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
>> *****************************************
>> [log in to unmask]
>> [log in to unmask]
>> *****************************************
>
> --
> James Stroud
> UCLA-DOE Institute for Genomics and Proteomics
> Box 951570
> Los Angeles, CA 90095
>
> http://www.jamesstroud.com
--
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* Gerard Bricogne [log in to unmask] *
* *
* Global Phasing Ltd. *
* Sheraton House, Castle Park Tel: +44-(0)1223-353033 *
* Cambridge CB3 0AX, UK Fax: +44-(0)1223-366889 *
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