And let me know if you still think the ODF is merely a 'memory dump in angle brackets'. Maybe they could have reused a good chunk of CSS, but that would also require another type of basic parser in implementations. I imagine you've heard of expat, but can you name a standard CSS parser library? I can't, and once upon a time, I had CVS checkin privs on mozilla. Looks simple enough, but ask a web developer if they've ever heard of any major browser having CSS parser bugs.
And it looks like ODF's style definitions could maybe be generously described as CSS in XML, too. Regardless, I think you could make a pretty compelling argument that the layout needs that have historically driven CSS are a little different than a word processor's needs.
Back when I worked on Abiword, the native format was very similar to XHTML/CSS. Some arbitrary element renamings -- I believe our equivalent to the span tag was a single letter. The XML->XHTML conversion could probably have been handled by a simple sed script.
For styling, we reused as much CSS as possible. I learned about a lot of nifty stuff in CSS3 back then. I hope I get to use some of that stuff in browsers some day. But we were well on our way to the first draft of a hypothetical CSS3 Wordprocessor Module, too.
The OOXML format does strike me as a brain dead C struct to XML encoder, however. And I know the doc format pretty well, having written some non-trivial bits of wvware and the Abiword importer based on it. We actually once got a post on the mailing list from someone looking for technical details on the doc format, and they had been forwarded to us by someone on the Word team at Microsoft. They had their time-tested, battle-worn libraries, but we apparently understood the actual bytes better than anyone still in Redmond willing to help a customer.
But we all knew that the eventual Microsoft XML format was going to be silly. Actually, it's better than I expected. I had considered the occasional base64 encoded binary data structure wrapped in data tag to be a very real possibility.
In my mind, the most astonishing thing is that they just arbitrarily reimplemented -- and generally very badly -- dozens of standards, including many ISO ones. I believe they have several novel timestamp definitions, in addition to ISO's.
I'm pretty shocked anyone is even pretending OOXML is being seriously considered as a standard. I think some people in Redmond had an April Fools' joke get out of hand. If this gets standardized, I expect the next anti-trust case is going to reveal internal Microsoft emails with text such as "holy shit, ISO just accepted our format!"
PS: I don't even read slashdot that often anymore, and I very rarely post. The few times I do, I generally don't even bother to login. But it would seem that several years of random hobbyist open-source contributions have made me quite likely one of the top few dozen or so domain experts on the planet regarding your specific post. I thought that was kind of amusing myself. I don't know if anyone actually cares, but my name is Justin Bradford, and I imagine google retains sufficient evidence of what I claim.
No units of time for the "age of the universe"? This number, by my math, is the age of the universe in microseconds. Surely this is a significant detail.
Admittedly, this was poorly written, but this is what they meant: the number of possible conformations of a 100 amino acid protein is a very, very large number. If you explored conformations randomly, switching between them at a very high rate -- a diffusion limited rate (ie. as fast as the protein could move around in water) -- then the amount of time it would take to find the native state is something around the current age of the universe squared. If you want more information, look up Levinthal's Paradox.
First, Dr. Vijay Pande is a professor at Stanford. His group is responsible for folding@home. He almost certainly knows more about this topic than anyone else posting in or reading this thread. There are few people who could be considered his peer, and I'm pretty sure the ones I know are not slashdot readers.
Second, while I understand your confusion, what he means is this: proteins fold much faster in reality than we can simulate them. If we could simulate the folding of a protein in a week, for example, and it took actual proteins a week to fold, it wouldn't be considered a hard problem. But since proteins fold in microseconds, and it takes simulations a long, long time to fold proteins, it is a hard problem.
On a side note, have you noticed that he is seriously ugly, and his g/f is a whore? I mean really, look at the pics she proudly displays on her sites - clearly a lady of negotiable virtue.
She's a nice person. I met her in college, and I knew her father well. You, however, are a sexist asshole and certainly the only one of questionable virtue.
There is scientific research being done in the field, primarily focused on trying to understand the basic principles of complex systems. Many make comparisons between the fields of complexity now and thermodynamics 200 years ago. In time, we will have lots of new equations and laws about this stuff.
However, you are correct in that most of the examples you see in cited in books are just toy models. Interesting, but they don't tell us anything useful about complex systems.
A little while back, the environmental activist industry was really up in arms about "BT" corn...
Regardless of whether the constitutive expression of Bt by bioengineered corn has had short-term effects (positive or negative) on any organism, it still stands as the most appalling idiotic, short-sighted, and forebodingly wrong decision ever made in the field of agriculture.
Bt is an excellent insecticide. It prevents the construction of chitin, which is used in insects' exoskeleton, including the digestive system. This causes the insects to die. Humans and mammals do not make chitin, and so Bt does not affect us. Since Bt application is perfectly safe, it is an important tool used by organic farmers to deal with insect infestations. Modern agriculture business isn't dominated by organic farming, though. It's a big corporation thing, with tight margins, too many acres, and not enough people to wander around and apply Bt just where the insects are. So instead, they decided to just have plants make Bt themselves, all the time. Sounds like a nice solution. No need for bad pesticides to be sprayed everywhere, but still no insects ruining the crop. Everything should be fine (and basically is, right now).
Except, we have plants cranking out Bt all the time now. And as it diffuses about, we get various Bt concentration gradients. Right in the middle of the crop field, there's a lot of Bt, and all the insects die. But get further away from the Bt spewing corn and you still find Bt, but in low concentrations. Here, most insects die, but some of them have screwy little mutations in some protein somewhere that helps fight off Bt. Perhaps it chews up Bt a bit, so it doesn't work quite as well. Maybe it results in a slightly different chitin anabolic pathway. Could be any number of little things that give that insect just a little bit of resistance. So the low concentrations hurt it, but don't kill it-- oh, and it gives them a huge advantage over all of its neighboring insects. So these little mutants increase in number, and new little mutations occur which make them even more resistant. Before you know it, Bt is nothing to them. They make chitin in a whole new way, and/or digest Bt to pieces before it can do anything.
