Yikes!
Apologies if that was over the top. I guess the chisanbop comment did
not properly convey the hyperbole, and hence humor, I was trying to
achieve. Hopefully my comments can still be taken as the constructive
criticism they were intended to be.
James
On Oct 26, 2008, at 4:57 PM, Gerard Bricogne wrote:
Dear James,
I am rather surprised and disappointed to find such an
intemperate,
ill-judged and almost slanderous statement from you, especially in a
posting
to a bulletin board that is intended for the sharing of experience
and good
will and to which you have been such a regular and valued contributor.
To deal with slander first: Global phasing has been operating
for over
10 years without ever being, or intending to be, anyone's chance to
"just
try and make a buck". We develop our software thank to a mix of
funding that
does include industrial sponsors, but we distribute it free of
charge to
academic users (since 2002 we have issued over 3500 licence keys for
SHARP
to academic users). We even give support to academic users, and
spare no
pains in doing so, as many users can testify: this is not exactly
the most
lucrative occupation if one is looking to make a buck. Global
Phasing's
staff consists of eight scientists, plus one part-time person to
keep the
books and get the annual accounts audited. The company has never had
any
investors, and spends all its income on scientists' salaries and
running
costs. Perhaps the ".com" suffix has acquired a bad smell in other
parts of
the world, but in this case your insinuations are badly misguided.
If you have had difficulties installing software from us, a more
constructive form of feedback would be to write to us at sharp-
develop or
buster-develop (both @globalphasing.com) and explain the nature of
those
difficulties. We have often found that the worst problems occur when
people,
instead of writing to us, start to try and hack the scripts
themselves and
end up tying themselves in inextricable knots. One of your remarks
seems to
want to imply that we have taken a perverse pleasure in making
installations
difficult. It is true that we still carry a legacy from earlier days
when
some of our sponsors wanted to be able to distribute jobs over
heterogeneous
clusters of machines and to view the results from any other machine
on that
network, while most users today just want to run everything on one
machine.
Our installation procedures have kept evolving to become simpler and
more
robust, although the need to link up with several third-party
packages makes
it hard to suppress complexity entirely. If you happen to have
constructive
suggestions to make in this direction, we will be only too happy to
listen
to them and will do our best to make use of them. We do have,
however, to
weigh up how much time to devote to these issues, vs. how much to
developing
and implementing new methods.
I hope you will take the time to write to either of the mailing
lists I
indicated above to explain what simplifications you would like to
see in our
current installation procedures, and look forward to reading them.
With best wishes,
Gerard.
--
On Sun, Oct 26, 2008 at 01:40:35AM -0700, James Stroud wrote:
The info at
http://www.globalphasing.com/buster/installation/index.html#requirements
will give you some hints about whether it will be successful on OS
X. As
per the Global Phasing modus operandi, any instruction involving
installation of their software is muddled in riddle and ambiguity.
They
have made an art of making their software difficult to install. I
guess the
philosophy is that if you can somehow get their software installed,
then
you have earned your phase information. Personally, I'd rather
solve my
structure with using chisanbop and a pencil than attempt to install
Global
Phasing software.
Speaking from experience, this is my 2c. Apologies if I hurt anyone's
feelings who are "just trying to make a buck".
James
On Oct 24, 2008, at 9:39 AM, jacques-philippe colletier wrote:
Hi everydoby,
I`d like to know if there is a version of BUSTER-TNT available on
MacOSX ?
Anyone knows ?
*****************************************
Dr. Jacques-Philippe Colletier
UCLA / DOE Institute for Genomics and Proteomics
90095 Los Angeles, CA, USA
*****************************************
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
*****************************************
--
James Stroud
UCLA-DOE Institute for Genomics and Proteomics
Box 951570
Los Angeles, CA 90095
http://www.jamesstroud.com
--
===============================================================
* *
* Gerard Bricogne [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
* *
* Global Phasing Ltd. *
* Sheraton House, Castle Park Tel: +44-(0)1223-353033 *
* Cambridge CB3 0AX, UK Fax: +44-(0)1223-366889 *
* *
===============================================================
--
James Stroud
UCLA-DOE Institute for Genomics and Proteomics
Box 951570
Los Angeles, CA 90095
http://www.jamesstroud.com
