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Comment Open source isn't the exception, it's the norm (Score 4, Informative) 10

I work in this field, and outside of the commercial pharma companies, the general rule is that all the data goes public and that all the code written is open source. All the big publicly funded agencies, and certainly all the research councils here in the UK, follow this principle. Admittedly some people do sit on the data a bit longer than they should before releasing it, but in principle it all goes public and freely available.

Want to find open, public data in genomic science, or contribute to an open database? - fill your boots: http://www.oxfordjournals.org/...
Want to find new open-source algorithms for genome analysis? There are so many it's hard to keep up - http://blends.debian.org/med/t...

In the EU, there is so much data in public databases they had to start a pan-European effort called ELIXIR just to try and work out how they were going to handle all the data curation work.

So, not to take anything away from this fine project, the idea that it's special because it's open source or because scientists are collaborating widely is just plain silly.

TIM

Software

30th Anniversary of the (No Good) Spreadsheet 407

theodp writes "PC Magazine's John C. Dvorak offers his curmudgeonly take on the 30th anniversary of the spreadsheet, which Dvorak blames for elevating once lowly bean counters to the executive suite and enabling them to make some truly horrible decisions. But even if you believe that VisiCalc was the root-of-all-evil, as Dvorak claims, your geek side still has to admire it for the programming tour-de-force that it was, implemented in 32KB memory using the look-Ma-no-multiply-or-divide instruction set of the 1MHz 8-bit 6502 processor that powered the Apple II." On the brighter side, one of my favorite things about Visicalc is the widely repeated story that it was snuck into businesses on Apple machines bought under the guise of word processors, but covertly used for accounting instead.
Image

Hippies Say WiFi Network Is Harming Their Chakras 432

Anti-Globalism writes "A group of hippies is complaining that a recently installed WiFi mesh network in the UK village of Glastonbury is causing health problems. To combat the signals from the Wi-Fi hotspots, the hippies have placed orgone generators around the antennae." Although there have been many studies that show no correlation between WiFi and health issues the hippies say, "Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man."

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