Ok, so the insects were going to become Bt resistant in time, but anyone want to hazard a guess at one of the best things you can do to speed up the evolution of resistance? Try concentration gradients. It's like progressively harder video game levels. You suck on mission one, but it's easy, and you learn. By the time you're at mission twenty, you're a badass. If this Bt corn becomes widespread, Bt as an insecticide has only a few years of useful life. That seems like an awful waste of a wonderful tool. If only we were a tad more foresighted, we'd wait to deploy Bt genes in crops until we had a good expression trigger. For instance, if we spend a bit of time trying to find a nice chemical that announces the arrival of an insect infestation, and we tie Bt expression to that, then the plants does exactly what good organic farmers do now: use it only when needed. Doing that will stave off widespread resistant mutants for a long time (likely many decades or more). And it's within our reach within five or ten years. Instead, we opt for the quick buck, knowing that in five to ten years, we're going to be screwed again. Maybe, if we're lucky, we can design or discover a new compound that's as nice as Bt, but it will be much, much, much harder than rigging up a triggered expression system for Bt.
Most commonly used to parse (unambiguous computer) languages, but a word file is alot less complicated then a language I can assure you:)
Actually, I would estimate the complexity of the Word format as greater than that of the English language (even including all the variants). It's the most incomprehensibly complicated, poorly documented (and frequently misdocumented), train wreck of a file format in the history of this universe, which no one could ever possibly hope to merely even make hypothetical conjectures at its actual implementation. It is a manifestation of evil; there is no other explanation. (By the way, I have code in wvWare.)
They already ARE open. You can download them from various places on the net. There are various Open Source fileconverters based on them. You can get them on the Jan 1999 edition of the MSDN library.
How much more open do they have to be?
Whenever this topic comes up, someone always posts something like this. So, just to clarify, it is possible to find documentation for some versions of the Office formats. This documentation, however, is usually incomplete and error prone. The formats are insanely complex, too.
Here's a quote from an interview with Caolan, to give you some perspective on the matter:
I include a quote that came my way from some indian software developers who had contacted the asian microsoft branch on the word format topic
"We requested Microsoft regarding this. They said, they are not supporting MS-Word's file format to developers. The reason they say is, they themselves do not have complete (clear) documentation. Also they pointed your website http://www.wvware.com for additional reference"
Office formats are basically the serialized form of the applications internal data structures. The Office team probably just has a bunch of code to deal with certain format versions, and few people even there know what it looks like in its final form. So, in summary, Microsoft still hasn't done much to support interoperability, but to their credit they barely can (barring the release of substantial portions of Office code), since it looks so poorly designed.
Part of the problem with most MP3 sharing is that the same horrible music keeps getting passed around, while independent bands have difficulty benefiting from digital distribution. Unfortunately, most still need the power of a label to help promote their music, as many people just download what they've already heard (or heard of).
I don't particularly care if the sharing of music destroys the music industry. I don't want to listen to most of it anyway. There are plenty of good, independent bands to listen to, and if the huge amount of money going to the corporate bands today was distributed among lots of little bands that most people have never heard of, we'd be better off. Why? Greater variety and more choice for music listeners.
The problem is this: how do you discern a good no-name band from a bad no-name band? Simple-- we take over radio. We don't take the corporate approach, however, with a few massive stations. Instead, a huge number of small stations take their place, each taking a much more narrow focus. Rather than generic, Top 40-ish stations, where nearly all listeners only like part of the play-list, you put in dozens of (very) genre-specific stations. They serve tiny markets, but they're run with small staffs, small transmitters, and music content free of charge.
So how does it all fit together?
Someone, with adequate venture capital, starts signing (non-exclusive) distribution agreements with every good no-name band they can find. Furthermore, they subsize the small radio station start-up fees for everyone who wants in. These radio stations play anything, with no restrictions, from your music repository. You provide high quality digital copies of the signed bands music (with no limits on redistribution). You provide community sections were like-minded fans can discuss/flame/recommend new bands. They can build their own play lists. They can DJ their own digital radio stations, etc.
Then, you start providing "value-adds". You promote your bands' tours and sell tickets online. You sell custom CDs (the customer selects tracks until the CD is full). You sell T-shirts, artwork (a throwback to the old era of CD inserts), perfect digital copies of the master, phonographs, autographed CDs, pictures, posters, ads on a my.mp3.com-like service, etc.
Things will start off slow, so it's important that the signing of bands be a totally non-exclusive, low-commitment thing. This way up and coming bands will sign on for exposure. When they get big, they'll dump you for major labels. Over time, your network will grow, and bands will be happy with the revenue stream generated by your service. Some existing big name bands will distribute some of their music through you, because they like the idea. As things continue, your network of radio stations will be large enough that you begin to wrest control from the corporate stations. Then conventional "brick and mortar" retail music distribution channels start to open up, and you can start putting your big name bands in mainstream stores, along with compilation CDs of your upcoming big name bands.
This is the key; you get in a position to take a cut of everything: merchanise, touring, ads, endorsements, media distribution, and even some music sales. The artists get the majority of this money. You can provide the publicity, the exposure, the distribution channels, and you don't rip the artists off. Nobody will make as much money anymore, and a lot fewer middlemen will be making money, but there will be many more artists capable of making a living. And for many aspiring bands, the prospect of being able to live comfortably making music would be an improvement, even if there is no longer a chance of them becoming insanely rich.
So, I have the business plan. Does anyone here have the VC? I want to be a billionaire. (irony intended to reflect my cyncial outlook on the realistic possibility of people accepting sharing the wealth among many bands when there is still the chance that they could be one of the insanely rich ones).
