Naaah, I think that this is not intentional. It's just the typically polish manner of doing things: let them drown in the chaos. Do you know that our former prime minister stated recently (http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/03/official-polish.html) that he opposes the idea of voting over internet because people use internet mostly to watch pornography while drinking beer and voting should be a serious issue? And our president doesn't want to sign a treaty that he himself has designed a few months ago? (details:http://www.eubusiness.com/news-eu/1205847121.22/)
I mean, come on. Don't take them seriously. The person responsible for distributing the e-mails will be sacked (just in a few months).
I mean, is that a kind of an overblown April Fools day or something? Or is
it really that bad in the geek community? I mean, if you haven't figured
most of it during the first 20 years of your life, I do not think this will
help you. Or anything else, by that matter.
I mean, come on. It's not like they are banning Quake or something. If I
understand it correctly, it's just additional information for the parent
about a game he or she is buying for the kid. I can't see why this should
be oh-so-evil. If you *are* a parent, then you should automatically care
about what your kids read, watch etc., because basically that is what
education is all about. That, and not censorship.
Look, there are similar ratings on movies, OK? I know that those ratings
are totally s****ed up in the US (like, you can show as much blood, gore
and violence as you wish as long nobody says 'fuck' and you can't see a
bloody inch of a tit), but that the system is s***ed up in the US doesn't
mean it is s***ed up everywhere. Have you seen `The baby of Macon' by
Peter Greeneway? Would you let just any kid wander into the movie theatre to
watch this movie? You could give countless examples like that.
I am the last person to think that games are the cause of violence
and various killings in the US. Not taking care about ones children
definitely is. Obviously, a kid playing Quake with his parent, who will
take the kid after the game to talk it over and explain a few things is
better off then a kid playing day and night Civilisation III, because his
parents don't give shit about him. But, you see, making a classification of
games is for the parents who care. If the parents don't nothing will help.
When I was a kid, I had no technical problems getting my hands on
anything which was forbidden: from matches in my early years to XXX and
violent videos a little later.
Dumaju, shto eto budiet' 2001-03-29 01:00:15 . Pochemu ja tak dumaju? Vot, vsio w vostochnoj Jevropie zanimajet bolshe vremieni chem na Zapadie.. Celaja eta istoria eto kak jebat' tigru: i smeshno, i strashno... January (nu, ja nie Russkij, ja Poliak...)
As many of you probably know, the actual work hasn't started yet. The schedule of a genome project looks like that:
a) sequencing, that is -- getting the actual sequence. This is almost purely technical work, and definitely not very interesting for a scientist, although you can get a lot of credits for it.
b) annotating the sequence: finding out where are the genes, what are the similarities between them and between the genes known from another organisms, and what can be suggested about their function based on those similarities. This is pure bioinformatics stuff: first finding the "open reading frames" (ORFs), that is -- anything that can be a gene at all: it has to start with an "ATG" (codon for metionine) and stop with a so-called stop codon. This is only the most basic criterium.
Whatever comes later is called "postgenomics", and it is probably the most exciting stuff in this whole area of reasearch.
1) in most of the genome projects which were done until now, as much as half of the proposed genes had not even a rough function assigned to them. (the group I'm working in sequenced a bacterial genome back in 1996, and during that time the situation hasn't changed much). Experimental work and more biocomputing is needed to find out what those genes do. The problem with biocomputing isn't the lack of CPU, but the lack of good strategies / models / theory (or, not lack of "good", but lack of "better" strategies etc.).
2) knowing what a gene does is, contrary to the common belief, only very little information. You need to know how it is regulated, and this means a lot of tedious and complicated experimental work: two hole areas of postgenomic science deal with that -- transcriptomics (regulation on RNA level) and proteomics (on protein level). You have to understand that each gene is regulated on many levels -- transcription of the gene from DNA to RNA, turnover (that is, the speed of degradation) of the mRNA, speed of translation, amino acid composition of the protein, protein turnover. Moreover, the genes are interconnected into networks rather then pathways. Creating a functioning model of an eukaryotic cell will be probable impossible during the next twenty or so years. That is -- among other things -- my group works with a little bacterium, which has only +- 700 genes. And even though it is a couple of orders of magnitude more simple then the simplest eukaryotic cell, it is very, very, very complicated.
Take-home lesson: don't be too enthusiastic. This is not the flight to the moon. This is only the first Sputnik.
How about learing something about the immunology? Viruses mutate
much, much faster then humans evolve -- in terms of months of
years. Human response to viruses is mostly immunological: you
start getting it literally with your mothers milk and continue to
do so all your life, and all your life it adapts to the current
situation in the viruses gene pool. The thing you are describing can happen with rabbits infected by Australian scientists with a lethal virus -- 99% of the population dies, the resistent 1% survives and reproduces. I don't know whether you have noticed, but there are not many viruses that cause a 99% mortality of a human population -- not even Black Plague or Ebola. Not even HIV. Human evolution, even if it has not stopped, then it slowed down to the minimum -- at least in populations where the prereproductive mortality is less then 90%.
Speaking of immunology -- some food for thought to you. It is known, that viruses coming from other species can more easily infect humans with immunodeficiency, then adapt to the host organism and that way be more proficient in infecting healthy people. So, how about killing all people with immunodeficiency? They present a threat to human population, don't you think so? They would die very quickly anyway in a non-pharmateucised society, wouldn't they?
This example should warn you that talking about preserving human variability and returning to Nature's ways of dealing with things. Remember that "Nature's way" is killing 90% of your offspring and letting you live on average 30 years.
On the other hand -- you have a point, though no clue (that is, you arrive at some reasonable point using wrong, dangerous arguments). It is dangerous to overuse antibiotica -- because the germs evolve faster than we are able to synthetise new antibiotics. But that problem is, AFAIK, very specific to the U.S.A., where, as I heard, doctors prescribe antibiotics by just any infection (even viral, though viruses are not affected by antibiotics) -- just in case the patient would die and his family would have sued him, and to prevent longer absence in the job (antibiotic therapy usually *is* quicker). In Europe, the doctors are much less apt to prescribe antibiotics; and I have taken them once or twice during my whole life.
Hi, I made my MSc in evolutionary biology, and right now I am doing my PhD in genomics and molecular genetics. I think your metaphore is partly correct, and it would be an interesting subject for discussion, although I'm not sure whether the outcome of this discussion would show OSS in a better light.
