It might be helpful for the discussion if some person experienced in graphic software programming explained what this patents are about and what is their significance, don't you think?:-)
The german news service heise.de has also covered the slashdot story in this article. They tell the whole story with a good deal of details, and give also a link to the slashdot discussion. "The somewhat particular interpretation of the term ``Open Source'' by Microsoft lead to a conflict between the software producer and the Open-Source community, in which the freedom of speach collides with the protection of intelectual values." (...) "This is not the first time Microsoft is accused of changings standards this way, in the purpose of silencing other companies and Open-Source programmers, who stick to the actual standard. The way Microsoft deals with the Kerberos standard was also mentioned in an opinion published on April 28th which was one of the foundaments for the goverment to propose the splitting of the company."
This will be a little off-topic, but I hope some of you will find it interesting.
I think you have a problem understanding what "theory" means, scientifically and philosophically speaking, otherwise you wouldn't be talking about proving one or the other. You see, scientific theory, according to scientific methodology widely accepted and developed by Karl v. Popper and later his follower Imre Lakatos has to be a) falsifiable (within the limitations given by Lakatos) b) has to have explanatory power (that is, has to predict further facts) c) has to provide you with a sound scientific programme. Sound means, ehem, it means "interesting" --- for example, collecting and naming all the bugs from planet Earth is of course a scientific programme, but a rather boring one, and it will not provide any further insight into how the things work. However, collecting those bugs in terms of researching biodiversity, and looking at ecological mechanism which drive biodiversity, can be a sound scientific programme. You have to start thinking first, developing a model or a hypothesis you will test, and collect only the data you need.
I will not explain here why a theory cannot be proven, but only refuted --- I would be very disappointed if the readers of Slashdot couldn't think of an explanation.
It is true, that people speak of widely accepted theories as facts, and I agree fully with you that it is not good. It keeps people from being ingenious and thinking on their own. However, I'm a molecular biologist trained in evolution and experimental evolution and from my experience, creationism fails to be a theory in all the three points I mentioned. It is boring (you can explain anything by miracles, and there is no place for thinking), it is non-falsifiable, and it does not make any sound predictions. But let's not start a creationism v. evolution debate here, please. There are better places on the Net to do so. Allow me only one more thing to add: "theory of evolution" is a somewhat inadequate term. One can think of many theories trying to explain what we observe and call the process of evolution, that is a change of biological diversity through time. The Modern Synthesis (or "neodarwinism" or "Synthetic Theory of Evolution, STE") is only one of them --- it is accepted by the scientist, because it works well and there are no alternatives. However, we (the biologists) still try for better things. Science is about trying out things, hacking the Nature, doubting everything. STE has still it's problems, for example (even with the recent Nature publication) the origin of two sexes. (No, origin of life isn't IMHO one of those grand problems: you see, we can think of some ways life could have arisen: the problem is, there is no way we can trace it back. Even if humans create artificial life, it will be only a prove that it can be made in this and this way, and not, that it really happened like this. History is not a science in terms of Popper).
All current theories have it flaws and problems, and I think they always will (here I differ in my view with Horgan, who boldly announces "The end of science"). What was not mentioned in the Slashdot review and not adequately stressed in the referred article is that the point is not in discovering an old meteorite! The point is, they have created a model of solar nebula formation, a theory, and they have supported it with experimental evidence, which was contradictory with the current models. And this is precisely the point I wanted to make: science is not about discovering things or facts, but creating theories and models which provide us with explanations and predictions.
Two comments. First, as other have already pointed out, thie idea that dinosaurs are warm blooded is quite old, now widely accepted and supported by lot of evidence. Second, biologically speaking, there ain't no such thing as "dinosaurs":this is a popular term designating two or three groups of distinct animals. A more apriporate term is "archeosauria", which also includes... birds. Actually, there are much less differences between birds and dinosaurs than between bdinosaurs and modern reptiles. Once you start to think about dinosaurs as bird-like animals, or, even much better, about birds a sdinosaurs which haven't died out, the idea that they were warm blooded is quite sound
Once again, I advice the pleno titulo Slashdot editors to ask some biologist before posting any media sensation they find. Look, for me, as a biologist, reading such "sensations" is more or less like for a Linux user reading a media coverage about a new Mindcraft test on Linux and Windows NT, clearly showing that Windows is superior.
I'm always sorry to see Slashdot to fall for any publicity made by Venter et. al. or any other scientist claimingthat he has discovered America.
First of all, there are plenty of packages coming with the standard distribution: six CD's full of software. There is also a lot more of documentation available, including the SuSE handbook, which you will get even with the "evaluation version" found sometimes on CD's distributed with magazines.
The next issue is internationalisation. Being a German company, they stress the internationalisation of documentation and installer, so during the installation you can choose one from dozens of languages, including Turc, Polish, Russian and some even more exotic. And with the distribution you get a lot of material translated into various languages. And you get national fonts, too.
The SuSE users guide is quite comprehensive, so is the SuSE support database, which gets installed (if you choose it) on your local Apache server.
I have heard that the RPM packages are somewhat not as good prepared as the RH ones, but I myself never had problems. The directory structure is different in one aspect - the/etc/rc.d/* scripts sit in/sbin/init.d/ (to quote a character from UF, "It's just plain wrong!").
But overall there are not much differencies. Linux is Linux. I use SuSE because of the internationalisation (being a Polish guy in a German lab).
Hey, people, you might not like a joke, you might not even understand a joke, but a joke is a joke is a joke; everything funny is in some way a little flamebait, and I don't see that this posting exceeds the limits of a/. joke. This is definitely not the usual kind of flamebait, and furthermore I don't see any explicit bad intentions here.
I'm not an eglish native speaker, and not a german native speaker, but I do speak both languages quite fluently. So - let's try:
-------begin translation--------
The Ministry for Internal Affairs draws back the Open Source paper
Obviously, an internal analysis about the use of free Software in the German administration was not appraised by some higher officials. The document, in which the experts of the ministerium stress the advantages of the free software as to it's security and possibilities of savings, was withdrawn from the Internet on the command "from people up there".