It would be a more fair comparison to get hold of an entire distribution's count of todo's and bugfixes, including X, Wine, sendmail, python, GNOME, and on and on. I bet you could get right up there near 65K pretty easily if you aggregate all the TODO and KNOWN BUGS lists in all the SRPMS in Red Hat 6.2, for instance.
Obviously comparing the kernel to Windows 2000 is outrageous, but comparing Windows 2000 to a full Linux distribution is also unfair. The average distro ships with some 3,000 or so packages, the vast majority of which are applications that you won't find an equivalent for in Windows 2000.
Windows 2000 is more comparable to the kernel, X, glibc, GNOME, samba, Apache (maybe-- does IIS come with the base OS now?), some common libraries and small utility applications. Probably a few other applications, too. But you can exclude nearly everything related to development, most network daemons, databases, most libraries, most scripting languages, and most applications.
And then, you have to factor in the fact that most Linux distributions run on several hardware architectures, many of the libraries and applications in that distribution run on various operating systems, too.
But still, you do have a point: we've got our share of bugs, too. Of course, we also don't have Microsoft's legions of full-time, paid developers and testers working on the core components of a Linux distribution, either. Imagine what you could do if you had a billion and half dollar development budget (which is about what they spent on Windows 98 and IE4/5).
I don't know squat about the information given in this 'Map'. But is it just the four nucletides?
Yes, it's the four nucleotides repeated 3 billion times. I believe Celera is just doing the human genome and taking shortcuts to get only the (supposedly) more interesting regions of the genome. The Human Genome Project is sequencing everything for humans and several other species (many of which are already done).
If I did this, would it look exactly like Cerela's map?
No, there would be variations between the two maps. Certain regions would vary more than others, but the expressed regions would likely be pretty similar.
If it does, what would keep me from making a copy of their map, selling it as my own and simply claiming I did all the work?
Biotech companies, such as the one I work for, Genentech, would be slightly concerned by the fact that you seemed to produce the map out of thin air. If we're going to go looking for novel proteins to make into drugs, we'd like to be relatively certain that the genome sequences we have are reliable. We would want to know about your sequencing techniques and methods. As you would have nothing to show, you would not sell many maps.
Someone once posted some software here that converted C source to English ad vice versa. If someone can find this, please post a link. It might be useful to the EFF's case that this is a free speech issue.
Yes, older than Dolly. Researchers have twinned a human embryo before. You basically just pluck a cell off, and that's it. With the monkey embryo, somebody stuck the plucked cell in a uterus. Most scientists are still a little wary of doing the same with a human embryo.
This development has potential uses, of course, such as a brand of genetically identical lab animals for research. It's really not that big of a deal, though. Important things, like growing organs, are a lot more complex than twinning embryoes.
Genetic modification of plants is not a bad thing. Bad, poorly conceived genetic modification of plants is a very bad thing.
First, this dependence on synthetic chemicals has some benefits. Monsanto makes Round-Up, a herbicide, and sells Round-Up resistant crop seeds. Round-Up is a pretty harmless, as far as (herb/pest)icides go. It degrades quickly, has a very specific biochemical target function, and binds in soil (so no runoff).
Other things, like constitutive expression of natural pesticides, are unbelievably idiotic. This could cause serious problems, killing off a variety of (unintentional) insect life and breed resistantance within ten years.
Also, genetic engineering is inevitable. We won't be able to sustain current farming practices at a sufficient volume to feed the world's growing population. Water sources are drying up and soil is being ruined rapidly. Genetically modified plants to overcome this will be necessary.
And finally, genetic modification is not a completely new thing. Humans have been mucking with the genetic development of domesticated species for more than 10,000 years. Inserting new genes isn't all that different from directed cross-breeding and the selective pressure applied by earlier farmers. We're doing (roughly) the same thing now, just at a hyper-accelerated pace.
We can't stop modifying plants now, but we should be far more careful and there should be very strict guidelines to regulate these modifications. The biggest problem, by far, is the USDA; it's a joke organization with no resources and no spine. It can't handle the responsibilites, and this industry is largely unchecked (thanks to some key lobbying, too, I'm sure). The best thing that could happen is actually political. Congress needs education, and the EPA, FDA, USDA, and related organizations should be merged into one well-funded and very powerful agency.
Of course, it's unlikely to actually happen. The most likely outcome will be unchecked genetic modification, driven primarily by the agricultural industry's astounding ignorance and short-sightedness, leading to massive environmental problems. If history is any indication, they will simply rely on (aka abuse) science to fix/postpone the major problems for them, allowing us to continue on our crash course towards a barren, life-less planet (until the next wave of extraterrestial microbes rides in on a asteriod, that is).
What the people who go on about genetically altered corn seem to overlook is the damage conventional pesticides do to the environment. Genetically altered crops do away with most of the need for those.
The person you replied to was talking about the introduction of the Bt pesticide gene into crops, where it is expressed constitutively. Bt pesticide is a relatively harmless, natural enzyme which is used to treat certain types of infestations. It is one of a few such pesticides available to organic farmers.
The constant expression of Bt by engineered crops will make the enzyme useless as pesticide within 5 to 10 years. Additionally, it will likely kill off a few species of butterfly (possibly including the Monarch), as this gene product is going to be EVERYWHERE (it's even expressed in the crop's pollen which is blown by wind to cover a huge area).
I work in the biotech industry, but I still think the Bt pesticide thing is completely inappropriate. The government should demand Monsanto and the rest of the gang to develop some kind of conditional expression system, where the pesticide is only expressed in response to an infection. It wouldn't be that hard, and it would cause a vast reduction in the damage done to the environment.
As for the missing link, he was obviously referring to the comments immediately following his interview, and therefore suggesting that one of the dangers of cracking (and getting publicity from it) is incurring the wrath of slashdot.
I think it would be quite a nice death. Should be quite fast.