Some food for thought (remember, I am not discussing OSS itself, but rather your metaphore about OSS):
1. Memes. This is a nice idea, and nothing more. Only very little real research has been done, and there aren't really any models making interesting or falsifiable predictions. To be more precise: natural selection is a mechanism (not a theory, theory of natural selection is another story) acting on entities called replicators. Genes are replicators, and so are certain computer programs. Memes haven't been shown to be replicators, so we really don't know wheter NS acts upon them. Just skip this point.
2. Theory of natural selection -- briefly, it proposes that the mechanism of natural selection is responsible for evolutionary events: changes of gene proportions in populations, new species being born and other become extinct, and so on. Even if we show that OSS projects are a subject to natural selection, can we generalize as far as that?
2. Natural selection.. As anyone who ever touched the subject can tell you, natural selection, the driving force of evolution, is "blind" -- it often produces sub-optimal and inefficient designs, and is strongly subjected to historical constraints. There are countless examples for this. How can you be sure that natural selection of OSS projects will (a) act faster than the standard development approach (b) lead to optimal solutions? As an example of sub-optimal design I would propose (i) sendmail (ii) the fact that the majority of Linux daemons are not in chroot jail (iii) from commercial world, Windows, as hampered by historical constraints (downward compatibility at each development stage)
4. Survival of the fittest. Natural selection is not about survival of the fittest, as the survival is only one of the components of fitness. What matters is the propagation ratio, which can be independent from what really matters for us. Example from the commercial world: bad software with much publicity will propagate quicker than a better one lacking this reproductive ability; therefore, Windows is fitter then OS/2. Can OSS avoid this trap, and if yes, how?
5. Reproductive ability. Let me stress again: it may have nothing at all in common with ability to efficiently support humans in solving their tasks. A good example for me (but probably a controversive for you) is KDE, an eye-candy, easy to program (I was told), cute. On the other hand: bloated, memory-hog, hard-disk hog, inefficient and really not providing much more functionality than the icewm manager I use on my 486 laptop. When I first installed Linux, I needed something like 40 MB of disk space. This is much less than is needed for a basic KDE installation. How much functionality have I, a simple, biology-oriented user gained? Not much. You call that optimal? To me, it seems more like one of those arm-races the Nature is full of: over-sized dinosaurs, birds with useless tails (handicap principle), trees that are growing three stores high because of the arm-race, instead using the energy for "making love", for example, and so on.
Closing remark: "aka" means, as far as I know, "also known as". This is the first time I read that genes are "also known as" Richard Dawkins. By the way, although Richard Dawkins coined the phrase "selfish gene", he merely popularised something evolutionary biologists were aware of since Fisher, Haldane and Hamilton.
First of all, hello and goodbye, slashdot folks, I have had enough. Reasons
are mentioned below, not that I think anyone cares.
DNA has many fine and interesting traits, but ability to self-replicate
definitely isn't one of them. A large and complicated enzyme called
polymerase and very special conditions are needed for even simplest
replication of DNA. Food for thought: enzymes aren't stable. We keep them
in -20, -70 deg C. Typical polymerase will be degraded after a couple of
hours at room temperature.
Generally, this whole debate is a mixture of ignorance, misunderstanding,
writing *something* quickly without having a hint of knowledge on the
subject and without reading and understanding the original text (someone
mentioned cybernetics. Well, I don't see any connection here. I would even
go as so far as to say that DNA-based nanoelements would be especially
unsuitable for any implants, since their expected lifetime in an organism
full of DNA-digesting enzymes would be measured in minutes). What is
even worse is that this is perfectly representative for Slashdot.
Slashdot -- corporate & legal news, misinformation en gros. "So why
read Slashdot if you don't like it?" -- well, I won't. From now on.
Slashdot is boring and full of "sensations" which usually turn out to be
totally uninteresting, harmless, old.
About two years ago I have found Slashdot -- as a Ph.D. student in
molecular biology who is doing also casually some bioinformatics, it was
exactly the kind of thing I liked. Since then, I usually started my day by
reading Slashdot. You may not believe it if I tell you, but there were
usually genuine and interesting news about science and technology, often
with links to articles written by profis, and not recycled second-hand
information some laic wrote in some boulevard magazine. And if it was
labelled "funny", then it was usually a couple of orders of magnitude more
hilarious then "Diablo meets the Sims", which is what I call the humour for
the rest of us. OK, enough with the rant. See you in a better world.
Keep calm. There are other explanations as well. Say, someone posted news about this poll in some MS newsgroup (something a la Slashdot effect). Or, and this is a sad explanation, but quite likely IMO[1], they discovered some fake votes coming from the same address, and removed them. That would be even more probable to me, since it is *much* easier to do something like that using a one-liner in bash then using Windows[2], and since this wouldn't be the first time.
I would be a little ashamed, as a/.er and Linux user, if this turned out to be true, especially after seeing such this type of headlines on Slashdot.
Best regards,
January
[1] There ain't no such thing as a "humble" opinion.
[2] In fact, almost anything useful is.[3]
[3] And in other breaking news Mr. Edison invented the lightbulb, this contributing greatly to the Usenet humor[4]
I agree that mouse can be very distracting. I never use it to access menu items, window menus, changing between windows and the like, and rarely to cut and paste text I am editing (using vi instead). But even cursor keys can be distractive -- that is one of the reasons I am using vi: using hjkl is very convenient. But a pointer device is still sometimes necessary -- and Idon't mean gamers and graphic designers here. Recently I have boutht my first notebook, a very old Toshiba, with a, erm, how one could call this pointer device, I don't know. I call it a clitoris. Sorry. It is this little thing between the keys b,h and g, and it is really, really comfortable to use. Better then touchpad/ ball / anything else I have used over the years. You dont have to move your hands at all away from the keyboard. And I would like to have a keyboard for the workstation with a device like that.
Rant start.
Environmentalists. Yeah. You think they make the global warming predictions?
You think they understand any of the mathematical theories which are the
corner stones of climatic modelling?
This is precisely why these global warming discussions are never
conclusive. Ignorant techies on one side, and ignorant environmentalists on
the other, and noone bothers to take a handbook on ecology or climatology
in the hand. Hey, if you talk that "there are is no proof" then I know that
you never had anything to do with science -- otherwise you would have known
that there are facts, and theories, and refutations, but proofs are only in
maths.