The letter entitled "Open Source Software in the German national administration" was made available on the Internet last week by the so-called "Coordination and Advice Office for Information Technics at the German Administration" (KBSt, the letter was KBSt 2/2000). KBSt is subordinated to the German Ministry of Intenal Affairs; the letters are supposed to give other administration offices a view and expertise about the developments and experiences in the field of computational techniques.
The text was withdrawn from the KBSt server after heise online reported about this letter, then it reappeared during this week again, but now it has finally disappeared. Answering a question from c't, Roger Kiel, the speaker of the Ministery, confirmed that the letter was removed due to a direction of the Ministery. The letter is supposed to be only for internal use and not for the public, said Kiel. Checking whether Open-Source-Software is fit for the use in the Ministery is - so Kiel - not finished yet.
Right now the letter is still on the list of KBSt letters, but the link is pointing nowhere, whereas all other KBSt letters since 1997 are still available.
Among the experts in the field, the idea of usage of Open-Source-Software as a possible alternative to commercial Software is widely approved. Daniel Riek, the member of the head-commitee of the Linux group "LiVe", said he regrets the decision of the Ministery. This Linux group has been promoting the usage of OSS for a long time, and would gladly see a public discussion on this subject. "The KBSt letter calls price- and security advantages as core arguments, which, so our analysis, support the usage of OSS", said Riek.
More informations about the details of this study [= KBSt letter] can be found in c't 7/2000 (which appears on Monday).
That's not exactly truth: we bought a new computer three weeks ago, and got MS OEM NT 4.0 (without a handbook, damn them), german version, SP 1. I can guarantee to you that down here in Germany most of the people want to stick to NT 4.0 for some time more, before the dust settles on Win2K, and that you can buy NT 4.0 practically anywhere. As to other versions - heck, I know people using Windows 3.1, and I find it a shame that Microsoft is not supporting anymore a product which they sold only five years ago. I know, I know, "who the hell wants to use 3.1" -- well, I tell you: there are many computers in the scientific area dedicated to certain tasks, or having specialistic software written specifically for that and not an other version of the OS. Look, we even have got two OS/2 babies to look for our HPLC/FPLC (liquid chromatography).
Enter paragraph two and Linux.
I agree with you partly. Speaking in mathematical terms, I was comparing the differentials (df/dt), and you wrongly assumed that I'm talking about absolutes:-) I just want to say that things are getting easier in Linux, and more and more complicated in Windows. This is partly due to my experiences of installing some Windows machines in our lab and getting them to work together, and installing SuSE 6.3 over ftp and a full suite of programs not distributed within SuSE (like molecular biology specific programs, StarOffice etc.). Of course, I know that I just know more about Linux than I know about Windows, but even a certified Microsoft-something was not able to make our scanner software work on NT. Never mind, because you are right: we are going into holy-war mode. Anyway, what I mean is: independent of distributions, you have a common and constant logic behind everything you do: packages, distinct environments, exchangeable parts, global preferences in/etc, local in.*rc, root/users distinction, different layers with separate functions, etc. Linux connects the variance among different flavours with interchangeability of its parts, whereas to, for example, incorporate NT in the AppleTalk Network you have to buy the Server edition, because Workstation will not do.
windows there's pretty much 3 answers
Oh. OK, I assume that you would recommend a polish version of NT for a polish user? Wrong -- it's kind of unstable, as with most of national versions of Windows during last few years. SP 6? Why not 6a? And why did my NT broke down after I have installed something from the original CD-ROM *after* installing SP6? And why doesn't it work as a print server? Ah, no, it's not a server edition, no. And the W95 computer? No, we can't upgrade it to 98, it's to slow, but nevertheless we have no option but to keep it. Besides, we don't have a free license to do that (this is Germany, man, they check whether we have licenses for the software we're using at the university).
Well.. OK. I agree -- most of my ranting is just because I don't know much about Windows OS myself, and I was just in a little breakdown lately due to the problems we had with our Windows -- I'm a simple biologist, and our admins are Mac/Unix savvy, so we had to do it ourselves. And the Linux installation, as I mentioned, with all the new hardware stuff and programs not distributed with SuSE was simple and fast. OTOH, I can mention at least one thing where Windows beats the -- whaddyacallit -- out of Linux: printers. Printer selection. Printer drivers. Still, Mac solution is even better and easier to learn.
It seems that today was a good day for astronomy news:-) I found another interesting bit on the Nature "Science Update" page -- strange new species of gamma-ray sources.
X-ray and gamma-ray emitting sources (high-energy sources) of radiation are usually signs of something very extremal going on: black holes, supernovas, neutron stars, pulsars. Now, a new family of such objects has been found -- the full article is in today's "Nature". What are they? Read the article, I'm not much of an astronomer:-)
It used to be simple: first, Windows 3.1 and DOS. Nothing else. Then, Windows 9x for Mr. Smith and Windows NT for the corporate. By the end of this year, there will be a fullhand of different Windows versions out there, and no Mr. Smith (like me) knows really what are the differences, which versions are stable, which aren't, what to install, what not, which programs runs stable under which version, which doesn't. These problems are already here with different OSR-s and national versions (which tend to be much less stable then the original US versions: e.g., if you want to install Windows NT PL or Windows 98 PL - just don't do it).
I'm not much of a Windows user, and not much of a computer guru. Still, the situation in the Linux world, in spite of various Linux distributions, starts being simpler and more logical then what is happening now with Windows. Don't you have the impression that Windows world starts being obscure / twisted / full of funny looking names, and things are getting much simpler in our world?
No, I'm not from the let's-take-over-the-world-right-now dpt. It's just that how I see the future is, that you won't need to know anything about computers to run MacOS X on an iMac, and you will have to know at least a little to work on a Linux -- but you will also have to know much to work under Windows. And where Linux gives you all advances of a high-tech OS, Windows just stays in the middle, not really easy to use, but then not really powerfull either.
There are three or four PC's on the floor where my lab is placed (the rest being Macs and Unices). And each one of them has a different version of Windows, and this won't change for a while (because once you get it to work, you don't meddle with it -- never change a winning team, as the old biologist' saying goes). The compatibility problems between them are just pure ridiculous when you think how similar the OS are.