Actually, entering a black hole would be anything but a fast death. Time slows as you approach the singularity. I think it's possible you'd just be falling for an eternity (or so it would seem to you).
Gravity is not polar and there is no (known) means of shielding it.
I thought two particles, gravitons and anti-gravitons, are expected to exist, each with an opposite gravitational "pole". The existence of these quantum particles is vital for exotic matter (and consequently, fun things like exploiting wormholes and warp drives). Right?
He's really not far off. The agricultural industry is pretty messed up. There is not any good control over Monsanto and the like who are cramming new genes into plants as fast as they can.
The genes in the altered plants cross with wild-types. The recommendation is to keep a "buffer" zone of empty land around the modified plants. Yeah, like any farmer is going to leave several fields clear because it might have an impact on surrounding wild-types.
That really bad part, however, is things like: 1. All those genetic crops have some kind of antibiotic resistance gene (used in the laboratory to select for transgenics). Eat enough of the crop and eventually you're going to get bacteria in your gut with the resistance, too. 2. They're inserting genes which cause constitutive expression of pesticides. This will breed resistance in under 5 years. It's just idiotic. And, of course, these pesticides they're inserting are natural pesticides (various enzymes) which are the kind used by organic farmers. Organic farmers will not have viable pesticides for much longer. There are other options, such as breeding insects to eat the problem insects, but it's complicated and expensive.
Summary: The agricultural industry is short-sighted, dangerous, and not under any real governmental regulation. The USDA is a joke, and the FDA usually doesn't get involved (too busy with the drugs).
The whole industry is running on the assumption that science will fix the problems they're creating faster than the farmers can make new problems. It will collapse eventually.
Later I saw a group of about 200+ rolerbladers just blading through the city.
I was in Gordon Biersh's along the Embarcadero and I saw them go by, too.
But for the lower-income workers, I don't know what to say. A single person can live here on $30K, but they can't support a family. Public transportation is so hopelessly broken here that commuting from farther out is a massive pain. It would help if they'd hurry up with the southern extension to BART, as at least BART-Caltrain would be connected.
Luckily, I'm close enough to my job (Genentech) that I can walk. Unfortunately, that means living in South San Francisco. For any kind of entertainment, you have to drive north or south...
Also, does anyone here have living experience in New Mexico. Near Santa Fe or Los Alamos? The landscape is amazing, and I believe there are some high-tech/biotech jobs there.
My laptop, on the other hand, has never crashed, wedged, or otherwise malfunctioned. It's running Windows 2000 beta 3. My desktop back in the states has never crashed, wedged, etc. since I first put Windows NT 4.0 on it several years ago.
Isn't it funny that all of our pro-MS trolls have a Windows 2000 beta? I wonder what the odds of that are?
Oh, and if I ever saw two Linux boxes and a BSD box crash within a 24 hour period, I'd figure a) they're doing kernel development or b) Hell froze over.
But you're right, NT isn't that unstable. I could replace my Linux workstations with NT, and probably never see a crash. However, I'm running Linux because NT is such a limiting environment. I can't do things the way I want with NT. And then trying to work on NT remotely is just pointless.
BUT the most important thing that zealots (myself included) don't seem to realize is that the competition is more important than either OS alone. A lot of the time, I just want Windows to disappear, but we'd probably be better off in a competitve OS market (with Windows still around, but not a monopoly).
Win00 is going to be a better OS because of Linux. But Linux is competing openly and fairly, and I wonder if MS will do the same? They never have before...
And along those lines of thought, I have one reason why using Linux, even if NT was superior in some ways, might be a good idea: How many applications do you have on your NT box? How many of them are NOT made by Microsoft? I'll bet it's a pretty low percentage, and it's even lower for a more mainstream user.
Do you really feel comfortable with the idea of one company providing nearly every tool you need to use a computer and access the Internet? These things are quickly becoming vital to commerce, research, communication, and entertainment. Do you really want to visit the MS Bank, MS Store, MS Library, and MS Postoffice, and watch MS TV and MS Movies over your MS Cable Modem on your MS OS with MS Internet 2005 (integrated into the OS, of course)? I bet Bill would like it.
Windows 2000 doens't use FreeBSD's tcp/ip code. Microsoft wrote it themselves.
Data collected from detailed analysis of TCP/IP stack response (via nmap, the port-scanner, OS identifier, etc.) shows that Win95, Win98, NT3.51, and NT4 all responded identically (as in, unable to distinguish between them) despite testing for really minute things, which were frequently buggy responses (as in the most broken TCP/IP implementation yet seen by humankind). I'll bet the Mindcraft benchmarks were run on a new TCP/IP stack (probably the one they stole from Free/OpenBSD).
However, supposedly "completely rewritten" NT5/Win2K betas all respond with an initial TCP window size identical (and previously unique to) the Free/OpenBSD's TCP/IP subsystem. Odd, huh?
Take a look here, if you don't believe me. http://www.insecure.org/nmap/nmap-fingerprinting-a rticle.html
And I'll bet cash that port-scanning the NT systems used in the infamous benchmarks would have responded with a peculiar new TCP window size, too.
And a side-note: The author of nmap, unable to distinguish between 95, 98, NT has suggested an additional test to find the specific OS: try all of the exploits in chronological order. Start with Ping of Death, then Winnuke, etc, then move up to the Teardrops and Land. Just follow each test with a ping to find which one crashes the machine. Then you can even figure out the specific service pack or hotfix applied.
So even if my company was in competive field of serving a few hundred million static webpages a day from a single server (with a nice fat OC3 for a pipe, mind you), we could hire a monkey to run the latest, greatest, automated script to BSOD our competitor's Windows NT box. Of course, if they were smart, they'd set their NT system behind a Solaris-based firewall -- like Microsoft does.
Slashdot Mirror
Ditto.