Come on. There is a global warming. There are hundreds of modells and
theories that predict what happens next. And many of them do predict really
dramatic changes. (And I thought that at least Americans should understand
the meaning of "hurricane" or "flood". Now, you are lucky, you got the
dough to save your lifes). It is not sure, whether the global changes are
related to the global changes in CO2 (for which there are quite good
records as well). It never will. Every model is an
approximation, and constructing one that could precisely predict what
happens to the weather in twenty years is not only practically, but also
theoretically impossible (hint: predictive horison in models involving
deterministic chaos).
My point is, we have a game with a very high stake, and you should
disregard the panic-makers and do some serious reading on the subject -
maybe that would convince you.
Whether we have global warming or not is not the issue the ecologists (I
mean the scientists, not Greenpi^Heace) are arguing about. All the records
available show two things a) the climate is getting warmer, and the change
is the greater the more north it occurs b) there is a steady increase in
CO2 and other greenhous-therory related gases in the atmosphere. Hardly any
scientist discusses those findings.
There are, however, other issues that are subjects to discussion, namely,
what causes what. Is the global warming related to CO2 increase? Is the
latter due to human activity? (well, this is pretty sure, but not 100%
sure). Maybe the global warming is a part of a longer trend? Can we do
anything about it? Should we do anything about it? If we don't,
what happens next? Does the data fit the greenhous-effect model? And so on.
ROTFL. To continue the OS metapher, what you say is what some Windows user might have said about Linux a couple of years ago. "Noone usese Linux", "Everybody uses Windows" "You need Windows to communicate". Esperanto doesn't have the qualities that made Linux spread, I agree. However, that doesn't mean that some other artificial language coming from nowhere won't succeed.
If languages were operating systems, English would be Microsoft Windows. It
is easy to learn for a beginner, but once you have learned the basics,
learning a proficient use takes ages. It has a primitive grammar masked by
tons of specific and regionalized idioms and an ortography consisting of
exceptions. Everything is pronounced differently than it is spelled. If I
was choosing a lingua franca, I would rather choose Finnish. At least,
Finnish is a funny language. Like, it sounds funny.
No, I am not trolling here. English is a beautiful language, and it's
richness and coherence make, for example, the English poetry and literature
so beautiful. English has also a fairly nice sound (as opposed to German).
But it's learning curve is Windows. If you think, English is suitable for
scientist (for example), then listen to some scientific jargon and see how
hard it is to understand -- in English. Listen to a seminar in English and
then in French, both done by two non-native speakers, preferably with a
strong accent. I do not speak Esperanto, but if I had to choose, there
would be a common artificial language.
This is may be offtopic here, but since your post got moderated so high, I
feel the urge to some constructive criticism.
Since I have started arguing on a polish newsgroup devoted to computer
advocacy three or so years ago (seems like an eternity...), my point was
always: I don't want any world domination. I don't even want to be in
majority. I just want to be able to keep those tools and this OS I like,
which works *for me*. I keep hearing about the average user. The average
use of the word "average" is a misuse of statistics: as anyone can tell you,
it doesn't tell you the variance, or even whether the distribution is
normal. I don't want to be put in the category of an average user. Although
not a techie, but a mere biologist, I use computer as a tool much of the
time at work. I want to have my niche. Linux gives it to me. For me, Linux
was perfect as a desktop OS two years ago! It had all I needed (with
one notable exception: the possibility to communicate with Microsoft Office
users. This hasn't changed and looking at various efforts this will be the
last thing that will, taking into regard the fact that various Office
versions have very hard times trying to import each others documents).
In my opinion -- though I have read only the public version of the
interview -- Linux is wrong if he sees those things so one-sided. Windows
were a boom, and taking lessons from evolutionary biology what one could
expect would be adaptative radiation. Computer for a scientist, home office
computer, game computer... et cetaera. I definitely have very seriously
different needs from the fellow game-addicted Ph.D. student sitting next to
me. And they are more deep then just different software installed over the
same, bloated, idiot-proof, easy-to-learn, hard-to-make-work, ugly OS.
Divergence in place of competition: if we had Linux boxes instead of that
Mac / Win98 / WinNT melee at the lab would save us many problems. Linux is
good for someone used to read the documentation, willing to learn technical
information or to invest some time in learning (that is, taking a steep
learning curve) or to just finding the things out. Coincidentally, people
who choose natural science are often like this. I want Linux as a
scientific OS, not a user-friendly bloatware.
Joe Schmoe may bite his toe. I don't care. Or, rather, I do. I don't want
him to get hands on my OS. May he stay with Windows as long I can use
Linux. Forcing Linux to be the desktop OS for Joe Schmoe is harmful for
both. I hate saying it, but I really don't give a damn about KDE / Gnome.
One week of learnig bash saves you 1 GB of hard disk (via rpm -e kde).
(Well.. I am exagerating... a little bit...). It is Joe Schmoes fault.
Best regards,
January
P.S. You didn't say pro-Microsoft things. You said pro-Windows things. That
is worse. Microsoft is a large company. There are many IT companies. There
is no need for Linux becoming Windows. We already have Windows. They *will*
become better with a little competition. Linux should become better
Linux.
P.S.2. I may sound as a 50 yrs old Unix hacker by saying "giving up man
pages, command line options, and stdin/stdout capability is a sin and
people who do this should burn in hell", but in fact I am 27, working on
experimental biology, and free climbing in my free time.
I remember an old joke. The astronauts found that the ball-pens do not work
in no-gravity conditions, obviously. NASA started a multimilion dollar research
work on no-g pens, and a couple of years later came up with a special,
$1000 pen which worked almost perfectly even on the orbit. It later became
widely available as an expensive gadget.
The Russians, however, when faced with the same problem, started using
pencils.
Very interesting, indeed. There are two points I would like to mention, though. Funny that they did not talk about the merits of the OS at all -- only marketing. There are Linux users, so let's support them. So one reason for all of that is the growing user base, which is obvious and not necessarily very intersting per se. However, I take it as a better prophecy for the future (for me as a Linux user) then, for example, the fact that Ralph Nader is using Free BSD.
The other thing is -- by supporting Linux, they rather seem to be competing with SUN & al. then with Microsoft. A lot what he says remains unspoken (e.g. he says "Look at SUN and Microsoft", and then doesn't even mention the latter). Linux warriors may be more obsessed with Microsoft, but one conclusion I draw from that interview is that rather the big commercial Unix corporations can be the real competitor / enemy (however you state that) of Linux in the corporate market.
