I'm taking it with a big grain of salt. The article only said that Glaxo would publish information of chemical compounds that have potential to act against the parasite that causes malaria , it didn't say that those are real final drugs that a third-world pharmaceutical factory can take to produce tablets. As anyone in the drug research would know (I'm only a programmer), in order to discover a cure, researchers generate thousands, or even millions, of chemical compounds to study. The majority of them are not useful for anything. They are not publishing information about confirmed hits.

The other thing I'm questioning is the patents. It just said the patents are waived for studying, it didn't say about manufacturing and marketing. What if one of the compound published turned out to be a hit, and Glaxo had patented it. Can others still use it without royalties? What about the IP of any derivatives?

Still a lot of questions to be answered.

Right, so Google is relying on a buggy security system, and complains when it is cracked. If they are so paranoid about security, as they said it, why not opening up the source code for security scrutiny?

Oh, I forgot, this is a company cherished by /.ers. If this were Microsoft, everyone would be ROFL.

1) A sync framework built-in, for syncing different mobile devices. Everyone has one or more mobile devices now, nothing works really well. My Windows Mobile phone, PDA, my iTouch, etc, are not working well. SynCE and Multi-sync are not up to task (yet). This might be a Linux issue, but it would great too if Gnome could provide a nice syncing framework, if no one at a lower level would want to pick it up. Anyway, I really don't care where that issue should be lied in, I just wish my mobile devices work nicely with my linux laptop. It's annoying having to manage my contact, calendar, task list etc in Windows inside a VirtualBox, in order to be able to sync.

2) Evince should take a look at PDF Xchange PDF viewer. I want to be able to add notes, highlight, etc, in my PDF ebooks. Installing PDF Xchange Viewer on Wine is an ugly solution (font and UI are way ugly), and it's too slow.

3) F-Spot is slow...

4) Anjuta, can we do emacs key binding yet? Haven't used it for a while though.

5) Network Connections should apply network settings after changes, not having to ask users to restart networking service or reboot. Ok, probably just an Ubuntu issue.

6) Gnome should wake up probably after a suspend. I have no such issue with other desktop or WM, just Gnome. I tolerated it so far, coz I don't do suspend that much, and prefer to hibernate. But it's still annoying when you need to do it.

7) iBus seems to have a bad habit of hanging from time to time, especially when you are typing too fast, and you have to switch between input methods very often. And start up is slow too.

I'll try the new version soon, hope to see some of my problems solved. Regardless, thanks a lot for the hard work, really appreciat it.

There is a saying in Chinese: tian xia wu zheng sheng, yue er ji wei yu. Meaning: there is no correct tune, as long as it pleases your ears, it is good tune.

People have always been saying, computer will never be able to do "creative" work, that's what distinguishes human from computer, and that's what makes us human. Gradually, computers/machines are creeping more and more into the last fiefdom of what "makes us human with a soul". I guess, for those who get upset, falling from a high pedestal was a lost pride too hard to swallow./p?

The last time I played a computer game was in 95, and after that, I lost passion for games. That was called, fairly enough, Virtual World. It's a game where you sit in a cage modeled like a car, and you drove it in the mining tunnel on Mars. Obviously, the car is not really moving, but it had enough hydraulic system to simulate certain action to give some realism, like a flight simulator. It was expensive to play, $15 per 15 minutes. It's a multi-player game in which you tried to shoot each other while racing. If you got shot, you heard a bang on your back, and the car shook so hard it gave you dizziness. If you sit with your back on the seat back, it could hurt pretty bad.

I spent a lot money playing that game, and after, I had no passions for other non-realistic games anymore. I always say to my other gamer friends that the game they play are for pimps :)

The chief reason I have SPF records for my domains is so that the big boys like hotmail.com and GMail don't reject my emails.

I set up SPF records properly, hoping that mails from our domain are not blocked or bounced. It works a little bit, but my frustration has not reduced that much. Now, I don't care any more, the SPF records are still there, but that's all.

