The article mentions performing myriad assays as a rate-limiting step in drug discovery. My employer https://www.synthace.com is trying to accelerate this process through software. We’ve created a platform to easily program liquid handling robots to perform complex protocols, and to do so using a Design-of-Experiments[1] approach to investigate multiple factors simultaneously. It’s early days for this approach but we’ve already had pharma customers using it to significantly accelerate their drug discovery process.
I use his work, but for me the situation is more complicated my prior experiences with the author.
He's been making similar complaints about his lack of renumeration for quite a while. In an older GitHub where he requested contributions, I pointed out that he had barely worked on the project for many months (at that time), and not published a new version to npm in years[1], despite making a $600 withdrawal from his Open Collective fund in June 2018 with the explicit purpose of releasing v5[2].
In the thread, I suggested that I and others might be willing to contribute, but I wanted more certainty on what exactly my contribution would be paying for. As I saw it, at that point he had a number of regular donors who were essentially paying him to do nothing.
He responded very angrily, saying nobody had any right to question his actions or to expect anything from him, even if they were paying him. He then deleted my comment entirely and banned me from commenting further. This interaction didn't exactly leave me with a strong desire to contribute. I think he's a rather volatile individual and the community would indeed be better off forking this project than indulging his sense of grievance.
It's more akin to Best Buy telling me I need to visit the house of every customer who bought my widget and slightly break it, otherwise they'll stop selling said widget. And if I try to tell my customer "Best Buy is making me do this", that's "irrelevant".
There is a separate, co-operative effort by a consortium of manufacturers to improve and mass produce an existing ventilator design.
But with a project of this importance, while it makes sense to pool resources, you can't realistically have every company and every engineer co-operating on the same project. So it also makes sense to have several, independent efforts running in parallel.
Sadly latency makes this almost impossible. However, the guy who made Winamp came up with an interesting solution to this: https://www.cockos.com/ninjam/
The idea is, everyone's playing is delayed by one measure, so they are playing along with people from the past, while everyone else is playing along with a past version of them. Kind of crazy.
The price advantages of globalised supply chains vs. the relative rarity of an event like this means that, during normal periods, firms using them will enjoy a significant advantage over those doing the "right" thing and market forces will weed out the latter. So I don't expect management to be taking a lead on this.
This doesn't mean that many of those who were younger and without pre-existing illnesses weren't in a serious condition and in danger of dying, just that, with the help of intensive care, they were able to survive.
If and when heath services become completely overwhelmed and there are no longer enough hospital bed/ventilators/doctors and nurses to provide the assistance they need, then we'll likely see a lot of younger and otherwise healthy people start to die as well.
Tracking and testing doesn't destroy economic activity. Complete lock-downs, as we're seeing in China, Italy, Spain and soon elsewhere do. But it does let you get a grip on the situation when you have millions infected.
However you're right that you can't maintain that long term, so what's the off-ramp? South Korea has proved you can do mass testing and tracking which, combined with voluntary and state-enforced control of movement, lets you keep infections at a low level. What I'm contending is that, if the situation is bad enough, all countries that can will implement similar controls, and those controls will a permanent situation, not a temporary one. People will still be able to go to work, just not if they're potentially sick or infectious.
In this event, the solution will be the creation of a permanent, South Korea and China inspired infrastructure for testing, tracking and constraining infectious citizens by all developed countries. Regardless of the privacy and civil liberty concerns, I think that's where we'll eventually end up, and to your children it will one day seem crazy that a person with an infectious illness was once able to freely walk the streets.
If you run your CSS files through Autoprefixer[1], it's possible to use the latest syntax, and have it automatically converted to all necessary older ones.
To be clear, the caniuse.com stats are sourced from StatCounter Global Stats[1], not from the site itself, so they should be fairly reliable, albeit averaged across the world. Obviously, nothing beats measuring for your own site and audience.
Depends on where you source your browser usage statistics, but IE9's share is smaller than IE8's. For example, caniuse.com[1] has IE8 on 3.18%, and IE9 on 2.13%. Later versions of IE (and Windows) are better at auto-updating, and people using them seem to be more willing to upgrade.
I'm lucky enough to work for a company with a last-2-versions support policy for IE, meaning IE10 and 11 are all I have to worry about. I can't understate how much nicer it makes web development. So much of the bad reputation of web technologies stems from wrestling bugs in old versions of IE and the lack of proper layout capabilities in CSS.
Well, I added a reminder into my Google Calendar. Whatever happens in AI, if I make it to 1/1/2045 I'll be freaked out at midnight by a long-forgotten "Future Arrives" notification popping up in my ocular implant or whatever.
Does Nadella really deserve credit for Azure though, or Scott Guthrie? Azure was a joke until Guthrie took over, even MS employees couldn't figure out how to use it, and he turned it around in a matter of months.
The Taipei metro began operating in 1996, whereas the London Underground began operating in 1863. You can't really compare the two. The newest parts of the Underground, such as the Jubilee Line Extension that opened in 1999 are very clean, modern and spacious, but it's impossible to retroactively improve the rest of the network to the same standards while it's being constantly used by millions of people every day.
The new trains, platform-edge doors, and air-cooling are being introduced for the Central, Bakerloo, Waterloo & City, and Piccadilly lines. The tunnels and trains will still be small, there's not much that can be done about that, but they will be cooler, safer and hopefully a little less cramped, due to the extra capacity provided by walk-through carriages.
If it mutates and becomes airborne, it might be. That's why containment is so important, even if it doesn't seem so threatening in its current form. Viruses constantly mutate, and every extra person they infect gives them a million more opportunities to do so. All it takes is one of those mutations to make the virus airborne, and we're in big trouble.
The government being a lucrative market isn't the same as single mothers being a lucrative market.
And yes, you can make money from an underclass by exploiting people's weaknesses for sugar, fast food, gambling, alcohol, drugs etc. But then you're not solving their problems, you're adding to them.
So who is the target audience? How many web designers are capable of writing the HTML and CSS necessary to create animated tabs, accordions and overlays, but can't figure out the few lines of JavaScript/jQuery necessary to toggle classes on elements? I've never met a single person who would fit that description.
No, I'll repeat what I already said: You don't regulate what people can eat, you regulate what food companies can sell. You don't allow them to sell dangerous food. That isn't draconian statism, it's sensible regulation.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_of_experiments