Last time I checked "Carpe jugulum" Nanny Ogg & esp. Granny Weatherwax
didn't like the priests of Om at all, and Vorbis is definitely the most
prominent of them:-)
I mean, not even I am using Linux because I do believe in Open Source, but because I like the way it works (among others) and consider it to be superior to any alternatives. And I did choose my OS. They... erm. Imagine Ralph Nader pondering night after night over what OS should he choose for his campaign website server? I really doubt whether he can distinguish between server, website and Internet at all (OK, OK, so he *knows* that it was one of your bright american politicians who has invented the latter - G,D&R). However, the professionalists who were dealing with the details did choose the OS -- that means, that those systems are fit, good, stable, etc. Good. Some professionalists are using BSD now. Great news. When will you report that men landed on the Moon?:-)
On the other hand... I mean, is that really a good argument for you? That a politician is using a certain operating system for his campaign?
First, there are already "personal sequencers", which basically look like big-tower-sized box you put on the desk beside of your computer, produced by Amersham.
The costs... well, costs per sequenced base pair are certainly lower, but if you don't sequence a whole genome and don't have a sequencing service handy, manual sequencing is much cheaper and works just fine, thank you. The reason is, that sometimes you just don't want to sequence hudreds of thousands of bases, you just want to see whether you got the right PCR product, whether your mutagenesis worked, what organism does a certain sequence come from. Sometimes? No, not sometimes. Most of the time for most biology labs *those* are the primary reasons for doing the sequencing.
Besides, the method hasn't changed greatly over past few years. I mean, the chemical reactions. They are good, fast, reproducible and applyiable both in automated sequencers and when sequencing manually. But -- come on. Sequencing is not science. It's boring. It gives you basis for scientific work, but that's all. "Landing on the moon", my foot. V2? Not even V2. I don't thing there is a good metaphor for that. After all, it is collecting a really huge amount of data without knowing it. Like, before the Polish broke the Enigma, they had to collect some encrypted messages -- and that's what the genome projects are all about. In our case, the principle of the code seems to be partly known, but the one-time keys have to be broken each day de nouveau. Here the metaphor ends, because finding a working model of a genome complete with the proteome and transcriptome and regulation will be... well, let me put it this way: I wonder whether it will be possible to finish it before the end of the next century.
Nothing like Microsoft, certainly. I am a Ph.D. in molecular biology, doing genomics (that's the stuff you start to do after you have sequenced an organism, as our lab has), and I work with some of the PE instruments.
First thing you have to consider when making such analogies is that the market of PE and Microsoft is very, very different. It is a little harder to fool a scientist then it is to fool someone buing a home computer. You know, you tell one of them scientist fellas "this is 100% better" and he asks you what did you use as a negative control and where did you submit the paper with the detailed descriptions of experiments. And when you tell him, he actually goes to the library to read the paper, and maybe repeats one or two of the experiments, usually demanding a trial period for your machine or a sample of the chemicals. (Some even say, they do not buy chemicals at all, with all that company representatives in the house. But I'm digressing.)
You keep in mind your goal, you stay in touch with other people using the same techniques, you read a lot. My institute bought recently a quite expensive machine for so-called real time PCR; there are three companies producing such machines, and PE is one of them. Getting opinion, testing the machines, reading etc - I even was to two workshops - took a couple of months before we bought the PE machine. Funny thing is, it had definitely the worse marketing: everybody seems to know about another one, by Roche, which is called LightCycler, and has a mega-cool design, crossed with some piece of a futuristic ST device. PE machine is computer-ivory, takes more space, looks very old-fashioned and you can hardly spot any advertisments for it. It is not much better then the other one and definitely has some weak points (software, for example, is very crappy), but it seems much more -- reliable.
And that's the point about PE. They have a good opinion due to two things. First, the know-how: they are good at it. Technical support which I encountered was always exactly what the name says it is, and the workshop was excellent (however, that by Roche was not bad either, and definitely much more splendid). The other one is, the machines are really, really good. We have one PCR machine that has been working without any problems for the last ten years. A whole genome was sequenced with that single machine (admittedly, the genome is about 3750 times smaller then the human genome, but 1996 it was the seventh or so genome sequenced). PE PCR machines are quite expensive, so now we are using two by Eppendorff, but if we had that dough...
On the other thing, they are agressive, definitely. And I hate that thing with Celera, which is, IMO, the worst way of doing science. And I don't like anything that is set out only for money (as opposed, for example, to the university, which is set out only for making lives of some grown-up childrens more interesting and buy them more toys. Like, for example, a real time PCR machine). But PE is far, far away from being a monopolist, and the quality of their products is very high. So they are as far from MS as it is only possible for a large, international company (international? did I say international? You want to hear something about MS polish language support?).
Look, you don't have to get into details to get the joke. It's no more realistic then the parrot sketch. You wanna see what "samowar" looks like? Here is a picture. You know what is it? Look here. Remember, that in the Eastern European languages "v" is the same as "w"; al the "v" in "Tchaikovsky" are written as "w" in, for example, Polish; and Russians denote them with a glyph that resembles a "b" (and there isn't any other glyph to denote a "v"). Maybe the/.ers fall in for the hoax because they, automatically, pronounce the "war" from "Samowar" as "war". Now, the "w" in "war" is pronounced somewhat the "short l" in Russian or Polish (in Polish you denote it with a glyph that resembles the pound sign or a stroken l).
...is pronounced "Samo-var", and describes a secret russian military device, used to enhance soldiers general ability by... making tea in a proper manner.
Hello! This is Slashdot! April Fools 365 times a year!
...is what I'd reply to that post if it was Usenet. Really, this is something I really can't stand. Exagerations, misunderstanding so deep it would take years of a biology class to correct them, irrational fears mixed with real concerns, metaphers where you should find factual arguments... No. No reason to discuss, folks. Just as it was of no use discussing with people who claimed introducing of electricity for home use by the end of XIX century will be The Doom, will claim life of hundrets of thousends (and? where they wrong?) and made vision of robots replacing people everywhere. Do your job, folks. Not because of Alzheimers and cancer, or other diseases. Because humans want to know. And because I want to know.
