, or any force-related accident, and reconstruct it.
CSI is popular partly because of physics.
I find the article to be more of a review of past work than actual news. It covers several topics that anyone could read about by picking up a recent biology textbook (siRNA, the ribosome, alternative splicing, etc). I'm surprised this is on the front page of slashdot, while Nature dedicated almost an entire issue regarding the future of DNA technology, including the current state-of-the-art on personalized genomes. Now that is news for nerds.
The reason federal funding puts the IP rights into the hands of universities is a result of the Bayh Dole act. Regardless, it only makes universities the bad guys rather than the government. Its worth noting, though: the NIH has taken steps so research tools (patents granted for processes that do not lead to commercialization) that are developed with federal funds must be made available to other scientists under reasonable terms. Not ideal, but its a step. Read NIH 64 FR 72090 for the full details.
It depends on what you wanted access to, at least historically. Before the public access to publication initiative, NIH only really required that the data be made publicly available - i.e. if after reading a publication I wanted to look at the data from that publication for my own use, the lab I requested it from had to provide it (given that they had published it at that point). This is elaborated in NIH NOT-OD-03-032 and the NIH grant policy statement. Of course this all requires that I have access to the publication that talks about the data in the first place, so it was a bit of a chicken and egg problem.
So along came the initiative to make the publication itself open access (see the nih public access site for more info). Publishers are worried they'll lose cash, and thus the shitstorm you see in front of you.
I don't do 3D CAD, but being a biochemist type, I actually hang out with lots of folks that do work with all kinds of 3D data such as molecular models and volumetric MRI datasets. Workstation cards are especially useful for their stereo support, which many bio-folks find helpful when modelling. Most of the development is done on linux using stuff like VTK or VMD - its not just the engineering guys doing CAD in windows that want workstation cards.
As a scientist that uses linux daily for 3D applications, I would like to see an open source workstation card for 3D graphics, dangit.
Whatever - all I want to see is open specs on the cards, and support for open drivers a la Intel. Then I'll start thinking about buying ATI/NVIDIA.
Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of computing in this country. The Xeon was the chip to own. Then the other guy came out with a 64 bit CPU. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with a little thing called the Pentium D. That's 64 bit processing and two cores. For supercomputing. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened--the bastards went to four cores. Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling 64 bit CPUs with two cores. Dual cores or no, suddenly we're the chumps. Well, fuck it. We're going to eight cores.
Its fun to take the original gillette article and play with it in this context.
Thoreau was right: Replace post-office with cellphone, and its the same argument. Life should not be "frittered away by detail," but be more focused on the self and its development. That is the path to enlightenment.
Sorry, I wasn't paying attention. MythTV flagged the commercials and spliced them out of my recording. Oh, I'm also lathered in illegitimately acquired free Buffalo Snackers as I type this. Arrest me now!
The main point of this article that tends to be overlooked/ignored, even by the OP, is this:
Also, its worth linking the entire Royal Society position on open access, so those who read it would realize the OP is presenting a very selective view of the Royal Society's position.
The Royal Society's point is that free stuff might make non-profit/commercial organizations lose big money, possibly forcing them to stop producing their peer-reviewed journal. This is obviously bad for a scientific community trying to reach a larger audience, and thusly the above quote on exchanging knowledge and what-not. As scientists/free-as-in-beer advocates, this is the sort of concern/fear that we need to squash, and pronto.
What I believe the Research Council UK and the Royal Society should consider is a position put forth by Paul Ginsparg, who helps run arxiv.org (an open access system primarily for math/physics based papers). His idea, contrary to the Research Council UK plan of concurrently publishing research on the web at the same time as in such journals as Philosophical Transactions, is to publish research of refereeable quality immediately in a "standard tier" system primarily interested in dissemenation, rather than review of, the information - similar to that provided by arxiv.org. That way, experts in the field have immediate access to the work, can review/comment on the work so that the authors can improve upon it, respond to comments, post updates, etc. Upon meeting some guidelines put forth by an "upper tier", the work could then be submitted for peer review knowing it had met the standards for that tier. Only upon acceptance through peer review would the article reach the larger audience via publication, thereby fulfilling both the needs of open-access advocates and commercial/non-profit societies.
As an aside, Paul Ginsparg makes the interesting note that this system would also put the power of publication back in the non-profit sector: commercial entities only got involved due to the enormous costs associated with mass-production quality control of submissions. However, the dissemination of information and communication across the 'net essentially eliminates this requirement.
Funny thing is, publicly funded researchers aren't required to publish/make available their source code. In other words, your tax money is going towards scientific software development that, if the researcher chooses, can be through a closed source model. Thats doubly evil since peer review isn't possible, either. Not only would I like to know how the breathalyzer works, but I'd like to be know my physicist buddy didn't mess up his math while calculating the stress limit on the latest panels for a NASA space shuttle.
see: http://openinformatics.sourceforge.net/