Dear James,
Thank you for your reply. Again, I invite you to share with us the
details of the problems you encountered, through the appropriate mailing
list at Global Phasing.
I failed, however, to see either humour or constructiveness in your
claim that we were "just trying to make a buck", and could not leave such a
statement hang in the air unanswered.
With best wishes,
Gerard.
--
On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 02:52:16AM -0700, James Stroud wrote:
> 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
--
===============================================================
* *
* 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 *
* *
===============================================================