GATTACA was a very insightful movie, on the other hand.. you can know much about a man just by looking at him. You can make good predictions how much money the insurance agency will have to pay for him just by making a couple of simple tests: smoker? license? worker or student? annual income? sex? heart failures? drugs? alcohol? Why isn't it done on a daily basis? It could bring billions. Nobody checked at my insurance agency that I'm a smoker (nicotine as well as THC), free-climber, fast-driver, alcohol-abuser, choleric molecular genetist(*) with a heart failure. Go, and dream on.
Regards,
January
(*) High heart attack rate after reading Jon Katz' articles.
As a polish Linux user who is studying in Germany I think that the largest problem with SO and other MS-Office replacements is the native language support. Germans and other West-European languages are here in a slightly better situation than the East-European languages and languages using a kyryllic font, because of the different encoding and fonts. Polish version of MS office is badly polonized, with a bed spellchecker and poor translation; however, this is still better then zero. You have to hack SO to actually make it accept keyboard shortcuts for polish characters, and I never got WordPerfect to display all polish characters correctly for more then one single font face. There is only one and quite poor polish ispell dictionary --- it is not easy to create a dictionary for a language which has seven cases (nominativus, genitivus etc.), a complicated ortography and a lot of different verb, noun and adjective forms.
There is no fully polonized version of SO, Applixware, WordPerfect or any other of the proposed MS Office substitutions, and the same holds for a myriad of other languages. You have to speak german, english or maybe french to use them, and even then you don't have always the possibility to even spell your name correctly. The only alternative for Word is LaTeX, and though this is my primary publishing tool it is still sometimes very painfull to use, and it gives none at all compatibility with MS Office.
Compatibility
Solutions which can be acceptable when converting to and from english Word documents fail pathetically if you try to convert a document with native language characters, especially from a non-ISO-8859-1 language. Sometimes you just see strange characters, and you have to find-and-replace manually or with a macro. However, with Unicode this became impossible in many instances. Even Word for Macintosh 98 is not capable of importing a Word for Windows documents written in polish language. All polish characters become "_", which clearly makes any search-and-replace impossible. This is similar when using Star Office or Word Perfect.
Coherence
Everybody seems to play his own game. There is not a single commercial application capable of using ispell; none of them use locales or any other mechanisms provided by the system. Linux is especially popular among scientists -- why is that only Lyx tries to use BibTeX, the citation manager for LaTeX? (and, except in the easiest cases, tries and fails). Instead of a coordinated effort which would be able to bring a spectrum of reasonable MS Office alternatives, we have a spectrum of handicapped beta-versions which do not allow volunteers to participate and extend the existing programs.
Conclusions
Following is, in my humble opinion, necessary to create a working replacement for Word and associates: -- good national translation or a mechanism allowing free (as in "freedom") translating effort leading to a such translation; using locales would be welcomed, -- Unicode support, at least at the import/export stage, -- common dictionary effort - all such programs should be able to use ispell, -- most of all, realizing that there is a huge group of people who do not write their documents in English and who need national language support. Corel, Lotus and others where ignorant and arrogant in regard to this fact; this is why I doubt there is a single office in Poland using any of their tools. Even the most hardcore WordPerfect users had to switch to MS Word -- because old WP does not import new documents, and new WP does not handle national extensions, not even the minimum.
Slashdot Mirror
Naaah, I think that this is not intentional. It's just the typically polish manner of doing things: let them drown in the chaos. Do you know that our former prime minister stated recently (http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/03/official-polish.html) that he opposes the idea of voting over internet because people use internet mostly to watch pornography while drinking beer and voting should be a serious issue? And our president doesn't want to sign a treaty that he himself has designed a few months ago? (details:http://www.eubusiness.com/news-eu/1205847121.22/)
I mean, come on. Don't take them seriously. The person responsible for distributing the e-mails will be sacked (just in a few months).
January
Look, there are similar ratings on movies, OK? I know that those ratings are totally s****ed up in the US (like, you can show as much blood, gore and violence as you wish as long nobody says 'fuck' and you can't see a bloody inch of a tit), but that the system is s***ed up in the US doesn't mean it is s***ed up everywhere. Have you seen `The baby of Macon' by Peter Greeneway? Would you let just any kid wander into the movie theatre to watch this movie? You could give countless examples like that.
I am the last person to think that games are the cause of violence and various killings in the US. Not taking care about ones children definitely is. Obviously, a kid playing Quake with his parent, who will take the kid after the game to talk it over and explain a few things is better off then a kid playing day and night Civilisation III, because his parents don't give shit about him. But, you see, making a classification of games is for the parents who care. If the parents don't nothing will help. When I was a kid, I had no technical problems getting my hands on anything which was forbidden: from matches in my early years to XXX and violent videos a little later.
Best regards,
January
Dumaju, shto eto budiet' 2001-03-29 01:00:15 . Pochemu ja tak dumaju? Vot, vsio w vostochnoj Jevropie zanimajet bolshe vremieni chem na Zapadie.. Celaja eta istoria eto kak jebat' tigru: i smeshno, i strashno...
January (nu, ja nie Russkij, ja Poliak...)
a) sequencing, that is -- getting the actual sequence. This is almost purely technical work, and definitely not very interesting for a scientist, although you can get a lot of credits for it.
b) annotating the sequence: finding out where are the genes, what are the similarities between them and between the genes known from another organisms, and what can be suggested about their function based on those similarities. This is pure bioinformatics stuff: first finding the "open reading frames" (ORFs), that is -- anything that can be a gene at all: it has to start with an "ATG" (codon for metionine) and stop with a so-called stop codon. This is only the most basic criterium.
Whatever comes later is called "postgenomics", and it is probably the most exciting stuff in this whole area of reasearch.
1) in most of the genome projects which were done until now, as much as half of the proposed genes had not even a rough function assigned to them. (the group I'm working in sequenced a bacterial genome back in 1996, and during that time the situation hasn't changed much). Experimental work and more biocomputing is needed to find out what those genes do. The problem with biocomputing isn't the lack of CPU, but the lack of good strategies / models / theory (or, not lack of "good", but lack of "better" strategies etc.).
2) knowing what a gene does is, contrary to the common belief, only very little information. You need to know how it is regulated, and this means a lot of tedious and complicated experimental work: two hole areas of postgenomic science deal with that -- transcriptomics (regulation on RNA level) and proteomics (on protein level). You have to understand that each gene is regulated on many levels -- transcription of the gene from DNA to RNA, turnover (that is, the speed of degradation) of the mRNA, speed of translation, amino acid composition of the protein, protein turnover. Moreover, the genes are interconnected into networks rather then pathways. Creating a functioning model of an eukaryotic cell will be probable impossible during the next twenty or so years. That is -- among other things -- my group works with a little bacterium, which has only +- 700 genes. And even though it is a couple of orders of magnitude more simple then the simplest eukaryotic cell, it is very, very, very complicated.
