Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Tuesday, October 22, 2002

Life science applications for Mac OS X? -- Comment()
MacCentral writes optimistically that Apple's life science efforts [are] bearing fruit:

Developers are certainly paying attention to the Apple market now. "There are about 3,500 native applications available for the Mac OS X today," said Ken Bereskin, Apple's director of Mac OS X. "This includes popular Mac applications and many other applications ported over to run on the [operating system]." Nearly every type of application is represented, ranging from office productivity products to high-end computer-aided design programs.

This does not quite answer the question I posted two months ago:

If there are first-class applications for a certain area, people are at least willing to consider switching to a Mac. Perhaps even a group of people would be willing to switch. But this also could happen in the other direction. If there is a first-class application users can not live without, they will choose Windows, even though the general usability would be poorer.
What about, e.g., bioinformatics? Are there such applications on the Mac? Or on Windows?

RSS validator -- Comment()
Loebrich.org writes about the RSS Validator: "Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby have put together an RSS Validator. It works with RSS 0.91, 0.92, 0.93, 0.94, 1.0, and 2.0, but it is optimized for RSS 2.0 feeds. Sadly, my RSS does not validate." [Bruce]

I tried to validate the RSS feed of Universal Rule, and it passed the validator. Nice!

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IBM: Computer heal thyself: "International Business Machines Corp. this week unveiled plans to develop computer systems that will fix themselves when they break." [Google Technology News]

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Folding@home Scientists Report First Distributed Computing Success: 'As you read this sentence, millions of personal computers around the world are working overtime performing complex computations on their screensavers in the name of science. This growing Internet phenomenon [is known] as "distributed computing..."' [Google Technology News]

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Researchers use sperm to put human genes into pigs: "By manipulating swine sperm, Italian researchers have made a strain of pigs that carry human genes in their hearts, livers and kidneys, an advance that could lead to creating herds of pigs that could provide organs..." [Google Technology News]

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Archimago writes: "One of the better online dictionaries for technology-related material that I've seen. And it's free! What's better than free? Nuthin. The title is a bit misleading as it's not as comprehensive as a traditional encyclopedia, but it's helped me every time I've needed it." [MetaFilter]

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Ask a scientist: "It's quite possible that every science question you have ever wondered about has already been answered. Thousands of science questions & answers, from anti-matter to zero gravity simulations, all with explanations even a scientific neophyte can easily understand." [MetaFilter]

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Hydrogen Clouds Spotted High Above the Milky Way: "Huge hydrogen clouds that measure 100-light-years across hover in the void between the Milky Way galaxy and intergalactic space, according to a new report. Previous research had revealed the presence of hydrogen gas floating above the plane of our galaxy. But where it came from or how it was distributed remained unclear due to instrument limitations." [Scientific American]