Folks, it's time to write a "Field Guide To Windows Operating Systems": "4a: log in with Ctrl-Alt-Del: proceed to 6. 4b: log in with pressing 'ESC': proceed to 5".
OK, so I'm just a lame biologist, still -- I can't quite imagine how this would happen. I mean, of course you can write viruses for Linux, but to spread them would be very hard. I can only judge from my own case: places where I get software for Linux I can count on the fingers of one hand -- in 95% of the cases, it's a SuSE mirror. Yes, I can imagine some evil-minded soul who tricked SuSE into getting an infected package. But even though I could have been infected then, SuSE would be able to quickly track the virus and submit sufficient patches. This is not Windows world, where you get the programs from your friends or some obscure web pages: usually, programs are distributed much more professionaly than in the case of Windows programs.
Of course, I can imagine worms which trick the users in, for example, executing a shell script which then mails messages using sendmail and ~/Mail, ~/.tinrc,/etc/passwd, etc. However, Unix provides nice means to control the in- and outgoing e-mail, and the root account would be in that case untouchable - I think.
But how about some evil-minded hacker (yes, you read it right: hacker, not cracker), who contributes for example to the kernel effort, and installs somewhere in an obscure driver a nice backdoor, and waits till a new major stable version of Linux comes out? Say, 2.4.0. Then all the people who download this kernel are vulnerable: the hacker waits till the 2.4 becomes popular, and then spreads the worm for the designed wormhole. Anyway, in that case he would be probably finished...
Well, I don't know. I'm not much of a hacker. But I think that getting a virus is in the case of Linux much less likely then in the case of Windows. And besides -- I haven't seen a virus for Windows ever since 1996 or something, so is there really a thing to worry about?
I know that Celera is not the same as TIGR, of course. (Even with Claire Fraser being the head of TIGR). But the activities of both institutes seem to be quite crosslinked, as can be drawn from the published papers, at least through the person of Craigg Venter and the "creating artificial cell" idea. And I never said they are the same -- but even though Celera is much more commercial then TIGR, the annoyance I wrote about was linked to TIGR. So that's why I gave TIGR as a second example, next to Celera.
It's one of the best, and most widely supported, cards out there (hell for linux it beats nvidia into the ground).
We have just bought a nice workstation with G400 (16MB) for our lab. I installed Linux on it, and tried to configure the OpenGL support, which seemed prettey straightforward (actually, it comes with SuSE 6.3). The only problem is -- it doesn't work. Some GL programs, like ssystem, are slow like a hog and with a bad case of display schisophreny (these famous double overlapping, black-white images) if you change the window size. And I couldn't get the xscreensaver-gl running in fullscreen mode. And the KDE screensavers don't work at all.
Yes, I know. I am just a stupid biologist who doesn't know anything about Linux: but still, it sucks and is not useful for anything but, maybe, Quake - however, I rather play nethack then Quake.
According to a CNN story, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair annouced that the sources of the Linux kernel 2.4 will be released to the public! Seriously, people. HUGEP isn't run by any goverment, and is a scientific project. Scientific means in that case: made by scientists working at public scientific institutions, like universities and such. Which automatically means that the human genome, once sequenced by HUGEP, will be published in Nature or Science or whatever scientific magazine they choose -- not the sequence per se, but due to publishing policy in these journals it will be accessible via WWW or on demand, as it is the case with all scientific research.
Do you know that if you work at a university, and you find something suspicious (or want to repeat the research, or need it for your research, or are just curious) in a published article, you have a right to demand exact informations from the scientist who published it, including getting the original clones / organisms he used for the research? Of course, if the author works for a public institution. This is the major difference between them and such institutions like CELERA / TIGR.
Let me give you an example. This year an article appeared in Nature on a mutagenesis study of the small bacterium I'm working with. It was performed by associated scientists of one of those big commercial research centers. The article and information published on the web did not give you exact details as to where the reported mutations were placed on the genome, only -- which genes have been knocked out. A professor I know, who also works with these bacteria, wrote to the author to get the details of the study -- and never received any answer. This couldn't happen with an academic institution.
There is a book of a polish writer and Nobel prize winner, Sienkiewicz. It tells the story of the Swedish-Polish war from the XVII century. In one of the scenes, the king of Sweden offers to one of local polish princes that he will give this prince a certain polish teritory, which is occupied by the swedish army, if he agrees to colaborate. The prince answers -- "All right, and I will give you Netherlands".
What I want to say, they are giving away Netherlands: making an offer which is of no value just for the sake of telling it -- because it's not their science and because *of course* it will be released to the public. HELLO! This is not CELERA/ Perkin Elmer, for God's sake!
I will repeat myself, because I consider this matter very important: sequencing projects like HUGEP, payed by academic institutions do publish they data. Take a look at the Mycoplasma pneumoniae homepage -- the group I've been working in sequenced the genome and published it, and you can of course download all the data. Only on-going research projects, which have not yet been published in a scientific journal, are not public - yet.
Speaking of which: publishing the HUGEP data before the project is ready is giving a helpful hand to the privat counterpart of HUGEP - namely, Celera Research. And those are the "patent guys" in this case -- I would really like to see HUGEP ready before Celera is.
In most polish cities you can connect to a server of the polish telecom company, TPSA. You don't get an e-mail or Web page -- which you can of course get for free in one of the many free services -- but you pay only for a local telephone connection. This service has been available for at least two years, and, though the connection speed and quality aren't top, very popular.
In "Genome," Matt Ridley writes about the staggering implications of the Human Genome Project. You will hardly ever see these issues on the front pages of newspapers, or anywhere inside.
Well, if you are talking about "Sunday express" or "Bild" you're right, since you hardly find anything interesting in these newspapers. You won't find any information about Transmeta, either. But talking about the Humane Genome Project, I think the most concise source of information on this topic would be "Nature" and "Science", and a couple of specialized magazines. There you'll find what you mention and more -- even on the cover.
I have a full electronic access to most of the journals I need for my work. I have them as a hard copy also downstairs, in the institute library. And though most of the scientific articles I find while surfing, and read after printing them out, the general "news and views" sections I read holding an old-fashioned magazine in my hand. Why? Because it is more convenient than a computer screen.