Take-home lesson: don't be too enthusiastic. This is not the flight to the moon. This is only the first Sputnik.
Best regards,
January Weiner
How about learing something about the immunology? Viruses mutate
much, much faster then humans evolve -- in terms of months of
years. Human response to viruses is mostly immunological: you
start getting it literally with your mothers milk and continue to
do so all your life, and all your life it adapts to the current
situation in the viruses gene pool. The thing you are describing can happen with rabbits infected by Australian scientists with a lethal virus -- 99% of the population dies, the resistent 1% survives and reproduces. I don't know whether you have noticed, but there are not many viruses that cause a 99% mortality of a human population -- not even Black Plague or Ebola. Not even HIV. Human evolution, even if it has not stopped, then it slowed down to the minimum -- at least in populations where the prereproductive mortality is less then 90%.
Speaking of immunology -- some food for thought to you. It is known, that viruses coming from other species can more easily infect humans with immunodeficiency, then adapt to the host organism and that way be more proficient in infecting healthy people. So, how about killing all people with immunodeficiency? They present a threat to human population, don't you think so? They would die very quickly anyway in a non-pharmateucised society, wouldn't they?
This example should warn you that talking about preserving human variability and returning to Nature's ways of dealing with things. Remember that "Nature's way" is killing 90% of your offspring and letting you live on average 30 years.
On the other hand -- you have a point, though no clue (that is, you arrive at some reasonable point using wrong, dangerous arguments). It is dangerous to overuse antibiotica -- because the germs evolve faster than we are able to synthetise new antibiotics. But that problem is, AFAIK, very specific to the U.S.A., where, as I heard, doctors prescribe antibiotics by just any infection (even viral, though viruses are not affected by antibiotics) -- just in case the patient would die and his family would have sued him, and to prevent longer absence in the job (antibiotic therapy usually *is* quicker). In Europe, the doctors are much less apt to prescribe antibiotics; and I have taken them once or twice during my whole life.
Best regards,
j.
Some food for thought (remember, I am not discussing OSS itself, but rather your metaphore about OSS):
1. Memes. This is a nice idea, and nothing more. Only very little real research has been done, and there aren't really any models making interesting or falsifiable predictions. To be more precise: natural selection is a mechanism (not a theory, theory of natural selection is another story) acting on entities called replicators. Genes are replicators, and so are certain computer programs. Memes haven't been shown to be replicators, so we really don't know wheter NS acts upon them. Just skip this point.
2. Theory of natural selection -- briefly, it proposes that the mechanism of natural selection is responsible for evolutionary events: changes of gene proportions in populations, new species being born and other become extinct, and so on. Even if we show that OSS projects are a subject to natural selection, can we generalize as far as that?
2. Natural selection.. As anyone who ever touched the subject can tell you, natural selection, the driving force of evolution, is "blind" -- it often produces sub-optimal and inefficient designs, and is strongly subjected to historical constraints. There are countless examples for this. How can you be sure that natural selection of OSS projects will (a) act faster than the standard development approach (b) lead to optimal solutions? As an example of sub-optimal design I would propose (i) sendmail (ii) the fact that the majority of Linux daemons are not in chroot jail (iii) from commercial world, Windows, as hampered by historical constraints (downward compatibility at each development stage)
4. Survival of the fittest. Natural selection is not about survival of the fittest, as the survival is only one of the components of fitness. What matters is the propagation ratio, which can be independent from what really matters for us. Example from the commercial world: bad software with much publicity will propagate quicker than a better one lacking this reproductive ability; therefore, Windows is fitter then OS/2. Can OSS avoid this trap, and if yes, how?
5. Reproductive ability. Let me stress again: it may have nothing at all in common with ability to efficiently support humans in solving their tasks. A good example for me (but probably a controversive for you) is KDE, an eye-candy, easy to program (I was told), cute. On the other hand: bloated, memory-hog, hard-disk hog, inefficient and really not providing much more functionality than the icewm manager I use on my 486 laptop. When I first installed Linux, I needed something like 40 MB of disk space. This is much less than is needed for a basic KDE installation. How much functionality have I, a simple, biology-oriented user gained? Not much. You call that optimal? To me, it seems more like one of those arm-races the Nature is full of: over-sized dinosaurs, birds with useless tails (handicap principle), trees that are growing three stores high because of the arm-race, instead using the energy for "making love", for example, and so on.
Closing remark: "aka" means, as far as I know, "also known as". This is the first time I read that genes are "also known as" Richard Dawkins. By the way, although Richard Dawkins coined the phrase "selfish gene", he merely popularised something evolutionary biologists were aware of since Fisher, Haldane and Hamilton.
Best regards,
January
DNA has many fine and interesting traits, but ability to self-replicate definitely isn't one of them. A large and complicated enzyme called polymerase and very special conditions are needed for even simplest replication of DNA. Food for thought: enzymes aren't stable. We keep them in -20, -70 deg C. Typical polymerase will be degraded after a couple of hours at room temperature.
Generally, this whole debate is a mixture of ignorance, misunderstanding, writing *something* quickly without having a hint of knowledge on the subject and without reading and understanding the original text (someone mentioned cybernetics. Well, I don't see any connection here. I would even go as so far as to say that DNA-based nanoelements would be especially unsuitable for any implants, since their expected lifetime in an organism full of DNA-digesting enzymes would be measured in minutes). What is even worse is that this is perfectly representative for Slashdot.
Slashdot -- corporate & legal news, misinformation en gros. "So why read Slashdot if you don't like it?" -- well, I won't. From now on. Slashdot is boring and full of "sensations" which usually turn out to be totally uninteresting, harmless, old.
About two years ago I have found Slashdot -- as a Ph.D. student in molecular biology who is doing also casually some bioinformatics, it was exactly the kind of thing I liked. Since then, I usually started my day by reading Slashdot. You may not believe it if I tell you, but there were usually genuine and interesting news about science and technology, often with links to articles written by profis, and not recycled second-hand information some laic wrote in some boulevard magazine. And if it was labelled "funny", then it was usually a couple of orders of magnitude more hilarious then "Diablo meets the Sims", which is what I call the humour for the rest of us. OK, enough with the rant. See you in a better world.
