

Microsoft Open Source BioInformatics - Using Software to Advance Healthcare - adammichaelc
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/mbf-101210.aspx

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zdw
Great example of innovation inside of Microsoft.

One interesting point of comparison - if you look at say Apple or Sun (RIP)
open source contributions, they tend to be in the low level, OS and
programming fields - I'm thinking of LLVM, OpenCL, ZFS, Dtrace, etc.

MS's innovation tends to be more user visible, like this and Deep Zoom.

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JunkDNA
Any HN'ers out there using this stuff? Bioinformatics has always had a pretty
heavy bias toward *nix, so I'd be curious to know if the MS stuff is any good.

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boards2x
J&J is a for-profit company. Nothing to do with the advancement of healthcare,
as it does for profits. The same way Microsoft is not for Open Source, no
matter how many white-papers they'll publish (and then contradict with yet
another FUDish commercial, article, statement etc.)

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JunkDNA
Normally I won't take the bait on comments like this. But today my filter
isn't working so well...

There are tons of researchers (the people this software is targeted towards)
inside for-profit pharmaceutical companies who spend their entire lives trying
to advance healthcare. I'm not saying everyone who works at a pharma is an
automatic saint, far from it. But, people who work on the _research_ side are
genuinely motivated by the desire to make the world a better place and cure
disease. It's a good thing too, because the work on its own sucks. You spend
months or even years on something promising, only to find out it's a failure
for reasons completely unknown to you (biology is a fickle thing). Then you
pick up, and go back to the drawing board. If you're exceedingly lucky, maybe
one or two things you've worked on in your career will become an actual drug.
If it weren't for the knowledge that your work might actually help someone
some day, it would be awfully hard to get out of bed in the morning.