And getting to newspapers, even though I got most of the headlines from the Web/news/email, I read "Der Spiegel" every Monday. I read it on the bus (I have to travel about 40 minutes to get to the Institute).
I can imagine a device which could replace a newspapers and some of the books for me. I has an US-letter format, is very flat, with a cover over a high-resulution LCD. It is very light, so you can conveniently read it while in the bus, sitting on the toilet or lying in your bed. It does not cause the nausic impression before my eyes like the computer screen do. It does not break after I throw it at the bed side before going to sleep. I can take a pen and draw on the margins. It is water resistent, or at least it doesn't give you a nasty shock if you drop it into the bath tub.
Oh, and I forgot. It costs me $30. For each 6 months:)
Giordano Bruno did not waste much time with promoting heliocentrism. Much of his work deal with a) critisizing christianity, Christ (critisizing is not an appriopriate word here: he called Christ "an inferior, malicious and dumb man", as written by Bruno) and the church b) very naive pagan-style animism (like, "everything has a soul", "the Universe is living, man" and so forth). He never did a single experiment; a single astronomic observations. With 30, he claimed that some "universal holyness" contacted him and revealed him the truth.
No recording from any of the process recordings that remaind till nowadays mentions Copernicus or heliocentrism: Bruno was prosecuted mainly for paganism, heresy and blasphemy.
Nowadays he would have been considered to be a harmless maniac, they would put him in one of those quiet rooms and give lots of paper and a soft crayon. It **** me off whenever he is called "a missionary", a "martyr of the Truth". And when someone mentions Bruno in one sentence with the science I go berserk (like now, because now I did it).
Ehem, Red Queen is not a theory alternative to the neodarwinian sythesis. It is, in fact, a nice metapher of some of the population genetics models which work and are proved to work - for example, you have good examples of "Red Queen" for example in host-pathogene interactions.
Next, point (2). I don't see how this theory explains, for example, sexual selection, co-evolution and other complex evolutionary patterns - unless it replaces only a part of the synthetic theory of evolution (STE).
Last thing: this guy is what you call "a serious scientist", he publishes in biological journals like Microbiology or Journal of Theoretical Biology. These are high-impact, specialist journals. It's just he didn't publish any of his quantum stuff there.
Not quite so. I mean, an equilibrium you'll find only in isolated environments: where there is energy uptake, even in thermodynamic systems you can see chaos emerging and / or complex patterns. And life on Earth is definitely a process getting a lot of energy from outside. Therefore, the laws of thermodynamics which work in an isolated system don't apply here, sorry. A lot of discussions would be much nicer if people remembered that.
Hi there. I am a Ph.D. student in molecular biology; however, I made my M.Sc. degree in population genetics and experimental evolution (nota bene, using bacterial models).
The article you have cited looks familiar to me: remember the guy who made fun of post-modernistic brabble writing an article heavily loaded with serious physic terms taken out of the context? This sounds similar to me: "quantum" is a nice, popular word, and using it out of the context and not in its proper meaning is nothing more then retorics.
As for a biologist, this whole article sounds like cheap boulevard sh*t to me. J. McFadden, OTOH, is a serious evolutionary biologist, publishing in good journals. He works as a theoretical biologist - as far I understand - with transposone mutagenesis. So maybe he did something interesting, and tried to make "a big thing" out of it - and notified some journalists, who got it wrong. There was a similar thing with the "theory of punctuated equilibria", which finally fitted nicely in the "synthetic theory of evolution" or "neodarwinism" (which is to darwinism in as much as quantum physics is to Newton's laws).
I am an evolutionist - and I certainly see possibilities for bacteria to judge which mutation could be better. There are some reasonable hypothetical mechanisms, which have nothing to do with quantum mechanics. Unfortunately, in spite of various tries and much research there are no convincing experiments. In most of the cases either noone could repeat the experiments, or better, easier explanations could have been found. Nevertheless, I do not see anything controversial about directed mutations: after all, the driving force of evolution will still be the natural selection coupled to other evolutionary mechanisms (like genetic drift). You have to have a broader view: most of the organisms try to influence the genes they passed to their offspring: for example, by coupling them to an other set of good genes - when choosing a good mating partner, who can demonstrate that he has good genes (for example, using the handicap strategy). You could say there already exists a kind of directional mutagenesis:-)
So much for the "controversy" of directed mutations. What I wanted to say is that there is no much incoherency with the current evolutionary paradigm (STE) per se. However, there is lot more on "sampling of the quantum space" and so on in the article you have posted here. Well, although I got some kind of introduction in quantum physics I cannot say I am fit in this field. However, I suspect strongly that people who are fit, are, on the other hand, not necessarily skilled in evolutionary sciences and molecular biology. I can't tell at this point: maybe this is something interesting, but to pose a challenge to the current model, a theory has to explain everything the former theory did plus a couple of other things plus do it more cleanly, more simply. I really don't know, but even if there is something in this quantum brabble I do not understand, it is only on the level of simple mutations and a very short time scale. OTOH, natural selection is known to work also on a larger time-scale.
One more thing left: the arousal of life itself. Well, one important point: the biologists have problems to tell how it happened not because they lack an explanation or a model, but because finding evidence for evolving molecules with a time scale of millions of years is unlikely to be found in sediments several billions years old, and unlikely to be demonstrated in an experiment, because such an experiment would take too long. However, it is not at all as unlikely as assembling a 747 by a tornado. Imagine a tornado that works for millions years on a planet covered with intact 747 parts; and if two parts get correctly assembled, they stay assembled and they propagate itself and produce they replica. Does it still sound improbable to you? What I really hate is biologists commenting on quantum physics like they were quantum physicists, physicists commenting on food science, and astronomers commenting on biology. Do I tell you how to program? ("Hey, you over there! C is obsolate! Use VB![*]). There are experiments with evolving and self-replicating RNA molecules; RNA is a nucleic acid which can both contain genetic information and act as an enzyme. Compared to a living cell, it has a very simple biochemic structure. However, chance of finding RNA fossils are, ehm, like building a 747 by a tornado... out of straws:-)
Stephen J. Gould, the co-author of the "punctuated equilibrium theory", which was supposed to dismiss neodarwinism, had to write a book entitled - I'm translating from polish, don't know the english title - "Darwins too-early funeral". Well, let's see what happens to this theory:->
Seriously, though. I have a 200 Mhz computer. An AMD K6. I didn't pay a cent for it because it was so obsolate, and I'm quite happy about it (the CPU consuming computations like sequence searches I do using a Convex, so don't "PC purist" me).
Anyway, you seem to have missed my point. Which is: OK, we had a nice technology race, but this is my station, and I want to get out. Other words: the race was nice, it brought us here where we are, now the specialization / radiation and so on shall begin. You seriously think that a little of optimization in one of the many tasks computers are good for would not speed up the things you are working at?
I'm not a PC-purist, and I don't believe that people fall in one of those two classes. What I long for is a scientific computer, which has as little to do with a Windows - based, popular PC as a Sony Playstation with such a computer. With an OS which suits my needs. You are now in a position of an amphibian, who says: "who needs reptiles? only because we were amphibians we could get out of water! when you are a reptile you cannot go back to water, so forget it!".
For me, getting the "games-only-please" users away from PCs would be a very worthy thing. First, I believe in platform specialisation, something called in the evolution "radiation". It's when a species developes a cool new life form, like: something slimy creeping every out from water onto the land, soon the initial empty niche gets filled up, and new, specialized forms emerge. It's very quick on the beginning, and slows down later.
As a scientist, I want to get a computer, OS and a software pack which are suitable for my needs, specialized for my computations and so on. It's nice to play Q3D, but this is an additional bonus, and anyway I spent more time in my life playing nethack then playing Q. I don't need them everything-inside multimedia-gamers-office-everything-computers. Linux changed my computer into something resembling much more this dream machine of mine, but it still isn't perfect.
Next thing: I don't want to be forced into a silly arm race just because of new-extra-cool features which enable some people playing a real-time 3D flight simulator on their laptops, with 3D sound and a 72x CD-ROM and God-knows-what else. I would like a nice, laptop-sized machine, good for typing texts when travelling and with a decent acumulator, and *cheap*. Guess what? You can't. Yes, there are them old laptops, heavy as a hog, with an accumulator able to get the machine running for an hour or so (if you're lucky). Harh.
Yes, hopefully there will be a specialized games-computer much better then a normal home-computer. So I don't have to buy it.
I was re-reading Terry Pratchett's "Small Gods" today, and here is a little quote I would like to contribute to this discussion:
"Probably the last man who knew how it worked had been tortured to death years before. Or as soon as it was installed. Killing the creator was a traditional method of patent protection."
:-) I'm sorry, I just couldn't resist...
Regards,
January
p.s. Slashdotters who think there are too much patent and legal issues on/. lately, wave your hands!
Slashdot Mirror
Regards,
January
Regards,
January
I think you have a problem understanding what "theory" means, scientifically and philosophically speaking, otherwise you wouldn't be talking about proving one or the other. You see, scientific theory, according to scientific methodology widely accepted and developed by Karl v. Popper and later his follower Imre Lakatos has to be a) falsifiable (within the limitations given by Lakatos) b) has to have explanatory power (that is, has to predict further facts) c) has to provide you with a sound scientific programme. Sound means, ehem, it means "interesting" --- for example, collecting and naming all the bugs from planet Earth is of course a scientific programme, but a rather boring one, and it will not provide any further insight into how the things work. However, collecting those bugs in terms of researching biodiversity, and looking at ecological mechanism which drive biodiversity, can be a sound scientific programme. You have to start thinking first, developing a model or a hypothesis you will test, and collect only the data you need.
I will not explain here why a theory cannot be proven, but only refuted --- I would be very disappointed if the readers of Slashdot couldn't think of an explanation.
It is true, that people speak of widely accepted theories as facts, and I agree fully with you that it is not good. It keeps people from being ingenious and thinking on their own. However, I'm a molecular biologist trained in evolution and experimental evolution and from my experience, creationism fails to be a theory in all the three points I mentioned. It is boring (you can explain anything by miracles, and there is no place for thinking), it is non-falsifiable, and it does not make any sound predictions. But let's not start a creationism v. evolution debate here, please. There are better places on the Net to do so. Allow me only one more thing to add: "theory of evolution" is a somewhat inadequate term. One can think of many theories trying to explain what we observe and call the process of evolution, that is a change of biological diversity through time. The Modern Synthesis (or "neodarwinism" or "Synthetic Theory of Evolution, STE") is only one of them --- it is accepted by the scientist, because it works well and there are no alternatives. However, we (the biologists) still try for better things. Science is about trying out things, hacking the Nature, doubting everything. STE has still it's problems, for example (even with the recent Nature publication) the origin of two sexes. (No, origin of life isn't IMHO one of those grand problems: you see, we can think of some ways life could have arisen: the problem is, there is no way we can trace it back. Even if humans create artificial life, it will be only a prove that it can be made in this and this way, and not, that it really happened like this. History is not a science in terms of Popper).
All current theories have it flaws and problems, and I think they always will (here I differ in my view with Horgan, who boldly announces "The end of science"). What was not mentioned in the Slashdot review and not adequately stressed in the referred article is that the point is not in discovering an old meteorite! The point is, they have created a model of solar nebula formation, a theory, and they have supported it with experimental evidence, which was contradictory with the current models. And this is precisely the point I wanted to make: science is not about discovering things or facts, but creating theories and models which provide us with explanations and predictions.
Here is the reference to the original Science article: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/288/54 67/839.
Best regards,
January
Once again, I advice the pleno titulo Slashdot editors to ask some biologist before posting any media sensation they find. Look, for me, as a biologist, reading such "sensations" is more or less like for a Linux user reading a media coverage about a new Mindcraft test on Linux and Windows NT, clearly showing that Windows is superior.
I'm always sorry to see Slashdot to fall for any publicity made by Venter et. al. or any other scientist claimingthat he has discovered America.
Regards,
January
The next issue is internationalisation. Being a German company, they stress the internationalisation of documentation and installer, so during the installation you can choose one from dozens of languages, including Turc, Polish, Russian and some even more exotic. And with the distribution you get a lot of material translated into various languages. And you get national fonts, too.
The SuSE users guide is quite comprehensive, so is the SuSE support database, which gets installed (if you choose it) on your local Apache server.
I have heard that the RPM packages are somewhat not as good prepared as the RH ones, but I myself never had problems. The directory structure is different in one aspect - the /etc/rc.d/* scripts sit in /sbin/init.d/ (to quote a character from UF, "It's just plain wrong!").
But overall there are not much differencies. Linux is Linux. I use SuSE because of the internationalisation (being a Polish guy in a German lab).
Regards
j.
Regards,
January
-------begin translation--------
The Ministry for Internal Affairs draws back the Open Source paper
Obviously, an internal analysis about the use of free Software in the German administration was not appraised by some higher officials. The document, in which the experts of the ministerium stress the advantages of the free software as to it's security and possibilities of savings, was withdrawn from the Internet on the command "from people up there".
The letter entitled "Open Source Software in the German national administration" was made available on the Internet last week by the so-called "Coordination and Advice Office for Information Technics at the German Administration" (KBSt, the letter was KBSt 2/2000). KBSt is subordinated to the German Ministry of Intenal Affairs; the letters are supposed to give other administration offices a view and expertise about the developments and experiences in the field of computational techniques.
The text was withdrawn from the KBSt server after heise online reported about this letter, then it reappeared during this week again, but now it has finally disappeared. Answering a question from c't, Roger Kiel, the speaker of the Ministery, confirmed that the letter was removed due to a direction of the Ministery. The letter is supposed to be only for internal use and not for the public, said Kiel. Checking whether Open-Source-Software is fit for the use in the Ministery is - so Kiel - not finished yet.
Right now the letter is still on the list of KBSt letters, but the link is pointing nowhere, whereas all other KBSt letters since 1997 are still available.
Among the experts in the field, the idea of usage of Open-Source-Software as a possible alternative to commercial Software is widely approved. Daniel Riek, the member of the head-commitee of the Linux group "LiVe", said he regrets the decision of the Ministery. This Linux group has been promoting the usage of OSS for a long time, and would gladly see a public discussion on this subject. "The KBSt letter calls price- and security advantages as core arguments, which, so our analysis, support the usage of OSS", said Riek.
More informations about the details of this study [= KBSt letter] can be found in c't 7/2000 (which appears on Monday).
-----eof translation-----
Regards,
January
That's not exactly truth: we bought a new computer three weeks ago, and got MS OEM NT 4.0 (without a handbook, damn them), german version, SP 1. I can guarantee to you that down here in Germany most of the people want to stick to NT 4.0 for some time more, before the dust settles on Win2K, and that you can buy NT 4.0 practically anywhere. As to other versions - heck, I know people using Windows 3.1, and I find it a shame that Microsoft is not supporting anymore a product which they sold only five years ago. I know, I know, "who the hell wants to use 3.1" -- well, I tell you: there are many computers in the scientific area dedicated to certain tasks, or having specialistic software written specifically for that and not an other version of the OS. Look, we even have got two OS/2 babies to look for our HPLC/FPLC (liquid chromatography).
Enter paragraph two and Linux.
I agree with you partly. Speaking in mathematical terms, I was comparing the differentials (df/dt), and you wrongly assumed that I'm talking about absolutes :-) I just want to say that things are getting easier in Linux, and more and more complicated in Windows. This is partly due to my experiences of installing some Windows machines in our lab and getting them to work together, and installing SuSE 6.3 over ftp and a full suite of programs not distributed within SuSE (like molecular biology specific programs, StarOffice etc.). Of course, I know that I just know more about Linux than I know about Windows, but even a certified Microsoft-something was not able to make our scanner software work on NT. Never mind, because you are right: we are going into holy-war mode. Anyway, what I mean is: independent of distributions, you have a common and constant logic behind everything you do: packages, distinct environments, exchangeable parts, global preferences in /etc, local in .*rc, root/users distinction, different layers with separate functions, etc. Linux connects the variance among different flavours with interchangeability of its parts, whereas to, for example, incorporate NT in the AppleTalk Network you have to buy the Server edition, because Workstation will not do.
windows there's pretty much 3 answers
Oh. OK, I assume that you would recommend a polish version of NT for a polish user? Wrong -- it's kind of unstable, as with most of national versions of Windows during last few years. SP 6? Why not 6a? And why did my NT broke down after I have installed something from the original CD-ROM *after* installing SP6? And why doesn't it work as a print server? Ah, no, it's not a server edition, no. And the W95 computer? No, we can't upgrade it to 98, it's to slow, but nevertheless we have no option but to keep it. Besides, we don't have a free license to do that (this is Germany, man, they check whether we have licenses for the software we're using at the university).
Well.. OK. I agree -- most of my ranting is just because I don't know much about Windows OS myself, and I was just in a little breakdown lately due to the problems we had with our Windows -- I'm a simple biologist, and our admins are Mac/Unix savvy, so we had to do it ourselves. And the Linux installation, as I mentioned, with all the new hardware stuff and programs not distributed with SuSE was simple and fast. OTOH, I can mention at least one thing where Windows beats the -- whaddyacallit -- out of Linux: printers. Printer selection. Printer drivers. Still, Mac solution is even better and easier to learn.
Regads,
January
X-ray and gamma-ray emitting sources (high-energy sources) of radiation are usually signs of something very extremal going on: black holes, supernovas, neutron stars, pulsars. Now, a new family of such objects has been found -- the full article is in today's "Nature". What are they? Read the article, I'm not much of an astronomer :-)
Regards,
January
I'm not much of a Windows user, and not much of a computer guru. Still, the situation in the Linux world, in spite of various Linux distributions, starts being simpler and more logical then what is happening now with Windows. Don't you have the impression that Windows world starts being obscure / twisted / full of funny looking names, and things are getting much simpler in our world?