Cheers,
January
I would be a little ashamed, as a /.er and Linux user, if this turned out to be true, especially after seeing such this type of headlines on Slashdot.
Best regards,
January
[1] There ain't no such thing as a "humble" opinion.
[2] In fact, almost anything useful is.[3]
[3] And in other breaking news Mr. Edison invented the lightbulb, this contributing greatly to the Usenet humor[4]
[4] But I digress...
Best regards,
January
This is precisely why these global warming discussions are never conclusive. Ignorant techies on one side, and ignorant environmentalists on the other, and noone bothers to take a handbook on ecology or climatology in the hand. Hey, if you talk that "there are is no proof" then I know that you never had anything to do with science -- otherwise you would have known that there are facts, and theories, and refutations, but proofs are only in maths.
Come on. There is a global warming. There are hundreds of modells and theories that predict what happens next. And many of them do predict really dramatic changes. (And I thought that at least Americans should understand the meaning of "hurricane" or "flood". Now, you are lucky, you got the dough to save your lifes). It is not sure, whether the global changes are related to the global changes in CO2 (for which there are quite good records as well). It never will. Every model is an approximation, and constructing one that could precisely predict what happens to the weather in twenty years is not only practically, but also theoretically impossible (hint: predictive horison in models involving deterministic chaos).
My point is, we have a game with a very high stake, and you should disregard the panic-makers and do some serious reading on the subject - maybe that would convince you.
Best regards
j.
There are, however, other issues that are subjects to discussion, namely, what causes what. Is the global warming related to CO2 increase? Is the latter due to human activity? (well, this is pretty sure, but not 100% sure). Maybe the global warming is a part of a longer trend? Can we do anything about it? Should we do anything about it? If we don't, what happens next? Does the data fit the greenhous-effect model? And so on.
Best regards
Biologuary
Regards,
j.
No, I am not trolling here. English is a beautiful language, and it's richness and coherence make, for example, the English poetry and literature so beautiful. English has also a fairly nice sound (as opposed to German). But it's learning curve is Windows. If you think, English is suitable for scientist (for example), then listen to some scientific jargon and see how hard it is to understand -- in English. Listen to a seminar in English and then in French, both done by two non-native speakers, preferably with a strong accent. I do not speak Esperanto, but if I had to choose, there would be a common artificial language.
Best regards,
j.
Since I have started arguing on a polish newsgroup devoted to computer advocacy three or so years ago (seems like an eternity...), my point was always: I don't want any world domination. I don't even want to be in majority. I just want to be able to keep those tools and this OS I like, which works *for me*. I keep hearing about the average user. The average use of the word "average" is a misuse of statistics: as anyone can tell you, it doesn't tell you the variance, or even whether the distribution is normal. I don't want to be put in the category of an average user. Although not a techie, but a mere biologist, I use computer as a tool much of the time at work. I want to have my niche. Linux gives it to me. For me, Linux was perfect as a desktop OS two years ago! It had all I needed (with one notable exception: the possibility to communicate with Microsoft Office users. This hasn't changed and looking at various efforts this will be the last thing that will, taking into regard the fact that various Office versions have very hard times trying to import each others documents).
In my opinion -- though I have read only the public version of the interview -- Linux is wrong if he sees those things so one-sided. Windows were a boom, and taking lessons from evolutionary biology what one could expect would be adaptative radiation. Computer for a scientist, home office computer, game computer... et cetaera. I definitely have very seriously different needs from the fellow game-addicted Ph.D. student sitting next to me. And they are more deep then just different software installed over the same, bloated, idiot-proof, easy-to-learn, hard-to-make-work, ugly OS. Divergence in place of competition: if we had Linux boxes instead of that Mac / Win98 / WinNT melee at the lab would save us many problems. Linux is good for someone used to read the documentation, willing to learn technical information or to invest some time in learning (that is, taking a steep learning curve) or to just finding the things out. Coincidentally, people who choose natural science are often like this. I want Linux as a scientific OS, not a user-friendly bloatware.
Joe Schmoe may bite his toe. I don't care. Or, rather, I do. I don't want him to get hands on my OS. May he stay with Windows as long I can use Linux. Forcing Linux to be the desktop OS for Joe Schmoe is harmful for both. I hate saying it, but I really don't give a damn about KDE / Gnome. One week of learnig bash saves you 1 GB of hard disk (via rpm -e kde). (Well.. I am exagerating... a little bit...). It is Joe Schmoes fault.
Best regards,
January
P.S. You didn't say pro-Microsoft things. You said pro-Windows things. That is worse. Microsoft is a large company. There are many IT companies. There is no need for Linux becoming Windows. We already have Windows. They *will* become better with a little competition. Linux should become better Linux.
P.S.2. I may sound as a 50 yrs old Unix hacker by saying "giving up man pages, command line options, and stdin/stdout capability is a sin and people who do this should burn in hell", but in fact I am 27, working on experimental biology, and free climbing in my free time.
The Russians, however, when faced with the same problem, started using pencils.
Best regards,
January
The other thing is -- by supporting Linux, they rather seem to be competing with SUN & al. then with Microsoft. A lot what he says remains unspoken (e.g. he says "Look at SUN and Microsoft", and then doesn't even mention the latter). Linux warriors may be more obsessed with Microsoft, but one conclusion I draw from that interview is that rather the big commercial Unix corporations can be the real competitor / enemy (however you state that) of Linux in the corporate market.
Best regards,
January
Seriously speaking, Vorbis is named after the Pratchett character, but Ogg is not named after Nanny.
Best regards,
January
P.S. Cuius testiculos habes, habeas cardia et cerebellum. :-P
On the other hand... I mean, is that really a good argument for you? That a politician is using a certain operating system for his campaign?
Like, you trust them?
Best regards,
January
The costs... well, costs per sequenced base pair are certainly lower, but if you don't sequence a whole genome and don't have a sequencing service handy, manual sequencing is much cheaper and works just fine, thank you. The reason is, that sometimes you just don't want to sequence hudreds of thousands of bases, you just want to see whether you got the right PCR product, whether your mutagenesis worked, what organism does a certain sequence come from. Sometimes? No, not sometimes. Most of the time for most biology labs *those* are the primary reasons for doing the sequencing.