Read:t roductionToTheFormatInternalsr matODFVsMSXML
http://old.opendocumentfellowship.org/Articles/In
http://old.opendocumentfellowship.org/Articles/Fo
And let me know if you still think the ODF is merely a 'memory dump in angle brackets'. Maybe they could have reused a good chunk of CSS, but that would also require another type of basic parser in implementations. I imagine you've heard of expat, but can you name a standard CSS parser library? I can't, and once upon a time, I had CVS checkin privs on mozilla. Looks simple enough, but ask a web developer if they've ever heard of any major browser having CSS parser bugs.
And it looks like ODF's style definitions could maybe be generously described as CSS in XML, too. Regardless, I think you could make a pretty compelling argument that the layout needs that have historically driven CSS are a little different than a word processor's needs.
Back when I worked on Abiword, the native format was very similar to XHTML/CSS. Some arbitrary element renamings -- I believe our equivalent to the span tag was a single letter. The XML->XHTML conversion could probably have been handled by a simple sed script.
For styling, we reused as much CSS as possible. I learned about a lot of nifty stuff in CSS3 back then. I hope I get to use some of that stuff in browsers some day. But we were well on our way to the first draft of a hypothetical CSS3 Wordprocessor Module, too.
The OOXML format does strike me as a brain dead C struct to XML encoder, however. And I know the doc format pretty well, having written some non-trivial bits of wvware and the Abiword importer based on it. We actually once got a post on the mailing list from someone looking for technical details on the doc format, and they had been forwarded to us by someone on the Word team at Microsoft. They had their time-tested, battle-worn libraries, but we apparently understood the actual bytes better than anyone still in Redmond willing to help a customer.
But we all knew that the eventual Microsoft XML format was going to be silly. Actually, it's better than I expected. I had considered the occasional base64 encoded binary data structure wrapped in data tag to be a very real possibility.
In my mind, the most astonishing thing is that they just arbitrarily reimplemented -- and generally very badly -- dozens of standards, including many ISO ones. I believe they have several novel timestamp definitions, in addition to ISO's.
I'm pretty shocked anyone is even pretending OOXML is being seriously considered as a standard. I think some people in Redmond had an April Fools' joke get out of hand. If this gets standardized, I expect the next anti-trust case is going to reveal internal Microsoft emails with text such as "holy shit, ISO just accepted our format!"
PS: I don't even read slashdot that often anymore, and I very rarely post. The few times I do, I generally don't even bother to login. But it would seem that several years of random hobbyist open-source contributions have made me quite likely one of the top few dozen or so domain experts on the planet regarding your specific post. I thought that was kind of amusing myself. I don't know if anyone actually cares, but my name is Justin Bradford, and I imagine google retains sufficient evidence of what I claim.
It's always worked for me...
No units of time for the "age of the universe"? This number, by my math, is the age of the universe in microseconds. Surely this is a significant detail.
Admittedly, this was poorly written, but this is what they meant: the number of possible conformations of a 100 amino acid protein is a very, very large number. If you explored conformations randomly, switching between them at a very high rate -- a diffusion limited rate (ie. as fast as the protein could move around in water) -- then the amount of time it would take to find the native state is something around the current age of the universe squared. If you want more information, look up Levinthal's Paradox.
First, Dr. Vijay Pande is a professor at Stanford. His group is responsible for folding@home. He almost certainly knows more about this topic than anyone else posting in or reading this thread. There are few people who could be considered his peer, and I'm pretty sure the ones I know are not slashdot readers.
Second, while I understand your confusion, what he means is this: proteins fold much faster in reality than we can simulate them. If we could simulate the folding of a protein in a week, for example, and it took actual proteins a week to fold, it wouldn't be considered a hard problem. But since proteins fold in microseconds, and it takes simulations a long, long time to fold proteins, it is a hard problem.
On a side note, have you noticed that he is seriously ugly, and his g/f is a whore? I mean really, look at the pics she proudly displays on her sites - clearly a lady of negotiable virtue.
She's a nice person. I met her in college, and I knew her father well. You, however, are a sexist asshole and certainly the only one of questionable virtue.
There is scientific research being done in the field, primarily focused on trying to understand the basic principles of complex systems. Many make comparisons between the fields of complexity now and thermodynamics 200 years ago. In time, we will have lots of new equations and laws about this stuff.
However, you are correct in that most of the examples you see in cited in books are just toy models. Interesting, but they don't tell us anything useful about complex systems.
I've had Pacbell install DSL in a different apartment/house in San Francisco every summer, for the past three summers.
1999: $39.95/mo 384K up and 1.5-6M down
2000: $39.95/mo 128K up and 384K-1.5M down
2001: $49.95/mo 128K up and 384K-1.5M down
With that trend, it won't be long before a 56K modem is better.
A little while back, the environmental activist industry was really up in arms about "BT" corn...
Regardless of whether the constitutive expression of Bt by bioengineered corn has had short-term effects (positive or negative) on any organism, it still stands as the most appalling idiotic, short-sighted, and forebodingly wrong decision ever made in the field of agriculture.
Bt is an excellent insecticide. It prevents the construction of chitin, which is used in insects' exoskeleton, including the digestive system. This causes the insects to die. Humans and mammals do not make chitin, and so Bt does not affect us. Since Bt application is perfectly safe, it is an important tool used by organic farmers to deal with insect infestations. Modern agriculture business isn't dominated by organic farming, though. It's a big corporation thing, with tight margins, too many acres, and not enough people to wander around and apply Bt just where the insects are. So instead, they decided to just have plants make Bt themselves, all the time. Sounds like a nice solution. No need for bad pesticides to be sprayed everywhere, but still no insects ruining the crop. Everything should be fine (and basically is, right now).