No, I'm not from the let's-take-over-the-world-right-now dpt. It's just that how I see the future is, that you won't need to know anything about computers to run MacOS X on an iMac, and you will have to know at least a little to work on a Linux -- but you will also have to know much to work under Windows. And where Linux gives you all advances of a high-tech OS, Windows just stays in the middle, not really easy to use, but then not really powerfull either.
There are three or four PC's on the floor where my lab is placed (the rest being Macs and Unices). And each one of them has a different version of Windows, and this won't change for a while (because once you get it to work, you don't meddle with it -- never change a winning team, as the old biologist' saying goes). The compatibility problems between them are just pure ridiculous when you think how similar the OS are.
Folks, it's time to write a "Field Guide To Windows Operating Systems": "4a: log in with Ctrl-Alt-Del: proceed to 6. 4b: log in with pressing 'ESC': proceed to 5".
Regards,
January
Salve,
Ianuarius
Of course, I can imagine worms which trick the users in, for example, executing a shell script which then mails messages using sendmail and ~/Mail, ~/.tinrc, /etc/passwd, etc. However, Unix provides nice means to control the in- and outgoing e-mail, and the root account would be in that case untouchable - I think.
But how about some evil-minded hacker (yes, you read it right: hacker, not cracker), who contributes for example to the kernel effort, and installs somewhere in an obscure driver a nice backdoor, and waits till a new major stable version of Linux comes out? Say, 2.4.0. Then all the people who download this kernel are vulnerable: the hacker waits till the 2.4 becomes popular, and then spreads the worm for the designed wormhole. Anyway, in that case he would be probably finished...
Well, I don't know. I'm not much of a hacker. But I think that getting a virus is in the case of Linux much less likely then in the case of Windows. And besides -- I haven't seen a virus for Windows ever since 1996 or something, so is there really a thing to worry about?
Regards,
January
January
We have just bought a nice workstation with G400 (16MB) for our lab. I installed Linux on it, and tried to configure the OpenGL support, which seemed prettey straightforward (actually, it comes with SuSE 6.3). The only problem is -- it doesn't work. Some GL programs, like ssystem, are slow like a hog and with a bad case of display schisophreny (these famous double overlapping, black-white images) if you change the window size. And I couldn't get the xscreensaver-gl running in fullscreen mode. And the KDE screensavers don't work at all.
Yes, I know. I am just a stupid biologist who doesn't know anything about Linux: but still, it sucks and is not useful for anything but, maybe, Quake - however, I rather play nethack then Quake.
Regards,
January
Seriously, people. HUGEP isn't run by any goverment, and is a scientific project. Scientific means in that case: made by scientists working at public scientific institutions, like universities and such. Which automatically means that the human genome, once sequenced by HUGEP, will be published in Nature or Science or whatever scientific magazine they choose -- not the sequence per se, but due to publishing policy in these journals it will be accessible via WWW or on demand, as it is the case with all scientific research.
Do you know that if you work at a university, and you find something suspicious (or want to repeat the research, or need it for your research, or are just curious) in a published article, you have a right to demand exact informations from the scientist who published it, including getting the original clones / organisms he used for the research? Of course, if the author works for a public institution. This is the major difference between them and such institutions like CELERA / TIGR.
Let me give you an example. This year an article appeared in Nature on a mutagenesis study of the small bacterium I'm working with. It was performed by associated scientists of one of those big commercial research centers. The article and information published on the web did not give you exact details as to where the reported mutations were placed on the genome, only -- which genes have been knocked out. A professor I know, who also works with these bacteria, wrote to the author to get the details of the study -- and never received any answer. This couldn't happen with an academic institution.
There is a book of a polish writer and Nobel prize winner, Sienkiewicz. It tells the story of the Swedish-Polish war from the XVII century. In one of the scenes, the king of Sweden offers to one of local polish princes that he will give this prince a certain polish teritory, which is occupied by the swedish army, if he agrees to colaborate. The prince answers -- "All right, and I will give you Netherlands".
What I want to say, they are giving away Netherlands: making an offer which is of no value just for the sake of telling it -- because it's not their science and because *of course* it will be released to the public. HELLO! This is not CELERA/ Perkin Elmer, for God's sake!
I will repeat myself, because I consider this matter very important: sequencing projects like HUGEP, payed by academic institutions do publish they data. Take a look at the Mycoplasma pneumoniae homepage -- the group I've been working in sequenced the genome and published it, and you can of course download all the data. Only on-going research projects, which have not yet been published in a scientific journal, are not public - yet.
Speaking of which: publishing the HUGEP data before the project is ready is giving a helpful hand to the privat counterpart of HUGEP - namely, Celera Research. And those are the "patent guys" in this case -- I would really like to see HUGEP ready before Celera is.
Regards,
January
Regards,
January
I have a full electronic access to most of the journals I need for my work. I have them as a hard copy also downstairs, in the institute library. And though most of the scientific articles I find while surfing, and read after printing them out, the general "news and views" sections I read holding an old-fashioned magazine in my hand. Why? Because it is more convenient than a computer screen.
And getting to newspapers, even though I got most of the headlines from the Web /news /email, I read "Der Spiegel" every Monday. I read it on the bus (I have to travel about 40 minutes to get to the Institute).
I can imagine a device which could replace a newspapers and some of the books for me. I has an US-letter format, is very flat, with a cover over a high-resulution LCD. It is very light, so you can conveniently read it while in the bus, sitting on the toilet or lying in your bed. It does not cause the nausic impression before my eyes like the computer screen do. It does not break after I throw it at the bed side before going to sleep. I can take a pen and draw on the margins. It is water resistent, or at least it doesn't give you a nasty shock if you drop it into the bath tub.
Oh, and I forgot. It costs me $30. For each 6 months :)
Hope this helps, :-)
Regards,
January
No recording from any of the process recordings that remaind till nowadays mentions Copernicus or heliocentrism: Bruno was prosecuted mainly for paganism, heresy and blasphemy.
Nowadays he would have been considered to be a harmless maniac, they would put him in one of those quiet rooms and give lots of paper and a soft crayon. It **** me off whenever he is called "a missionary", a "martyr of the Truth". And when someone mentions Bruno in one sentence with the science I go berserk (like now, because now I did it).
