I understand why this is bad, but I personally would sign up for a Microsoft account anyway. Mainly, I don't want all my stuff in "C:\Users\micha". Is there a way to set your username?
When FASTA was invented in 1985, generally sequencing reads would be about half that.
The simplicity of FASTA seems like a dream compared to the GenBank flat file format used before then. And around the year 2000, less computationally-inclined scientists were storing sequence in Microsoft Word binary .doc files.
A lot of file formats (including bioinformatics formats!) have come and gone in that time period. I don't think many would design it this way today, but it has a lot of nice features like the ones you point out that led to its longevity.
Unfortunately, it is marked obsolete since 29.1. The NEWS says:
* Many seldom-used generalized variables have been made obsolete.
Emacs has a number of rather obscure generalized variables defined,
that, for instance, allowed you to say things like:
(setf (point-min) 4)
These never caught on and have been made obsolete. The form above,
for instance, is the same as saying
This used to be the case until Emacs 24.1, in 2012.
Passing a nil argument to a minor mode function call now ENABLES
the minor mode unconditionally. This is so that you can write e.g.
(add-hook 'text-mode-hook #'foo-mode)
to enable foo-mode in Text mode buffers, removing the need for
'turn-on-foo-mode' style functions. This affects all mode commands
defined by 'define-minor-mode'. If called interactively, the mode
command still toggles the minor mode.
Adding on a representation of mean in a different style (like a black bar) can be helpful. So can a boxplot-style indication of variance, in some cases.
I hope it keeps its blazing-fast startup. I regularly used Paint instead of Photoshop on a system where I had both because Paint starts instantly but Photoshop took a bit.
It seems like you may be reading some things into my comment that I didn't write? I made no claims about the procedure being fair or unfair—I'm just describing what it is.
I am faculty at University of Toronto. As part of the process of considering someone for tenure here, the university solicits six appraisals from relevant experts at other institutions. The candidate will not know who the referees are. Generally, the appraisals are positive; a negative appraisal may severely affect someone's tenure case.
I don't see the concern in this post as one of widespread caste discrimination at University of Toronto, but more that he's worried that a single prejudiced person might upset this, either an external referee, or someone internal involved in the decision-making process. In fact, that is exactly what he says.
I like the four-document model. While it isn't a perfect fit for all cases, for many it is a good start.
We wrote a review of bioinformatics software documentation, which includes a taxonomy of research software documentation (Table 1) and examples of which popular bioinformatics software packages use each two (Table 2). It is clear that not every kind is needed for everything, and it's more of a menu than a prescriptive set of documentation types needed for everything: