I have freebox too but I still use a linksys wrt54g router with Tomato behind their router (which can be disabled btw) and I have great results. No resets, no slowdowns, uptime is very high and the wireless works well enough for my needs. There might be a little bottleneck in the wifi cause the chip is a bit older but it compensates with the fact that is very reliable. So I would recommend Tomato and Linksys over any ISP provided router.
Is it a high quality PC or some overrated super hyped Apple workstation ? Cause on my 3 years old PC with a new SSD I just blink and I can start typing code. If it has no SSD .. it's not high enough :D.
Ugly, bloated ??? Omg, youtube.com/watch?v=G1iaVD-B2IA
I just clicked again on a small project just to see the load time. I'm not bullsh*ting but it was up and ready in ~3 seconds.Quadcore 2.5Ghz on some 3 years old Asus MB with 4Gb RAM and a brand new SSD (Crucial m4 i can recommend).
Alright fine I believe you. I can't pinpoint why I have such an issue with VS. I mean, I don't have much use for it since I'm a(n) RoR developer, but I don't really know why I hate it so much. Freshman year of high school I took my first CS class in Visual Basic and I really liked it.
"our understanding of the natural world is still sadly primitive" You are talking for yourself ? For humanity ? For scientists you never met ? I honestly don't know who you are and how well suited are you (you're a specialist in bioengineering ?) to tell us how much "we" know or we don't. I'm just a software engineer with some basic understanding of genetic engineering, but my wife is a genetic technician in a lab, and it's amazing what operations they performed on a daily basis as part of their university classes and recently in research projects in real labs (and this didn't start yesterday or only with my wife's generation). So I'm very tempted to believe that you just woke up speaking about some limitations you don't personally know and it's not even in your area of expertise. This does not mean that today "everything" is possible or that we achieved the grand mastery of DNA. It's just that for the "right people" the understanding of the natural world is more advanced than you have ever dreamed (unless you are one of the "right people").
Computation chemistry has been going on for decades. Attempts at modeling how molecules behave is still quite primitive. We're talking about modelling the behavior of a object that is comprised of a few dozen atoms. That's it, pretty simple right? We'll the models aren't that good at predicting molecular behavior.
Let's move up a step now. Computation chemistry is used heavily by the drug industry. Get an x-ray structure of a protein (maybe a few hundred to a few thousand atoms) and see if it binds to a drug. Wow, now it's getting complicated. How successful is it? Not very. I can remember a computational chemist saying "oh hey, the model say if you replace X with Y, you'll increase binding by 10x". So we try and guess what? The binding was worse.
Now we move up to a biological system. Now we have hundreds (if not thousands) of proteins floating in a matrix of water and ions. We have a DNA strands of millions of base pairs, of which maybe 10% we actually know what they do. We also have small signalling molecules that do something we understand, but probably also do 10 other things we have no idea about.
It is very impressive how far biological "design" (genomics) has come so far, but right now the tools are incredibly blunt and the analysis is incredibly crude. I have no doubt our understanding will improve immensely over the coming decades, but I would guess we understand less than 1% of what's going on inside of complex living organisms.
You see, my feeling is that trying to guess the progress of genetics by extrapolating the complexity and insecurity of the computation chemistry is wrong. As far as I understood, genetics today is a lot about (but not only) identifying which genes (portions of DNA) are responsible of which phenotype (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenotype).Therefore a lot of resources are and were allocated to create a dictionary with genes as keys and phenotype as values. This dictionary is being populated at a quite fast pace and this combined with the possibility to take genes from some organisms and implant them in the DNA of a cell of other organisms and see the resulting phenotype is already a great achievement (imagine undergrads cutting and pasting DNA daily). They are not inventing new proteins and worry that they will not "bind" enough. They just take the DNA known to produce proteins in some organisms and place it in other organisms and suddenly proteins which have a known effect in different organisms, appear in a new organism. Yes, there is a long way from here to engineering genes that will produce and deliver a medicine inside an organism but I wouldn't call this primitive at all. Sorry for the simplification and possible errors.
OK, I see your perspective now. I agree that our understanding of how genes encode for proteins is well developed, as are our techniques for "transplanting" a gene from one organism to another.
What we have very little handle on is gene regulation. All those "non-coding" genes that scientists used to think were junk? They are actually used to control gene transcription.
Controlling this is infinitely easier in a simple organism like a hookworm, but the complexities of in human borders on obscene.