The big boys are actually quite nice, and they do care about that. I got in touch with their admins, they did a verification (quite fast, I must say), and made sure mails from our domain went through. The problem is with cocky admins from small IT shops and ISPs who probably know jack about it, and who just chose to block the IP range of a whole continent. Yes, we are in China, but note that not all email servers in China are open relays, just like not all email servers in America or Europe are open relays.

So, no, I don't care about SPF any more. It does not work as it is meant to.

Why isn't IBM jumping first, and take the lead to move the whole IBM to Linux desktop? You know, the do-what-you-are-preaching concept? Last week, 5 IBM people came to our office to pitch for a 3 million contract, and I saw every single person (technical and sales) is running Windows Vista, with the latest MS Office. The only thing I recognized as IBM-made is Lotus Notes, which we also use here.

About 8 years ago, it was the same thing with Sun. We had a bunch of Sun people came to our office (another company), and they kept bitching about MS Windows and MS Office, while at the same time preaching Linux and Star Office. And guess what they were running? Yeah, you got it. At one point, I had enough of their bitching, I told them with a straight face: "Why don't you guys install Linux and Star Office, and send me that fucking slide in open format?" They looked at me as if I was from Mars, then I turned on my laptop, and it was running Linux.

One suggestion to the big guys: don't preach, do it. Then everyone will follow, you have enough clout to take the lead.

Well, if Microsoft's new OS can handle multi-core, multi-processor transparently for the applications, and if all the developers need to do is to recompile their apps on the new system, and voila, everything is transparently distributed across the cores/processors, then I'll be the first one to welcome it.

Multi-core/processor programming is hard. The thing I found quite elegant in Erlang is that it makes it so transparent that you don't even think about it. Imagine an OS with a "normal-looking" set of library that can handle all the hard works transparently. I'd say, bully to them.

Not everyone is lazy. I have intervertebral disc problem, and sometimes, it could be pretty nasty, I can't even stand up straight. If I stand or walk over an hour or two, I would have difficulty standing straight, and the lower back all the way to my calf are painful.

And no, I'm not a couch potato, I exercise twice to three times a week, mainly jogging (go slowly and gradually speeding up, up to 8km in 50 minutes) and swimming (2 to 3km in 1.5 hour) and stretching. And I'm not overweight either (had never been), I weigh 75kg, at 1.78cm tall. So that's pretty ok. If I don't exercise, my problems get worse.

So this exoskeleton could be a nice thing for me. I just wish it's not that expensive, and not so "borgy" (not that I mind that much). I would love to have one to help me sometimes, which would make life less miserable when the problem arise.

I know that Microsoft is to be evil, and Google is to be the good guy, and /.ers mostly side with Google, yada yada yada...

All that asides, I'd like to say that, from my personal experiences, Bing is pretty good. I've been using it on and off since its launch, before its ad campaign. Note that I still use Google on an everyday basis, but Bing has been doing better and better.

I spent a bored Saturday afternoon, comparing the two, with different methods that I use everyday for searching:

• keywords or phrases
• keywords, with + sign, AND, OR etc
• Chinese keywords + English keywords
• Natural questions (e.g. Where do I find xxx?), in English and Chinese
• Proper names, product names, location names, etc
• Some others non-pattern searches

In over half of what I put in, Bing came up with results that made more sense to me, and which are closer to what I'm searching for. I found that Google is more and more rigged with "hidden" ads, which is quite annoying at times. Maybe it's just that Google is better known, and all the so-called SEO experts work on it more, but it's still annoying.

That's just personal experience, and it's by no means scientific. YMMV. I, for one, welcome good search engine, even from the evil empire.

This may sound funny, but I recently had the same experience. I took over the position of CTO of an electronic payment company, and after one week, I figured a lot of critical systems are missing root password, including Linux, AIX, HP/UX and SCO Unixware. No one knows the password, it's been changing hands so many times, and the people who were responsible for those machines have left, without leaving the passwords behind.

Those are critical systems that must run 24x7. We had to rebuild the system on new machines, re-route transactions to the new machines, and shutdown the old ones to recover (single user mode).

And that's a platform handling over 400 billion in transaction per year. Scary. But that's the easiest problem I have inherited, mind you.