Besides, the method hasn't changed greatly over past few years. I mean, the chemical reactions. They are good, fast, reproducible and applyiable both in automated sequencers and when sequencing manually. But -- come on. Sequencing is not science. It's boring. It gives you basis for scientific work, but that's all. "Landing on the moon", my foot. V2? Not even V2. I don't thing there is a good metaphor for that. After all, it is collecting a really huge amount of data without knowing it. Like, before the Polish broke the Enigma, they had to collect some encrypted messages -- and that's what the genome projects are all about. In our case, the principle of the code seems to be partly known, but the one-time keys have to be broken each day de nouveau. Here the metaphor ends, because finding a working model of a genome complete with the proteome and transcriptome and regulation will be... well, let me put it this way: I wonder whether it will be possible to finish it before the end of the next century.
Cheers,
January
First thing you have to consider when making such analogies is that the market of PE and Microsoft is very, very different. It is a little harder to fool a scientist then it is to fool someone buing a home computer. You know, you tell one of them scientist fellas "this is 100% better" and he asks you what did you use as a negative control and where did you submit the paper with the detailed descriptions of experiments. And when you tell him, he actually goes to the library to read the paper, and maybe repeats one or two of the experiments, usually demanding a trial period for your machine or a sample of the chemicals. (Some even say, they do not buy chemicals at all, with all that company representatives in the house. But I'm digressing.)
You keep in mind your goal, you stay in touch with other people using the same techniques, you read a lot. My institute bought recently a quite expensive machine for so-called real time PCR; there are three companies producing such machines, and PE is one of them. Getting opinion, testing the machines, reading etc - I even was to two workshops - took a couple of months before we bought the PE machine. Funny thing is, it had definitely the worse marketing: everybody seems to know about another one, by Roche, which is called LightCycler, and has a mega-cool design, crossed with some piece of a futuristic ST device. PE machine is computer-ivory, takes more space, looks very old-fashioned and you can hardly spot any advertisments for it. It is not much better then the other one and definitely has some weak points (software, for example, is very crappy), but it seems much more -- reliable.
And that's the point about PE. They have a good opinion due to two things. First, the know-how: they are good at it. Technical support which I encountered was always exactly what the name says it is, and the workshop was excellent (however, that by Roche was not bad either, and definitely much more splendid). The other one is, the machines are really, really good. We have one PCR machine that has been working without any problems for the last ten years. A whole genome was sequenced with that single machine (admittedly, the genome is about 3750 times smaller then the human genome, but 1996 it was the seventh or so genome sequenced). PE PCR machines are quite expensive, so now we are using two by Eppendorff, but if we had that dough...
On the other thing, they are agressive, definitely. And I hate that thing with Celera, which is, IMO, the worst way of doing science. And I don't like anything that is set out only for money (as opposed, for example, to the university, which is set out only for making lives of some grown-up childrens more interesting and buy them more toys. Like, for example, a real time PCR machine). But PE is far, far away from being a monopolist, and the quality of their products is very high. So they are as far from MS as it is only possible for a large, international company (international? did I say international? You want to hear something about MS polish language support?).
Best regards,
January
Regards,
January
Hello! This is Slashdot! April Fools 365 times a year!
Best regards,
January
GATTACA was a very insightful movie, on the other hand.. you can know much about a man just by looking at him. You can make good predictions how much money the insurance agency will have to pay for him just by making a couple of simple tests: smoker? license? worker or student? annual income? sex? heart failures? drugs? alcohol? Why isn't it done on a daily basis? It could bring billions. Nobody checked at my insurance agency that I'm a smoker (nicotine as well as THC), free-climber, fast-driver, alcohol-abuser, choleric molecular genetist(*) with a heart failure. Go, and dream on.
Regards,
January
(*) High heart attack rate after reading Jon Katz' articles.
As a polish Linux user who is studying in Germany I think that the largest problem with SO and other MS-Office replacements is the native language support. Germans and other West-European languages are here in a slightly better situation than the East-European languages and languages using a kyryllic font, because of the different encoding and fonts. Polish version of MS office is badly polonized, with a bed spellchecker and poor translation; however, this is still better then zero. You have to hack SO to actually make it accept keyboard shortcuts for polish characters, and I never got WordPerfect to display all polish characters correctly for more then one single font face. There is only one and quite poor polish ispell dictionary --- it is not easy to create a dictionary for a language which has seven cases (nominativus, genitivus etc.), a complicated ortography and a lot of different verb, noun and adjective forms.
There is no fully polonized version of SO, Applixware, WordPerfect or any other of the proposed MS Office substitutions, and the same holds for a myriad of other languages. You have to speak german, english or maybe french to use them, and even then you don't have always the possibility to even spell your name correctly. The only alternative for Word is LaTeX, and though this is my primary publishing tool it is still sometimes very painfull to use, and it gives none at all compatibility with MS Office.
Compatibility
Solutions which can be acceptable when converting to and from english Word documents fail pathetically if you try to convert a document with native language characters, especially from a non-ISO-8859-1 language. Sometimes you just see strange characters, and you have to find-and-replace manually or with a macro. However, with Unicode this became impossible in many instances. Even Word for Macintosh 98 is not capable of importing a Word for Windows documents written in polish language. All polish characters become "_", which clearly makes any search-and-replace impossible. This is similar when using Star Office or Word Perfect.
Coherence
Everybody seems to play his own game. There is not a single commercial application capable of using ispell; none of them use locales or any other mechanisms provided by the system. Linux is especially popular among scientists -- why is that only Lyx tries to use BibTeX, the citation manager for LaTeX? (and, except in the easiest cases, tries and fails). Instead of a coordinated effort which would be able to bring a spectrum of reasonable MS Office alternatives, we have a spectrum of handicapped beta-versions which do not allow volunteers to participate and extend the existing programs.
Conclusions
Following is, in my humble opinion, necessary to create a working replacement for Word and associates:
-- good national translation or a mechanism allowing free (as in "freedom") translating effort leading to a such translation; using locales would be welcomed,
-- Unicode support, at least at the import/export stage,
-- common dictionary effort - all such programs should be able to use ispell,
-- most of all, realizing that there is a huge group of people who do not write their documents in English and who need national language support. Corel, Lotus and others where ignorant and arrogant in regard to this fact; this is why I doubt there is a single office in Poland using any of their tools. Even the most hardcore WordPerfect users had to switch to MS Word -- because old WP does not import new documents, and new WP does not handle national extensions, not even the minimum.
Hope this helps,
Regards,
January