Except, we have plants cranking out Bt all the time now. And as it diffuses about, we get various Bt concentration gradients. Right in the middle of the crop field, there's a lot of Bt, and all the insects die. But get further away from the Bt spewing corn and you still find Bt, but in low concentrations. Here, most insects die, but some of them have screwy little mutations in some protein somewhere that helps fight off Bt. Perhaps it chews up Bt a bit, so it doesn't work quite as well. Maybe it results in a slightly different chitin anabolic pathway. Could be any number of little things that give that insect just a little bit of resistance. So the low concentrations hurt it, but don't kill it-- oh, and it gives them a huge advantage over all of its neighboring insects. So these little mutants increase in number, and new little mutations occur which make them even more resistant. Before you know it, Bt is nothing to them. They make chitin in a whole new way, and/or digest Bt to pieces before it can do anything.
Ok, so the insects were going to become Bt resistant in time, but anyone want to hazard a guess at one of the best things you can do to speed up the evolution of resistance? Try concentration gradients. It's like progressively harder video game levels. You suck on mission one, but it's easy, and you learn. By the time you're at mission twenty, you're a badass. If this Bt corn becomes widespread, Bt as an insecticide has only a few years of useful life. That seems like an awful waste of a wonderful tool. If only we were a tad more foresighted, we'd wait to deploy Bt genes in crops until we had a good expression trigger. For instance, if we spend a bit of time trying to find a nice chemical that announces the arrival of an insect infestation, and we tie Bt expression to that, then the plants does exactly what good organic farmers do now: use it only when needed. Doing that will stave off widespread resistant mutants for a long time (likely many decades or more). And it's within our reach within five or ten years. Instead, we opt for the quick buck, knowing that in five to ten years, we're going to be screwed again. Maybe, if we're lucky, we can design or discover a new compound that's as nice as Bt, but it will be much, much, much harder than rigging up a triggered expression system for Bt.
Most commonly used to parse (unambiguous computer) languages, but a word file is alot less complicated then a language I can assure you :)
Actually, I would estimate the complexity of the Word format as greater than that of the English language (even including all the variants). It's the most incomprehensibly complicated, poorly documented (and frequently misdocumented), train wreck of a file format in the history of this universe, which no one could ever possibly hope to merely even make hypothetical conjectures at its actual implementation. It is a manifestation of evil; there is no other explanation. (By the way, I have code in wvWare.)
How much more open do they have to be?
Whenever this topic comes up, someone always posts something like this. So, just to clarify, it is possible to find documentation for some versions of the Office formats. This documentation, however, is usually incomplete and error prone. The formats are insanely complex, too.
Here's a quote from an interview with Caolan, to give you some perspective on the matter:
I include a quote that came my way from some indian software developers who had contacted the asian microsoft branch on the word format topic Office formats are basically the serialized form of the applications internal data structures. The Office team probably just has a bunch of code to deal with certain format versions, and few people even there know what it looks like in its final form. So, in summary, Microsoft still hasn't done much to support interoperability, but to their credit they barely can (barring the release of substantial portions of Office code), since it looks so poorly designed.
Part of the problem with most MP3 sharing is that the same horrible music keeps getting passed around, while independent bands have difficulty benefiting from digital distribution. Unfortunately, most still need the power of a label to help promote their music, as many people just download what they've already heard (or heard of).
I don't particularly care if the sharing of music destroys the music industry. I don't want to listen to most of it anyway. There are plenty of good, independent bands to listen to, and if the huge amount of money going to the corporate bands today was distributed among lots of little bands that most people have never heard of, we'd be better off. Why? Greater variety and more choice for music listeners.
The problem is this: how do you discern a good no-name band from a bad no-name band? Simple-- we take over radio. We don't take the corporate approach, however, with a few massive stations. Instead, a huge number of small stations take their place, each taking a much more narrow focus. Rather than generic, Top 40-ish stations, where nearly all listeners only like part of the play-list, you put in dozens of (very) genre-specific stations. They serve tiny markets, but they're run with small staffs, small transmitters, and music content free of charge.
So how does it all fit together?
Someone, with adequate venture capital, starts signing (non-exclusive) distribution agreements with every good no-name band they can find. Furthermore, they subsize the small radio station start-up fees for everyone who wants in. These radio stations play anything, with no restrictions, from your music repository. You provide high quality digital copies of the signed bands music (with no limits on redistribution). You provide community sections were like-minded fans can discuss/flame/recommend new bands. They can build their own play lists. They can DJ their own digital radio stations, etc.
Then, you start providing "value-adds". You promote your bands' tours and sell tickets online. You sell custom CDs (the customer selects tracks until the CD is full). You sell T-shirts, artwork (a throwback to the old era of CD inserts), perfect digital copies of the master, phonographs, autographed CDs, pictures, posters, ads on a my.mp3.com-like service, etc.
Things will start off slow, so it's important that the signing of bands be a totally non-exclusive, low-commitment thing. This way up and coming bands will sign on for exposure. When they get big, they'll dump you for major labels. Over time, your network will grow, and bands will be happy with the revenue stream generated by your service. Some existing big name bands will distribute some of their music through you, because they like the idea. As things continue, your network of radio stations will be large enough that you begin to wrest control from the corporate stations. Then conventional "brick and mortar" retail music distribution channels start to open up, and you can start putting your big name bands in mainstream stores, along with compilation CDs of your upcoming big name bands.
This is the key; you get in a position to take a cut of everything: merchanise, touring, ads, endorsements, media distribution, and even some music sales. The artists get the majority of this money. You can provide the publicity, the exposure, the distribution channels, and you don't rip the artists off. Nobody will make as much money anymore, and a lot fewer middlemen will be making money, but there will be many more artists capable of making a living. And for many aspiring bands, the prospect of being able to live comfortably making music would be an improvement, even if there is no longer a chance of them becoming insanely rich.
So, I have the business plan. Does anyone here have the VC? I want to be a billionaire. (irony intended to reflect my cyncial outlook on the realistic possibility of people accepting sharing the wealth among many bands when there is still the chance that they could be one of the insanely rich ones).