Regards,
January
Next, point (2). I don't see how this theory explains, for example, sexual selection, co-evolution and other complex evolutionary patterns - unless it replaces only a part of the synthetic theory of evolution (STE).
Last thing: this guy is what you call "a serious scientist", he publishes in biological journals like Microbiology or Journal of Theoretical Biology. These are high-impact, specialist journals. It's just he didn't publish any of his quantum stuff there.
Regards,
January
Regards,
January
The article you have cited looks familiar to me: remember the guy who made fun of post-modernistic brabble writing an article heavily loaded with serious physic terms taken out of the context? This sounds similar to me: "quantum" is a nice, popular word, and using it out of the context and not in its proper meaning is nothing more then retorics.
As for a biologist, this whole article sounds like cheap boulevard sh*t to me. J. McFadden, OTOH, is a serious evolutionary biologist, publishing in good journals. He works as a theoretical biologist - as far I understand - with transposone mutagenesis. So maybe he did something interesting, and tried to make "a big thing" out of it - and notified some journalists, who got it wrong. There was a similar thing with the "theory of punctuated equilibria", which finally fitted nicely in the "synthetic theory of evolution" or "neodarwinism" (which is to darwinism in as much as quantum physics is to Newton's laws).
I am an evolutionist - and I certainly see possibilities for bacteria to judge which mutation could be better. There are some reasonable hypothetical mechanisms, which have nothing to do with quantum mechanics. Unfortunately, in spite of various tries and much research there are no convincing experiments. In most of the cases either noone could repeat the experiments, or better, easier explanations could have been found. Nevertheless, I do not see anything controversial about directed mutations: after all, the driving force of evolution will still be the natural selection coupled to other evolutionary mechanisms (like genetic drift). You have to have a broader view: most of the organisms try to influence the genes they passed to their offspring: for example, by coupling them to an other set of good genes - when choosing a good mating partner, who can demonstrate that he has good genes (for example, using the handicap strategy). You could say there already exists a kind of directional mutagenesis :-)
So much for the "controversy" of directed mutations. What I wanted to say is that there is no much incoherency with the current evolutionary paradigm (STE) per se. However, there is lot more on "sampling of the quantum space" and so on in the article you have posted here. Well, although I got some kind of introduction in quantum physics I cannot say I am fit in this field. However, I suspect strongly that people who are fit, are, on the other hand, not necessarily skilled in evolutionary sciences and molecular biology. I can't tell at this point: maybe this is something interesting, but to pose a challenge to the current model, a theory has to explain everything the former theory did plus a couple of other things plus do it more cleanly, more simply. I really don't know, but even if there is something in this quantum brabble I do not understand, it is only on the level of simple mutations and a very short time scale. OTOH, natural selection is known to work also on a larger time-scale.
One more thing left: the arousal of life itself. Well, one important point: the biologists have problems to tell how it happened not because they lack an explanation or a model, but because finding evidence for evolving molecules with a time scale of millions of years is unlikely to be found in sediments several billions years old, and unlikely to be demonstrated in an experiment, because such an experiment would take too long. However, it is not at all as unlikely as assembling a 747 by a tornado. Imagine a tornado that works for millions years on a planet covered with intact 747 parts; and if two parts get correctly assembled, they stay assembled and they propagate itself and produce they replica. Does it still sound improbable to you? What I really hate is biologists commenting on quantum physics like they were quantum physicists, physicists commenting on food science, and astronomers commenting on biology. Do I tell you how to program? ("Hey, you over there! C is obsolate! Use VB![*]). There are experiments with evolving and self-replicating RNA molecules; RNA is a nucleic acid which can both contain genetic information and act as an enzyme. Compared to a living cell, it has a very simple biochemic structure. However, chance of finding RNA fossils are, ehm, like building a 747 by a tornado... out of straws :-)
Stephen J. Gould, the co-author of the "punctuated equilibrium theory", which was supposed to dismiss neodarwinism, had to write a book entitled - I'm translating from polish, don't know the english title - "Darwins too-early funeral". Well, let's see what happens to this theory :->
Regards,
January
[*] Disclaimer: I program in C on an AIX.
Seriously, though. I have a 200 Mhz computer. An AMD K6. I didn't pay a cent for it because it was so obsolate, and I'm quite happy about it (the CPU consuming computations like sequence searches I do using a Convex, so don't "PC purist" me).
Anyway, you seem to have missed my point. Which is: OK, we had a nice technology race, but this is my station, and I want to get out. Other words: the race was nice, it brought us here where we are, now the specialization / radiation and so on shall begin. You seriously think that a little of optimization in one of the many tasks computers are good for would not speed up the things you are working at?
I'm not a PC-purist, and I don't believe that people fall in one of those two classes. What I long for is a scientific computer, which has as little to do with a Windows - based, popular PC as a Sony Playstation with such a computer. With an OS which suits my needs. You are now in a position of an amphibian, who says: "who needs reptiles? only because we were amphibians we could get out of water! when you are a reptile you cannot go back to water, so forget it!".
Oh, just forget it.
January
As a scientist, I want to get a computer, OS and a software pack which are suitable for my needs, specialized for my computations and so on. It's nice to play Q3D, but this is an additional bonus, and anyway I spent more time in my life playing nethack then playing Q. I don't need them everything-inside multimedia-gamers-office-everything-computers. Linux changed my computer into something resembling much more this dream machine of mine, but it still isn't perfect.
Next thing: I don't want to be forced into a silly arm race just because of new-extra-cool features which enable some people playing a real-time 3D flight simulator on their laptops, with 3D sound and a 72x CD-ROM and God-knows-what else. I would like a nice, laptop-sized machine, good for typing texts when travelling and with a decent acumulator, and *cheap*. Guess what? You can't. Yes, there are them old laptops, heavy as a hog, with an accumulator able to get the machine running for an hour or so (if you're lucky). Harh.
Yes, hopefully there will be a specialized games-computer much better then a normal home-computer. So I don't have to buy it.
Regards,
January
j.
P.S. :-). Fullstop.
Regards,
January
p.s. Slashdotters who think there are too much patent and legal issues on /. lately, wave your hands!