Open-source biotechnology

Posted Apr 1, 2010 11:19 UTC (Thu) by cowsandmilk (guest, #55475)
In reply to: Open-source biotechnology by nix
Parent article: Open-source biotechnology

I believe in Jim Collins's talk Biology by Design
(http://www.bu.edu/phpbin/buniverse/videos/view/?id=261), he describes the differences in the
unrealistic expectations many people had for biological toggle switches and what he created. The
time delay was just enormous and it continues to be due to the nature of biology. Nucleotides may
"encode two bits", but they most definitely can't contain the information of two bits. And there's no
way without inventing whole new ribosomes or completely novel sigma factors to change this. No
lzma compression to the genome.

Open-source biotechnology

Posted Apr 2, 2010 13:45 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

Unfortunately that's a Flash stream with a name disguised in a mass of
JavaScript. I have no idea how to play one of those without the Flash
player: maybe rtmpdump could do it, but even then I'd have to unpick the
URI. No thanks.

Open-source biotechnology

Posted Apr 7, 2010 0:05 UTC (Wed) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link] (1 responses)

If you're on a Linux box, the Flash player will generally dump the entire FLV file in /tmp, and you can move it wherever and play it with a current mplayer whenever you like.

Open-source biotechnology

Posted Apr 8, 2010 16:01 UTC (Thu) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

Except that, on a site such as LWN where folks are more likely to be running
Linux boxes already, many people won't have your "magically assumed to be
there" Flash player at all, as it's proprietary, additional to the fact that
there's a lot of platforms without official flash binary support even if
people don't have issues with such things as granting damage waivers to
black-box code the authors seem to expect people to just trust that they
don't do anything harmful with, despite the fact that they don't respect the
same people's rights enough to open the code such that it can be fairly
examined before granting such a waiver, etc.

So the polite thing to do on a site such as this, is link the FLV file
directly, if possible, or if not, at least mention that the link is to a
flash video, and that if anyone wishes to extract the direct link to the flv
and post it (or conversely, extract the data itself and post that, assuming
legal permission to do so being granted, of course), it'd be appreciated.