It would be a more fair comparison to get hold of an entire distribution's count of todo's and bugfixes, including X, Wine, sendmail, python, GNOME, and on and on. I bet you could get right up there near 65K pretty easily if you aggregate all the TODO and KNOWN BUGS lists in all the SRPMS in Red Hat 6.2, for instance.
Obviously comparing the kernel to Windows 2000 is outrageous, but comparing Windows 2000 to a full Linux distribution is also unfair. The average distro ships with some 3,000 or so packages, the vast majority of which are applications that you won't find an equivalent for in Windows 2000.
Windows 2000 is more comparable to the kernel, X, glibc, GNOME, samba, Apache (maybe-- does IIS come with the base OS now?), some common libraries and small utility applications. Probably a few other applications, too. But you can exclude nearly everything related to development, most network daemons, databases, most libraries, most scripting languages, and most applications.
And then, you have to factor in the fact that most Linux distributions run on several hardware architectures, many of the libraries and applications in that distribution run on various operating systems, too.
But still, you do have a point: we've got our share of bugs, too. Of course, we also don't have Microsoft's legions of full-time, paid developers and testers working on the core components of a Linux distribution, either. Imagine what you could do if you had a billion and half dollar development budget (which is about what they spent on Windows 98 and IE4/5).
I don't know squat about the information given in this 'Map'. But is it just the four nucletides?
Yes, it's the four nucleotides repeated 3 billion times. I believe Celera is just doing the human genome and taking shortcuts to get only the (supposedly) more interesting regions of the genome. The Human Genome Project is sequencing everything for humans and several other species (many of which are already done).
If I did this, would it look exactly like Cerela's map?
No, there would be variations between the two maps. Certain regions would vary more than others, but the expressed regions would likely be pretty similar.
If it does, what would keep me from making a copy of their map, selling it as my own and simply claiming I did all the work?
Biotech companies, such as the one I work for, Genentech, would be slightly concerned by the fact that you seemed to produce the map out of thin air. If we're going to go looking for novel proteins to make into drugs, we'd like to be relatively certain that the genome sequences we have are reliable. We would want to know about your sequencing techniques and methods. As you would have nothing to show, you would not sell many maps.
Someone once posted some software here that converted C source to English ad vice versa. If someone can find this, please post a link. It might be useful to the EFF's case that this is a free speech issue.
Yes, older than Dolly. Researchers have twinned a human embryo before. You basically just pluck a cell off, and that's it. With the monkey embryo, somebody stuck the plucked cell in a uterus. Most scientists are still a little wary of doing the same with a human embryo.
This development has potential uses, of course, such as a brand of genetically identical lab animals for research. It's really not that big of a deal, though. Important things, like growing organs, are a lot more complex than twinning embryoes.
Genetic modification of plants is not a bad thing. Bad, poorly conceived genetic modification of plants is a very bad thing.
First, this dependence on synthetic chemicals has some benefits. Monsanto makes Round-Up, a herbicide, and sells Round-Up resistant crop seeds. Round-Up is a pretty harmless, as far as (herb/pest)icides go. It degrades quickly, has a very specific biochemical target function, and binds in soil (so no runoff).
Other things, like constitutive expression of natural pesticides, are unbelievably idiotic. This could cause serious problems, killing off a variety of (unintentional) insect life and breed resistantance within ten years.
Also, genetic engineering is inevitable. We won't be able to sustain current farming practices at a sufficient volume to feed the world's growing population. Water sources are drying up and soil is being ruined rapidly. Genetically modified plants to overcome this will be necessary.
And finally, genetic modification is not a completely new thing. Humans have been mucking with the genetic development of domesticated species for more than 10,000 years. Inserting new genes isn't all that different from directed cross-breeding and the selective pressure applied by earlier farmers. We're doing (roughly) the same thing now, just at a hyper-accelerated pace.
We can't stop modifying plants now, but we should be far more careful and there should be very strict guidelines to regulate these modifications. The biggest problem, by far, is the USDA; it's a joke organization with no resources and no spine. It can't handle the responsibilites, and this industry is largely unchecked (thanks to some key lobbying, too, I'm sure). The best thing that could happen is actually political. Congress needs education, and the EPA, FDA, USDA, and related organizations should be merged into one well-funded and very powerful agency.
Of course, it's unlikely to actually happen. The most likely outcome will be unchecked genetic modification, driven primarily by the agricultural industry's astounding ignorance and short-sightedness, leading to massive environmental problems. If history is any indication, they will simply rely on (aka abuse) science to fix/postpone the major problems for them, allowing us to continue on our crash course towards a barren, life-less planet (until the next wave of extraterrestial microbes rides in on a asteriod, that is).
What the people who go on about genetically altered corn seem to overlook is the damage conventional pesticides do to the environment. Genetically altered crops do away with most of the need for those.
The person you replied to was talking about the introduction of the Bt pesticide gene into crops, where it is expressed constitutively. Bt pesticide is a relatively harmless, natural enzyme which is used to treat certain types of infestations. It is one of a few such pesticides available to organic farmers.
The constant expression of Bt by engineered crops will make the enzyme useless as pesticide within 5 to 10 years. Additionally, it will likely kill off a few species of butterfly (possibly including the Monarch), as this gene product is going to be EVERYWHERE (it's even expressed in the crop's pollen which is blown by wind to cover a huge area).
I work in the biotech industry, but I still think the Bt pesticide thing is completely inappropriate. The government should demand Monsanto and the rest of the gang to develop some kind of conditional expression system, where the pesticide is only expressed in response to an infection. It wouldn't be that hard, and it would cause a vast reduction in the damage done to the environment.
As for the missing link, he was obviously referring to the comments immediately following his interview, and therefore suggesting that one of the dangers of cracking (and getting publicity from it) is incurring the wrath of slashdot.
I think it would be quite a nice death. Should be quite fast.
Actually, entering a black hole would be anything but a fast death. Time slows as you approach the singularity. I think it's possible you'd just be falling for an eternity (or so it would seem to you).
Gravity is not polar and there is no (known) means of shielding it.
I thought two particles, gravitons and anti-gravitons, are expected to exist, each with an opposite gravitational "pole". The existence of these quantum particles is vital for exotic matter (and consequently, fun things like exploiting wormholes and warp drives). Right?
He's really not far off.
The agricultural industry is pretty messed up. There is not any good control over Monsanto and the like who are cramming new genes into plants as fast as they can.
The genes in the altered plants cross with wild-types. The recommendation is to keep a "buffer" zone of empty land around the modified plants. Yeah, like any farmer is going to leave several fields clear because it might have an impact on surrounding wild-types.
That really bad part, however, is things like:
1. All those genetic crops have some kind of antibiotic resistance gene (used in the laboratory to select for transgenics). Eat enough of the crop and eventually you're going to get bacteria in your gut with the resistance, too.
2. They're inserting genes which cause constitutive expression of pesticides. This will breed resistance in under 5 years. It's just idiotic. And, of course, these pesticides they're inserting are natural pesticides (various enzymes) which are the kind used by organic farmers. Organic farmers will not have viable pesticides for much longer. There are other options, such as breeding insects to eat the problem insects, but it's complicated and expensive.
Summary: The agricultural industry is short-sighted, dangerous, and not under any real governmental regulation. The USDA is a joke, and the FDA usually doesn't get involved (too busy with the drugs).
The whole industry is running on the assumption that science will fix the problems they're creating faster than the farmers can make new problems. It will collapse eventually.
Later I saw a group of about 200+ rolerbladers just blading through the city.
I was in Gordon Biersh's along the Embarcadero and I saw them go by, too.
But for the lower-income workers, I don't know what to say. A single person can live here on $30K, but they can't support a family. Public transportation is so hopelessly broken here that commuting from farther out is a massive pain. It would help if they'd hurry up with the southern extension to BART, as at least BART-Caltrain would be connected.
Luckily, I'm close enough to my job (Genentech) that I can walk. Unfortunately, that means living in South San Francisco. For any kind of entertainment, you have to drive north or south...
Also, does anyone here have living experience in New Mexico. Near Santa Fe or Los Alamos? The landscape is amazing, and I believe there are some high-tech/biotech jobs there.
My laptop, on the other hand, has never crashed, wedged, or otherwise malfunctioned. It's running Windows 2000 beta 3. My desktop back in the states has never crashed, wedged, etc. since I first put Windows NT 4.0 on it several years ago.
Isn't it funny that all of our pro-MS trolls have a Windows 2000 beta? I wonder what the odds of that are?
Oh, and if I ever saw two Linux boxes and a BSD box crash within a 24 hour period, I'd figure a) they're doing kernel development or b) Hell froze over.
But you're right, NT isn't that unstable. I could replace my Linux workstations with NT, and probably never see a crash. However, I'm running Linux because NT is such a limiting environment. I can't do things the way I want with NT. And then trying to work on NT remotely is just pointless.
BUT the most important thing that zealots (myself included) don't seem to realize is that the competition is more important than either OS alone. A lot of the time, I just want Windows to disappear, but we'd probably be better off in a competitve OS market (with Windows still around, but not a monopoly).
Win00 is going to be a better OS because of Linux. But Linux is competing openly and fairly, and I wonder if MS will do the same? They never have before...
And along those lines of thought, I have one reason why using Linux, even if NT was superior in some ways, might be a good idea:
How many applications do you have on your NT box?
How many of them are NOT made by Microsoft?
I'll bet it's a pretty low percentage, and it's even lower for a more mainstream user.
Do you really feel comfortable with the idea of one company providing nearly every tool you need to use a computer and access the Internet? These things are quickly becoming vital to commerce, research, communication, and entertainment. Do you really want to visit the MS Bank, MS Store, MS Library, and MS Postoffice, and watch MS TV and MS Movies over your MS Cable Modem on your MS OS with MS Internet 2005 (integrated into the OS, of course)? I bet Bill would like it.
Windows 2000 doens't use FreeBSD's tcp/ip code. Microsoft wrote it themselves.
a rticle.html
Data collected from detailed analysis of TCP/IP stack response (via nmap, the port-scanner, OS identifier, etc.) shows that Win95, Win98, NT3.51, and NT4 all responded identically (as in, unable to distinguish between them) despite testing for really minute things, which were frequently buggy responses (as in the most broken TCP/IP implementation yet seen by humankind). I'll bet the Mindcraft benchmarks were run on a new TCP/IP stack (probably the one they stole from Free/OpenBSD).
However, supposedly "completely rewritten" NT5/Win2K betas all respond with an initial TCP window size identical (and previously unique to) the Free/OpenBSD's TCP/IP subsystem. Odd, huh?
Take a look here, if you don't believe me.
http://www.insecure.org/nmap/nmap-fingerprinting-
And I'll bet cash that port-scanning the NT systems used in the infamous benchmarks would have responded with a peculiar new TCP window size, too.
And a side-note: The author of nmap, unable to distinguish between 95, 98, NT has suggested an additional test to find the specific OS: try all of the exploits in chronological order. Start with Ping of Death, then Winnuke, etc, then move up to the Teardrops and Land. Just follow each test with a ping to find which one crashes the machine. Then you can even figure out the specific service pack or hotfix applied.
So even if my company was in competive field of serving a few hundred million static webpages a day from a single server (with a nice fat OC3 for a pipe, mind you), we could hire a monkey to run the latest, greatest, automated script to BSOD our competitor's Windows NT box. Of course, if they were smart, they'd set their NT system behind a Solaris-based firewall -- like Microsoft does.