Numerous of you have pointed out that the links to the advertised
KnowOS ILC2005 paper (in pdf) were broken in www.knowos.org and
www.biobike.org. I've repaird these, and in order to save you the
effort, here is a direct link:
http://nostoc.stanford.edu/jeff/personal/vita/pubs/2005ILCKnowOS.pdf
Also, as it turns out the slides and (not so good) audio for my talk
are online as well:
http://international-lisp-conference.org/2005/media/travers-slides.pdf
http://international-lisp-conference.org/2005/media/travers-audio.mp3
(Care of I don't know who, but thanks to you whomever you are!)
········@gmail.com wrote:
> Numerous of you have pointed out that the links to the advertised
> KnowOS ILC2005 paper (in pdf) were broken in www.knowos.org and
> www.biobike.org. I've repaird these, and in order to save you the
> effort, here is a direct link:
>
> http://nostoc.stanford.edu/jeff/personal/vita/pubs/2005ILCKnowOS.pdf
>
> Also, as it turns out the slides and (not so good) audio for my talk
> are online as well:
>
> http://international-lisp-conference.org/2005/media/travers-slides.pdf
> http://international-lisp-conference.org/2005/media/travers-audio.mp3
>
> (Care of I don't know who, but thanks to you whomever you are!)
Where can we download KnowOS from?
Cheers
Brad
> Where can we download KnowOS from?
Preamble: The simple answer to this question isn't so simple,
unfortunately. Please read this note carefully before having a
knee-jerk reaction to any of it. Complex things are complex.
Before going in to more detail, let me answer the exact question: You
can't. Or, more precisely, you can only, at the moment, download it as
BioBike (although internally they are mostly separate, and you can
subsequently easily replace the bio dbs with whatever you like). So,
then next obvious question is: Okay, so where do I get BioBike? That's
a little simpler to answer. But that too isn't so simple. The too
simple answer is to read the BioBike install manual, here:
http://nostoc.stanford.edu/Docs/install-steps.txt
which will lead you through downloading BioBike from sourceforge and
installing it.
You should also examine all the KnowOS core documentation, available at
www.biobike.org (Core Documentation section).
However, just as in order to run Windows or Linux you need certain
hardware, to run BioBike/KnowOS you'll need a certain Lisp engine.
Currently it is only fully tested on ACL (which is what runs our
serevers).[1] So, in order to run it out-of-the-box, you'll need to
either have ACL on Linux, or else re-port it to SBCL (or whatever free
Lisp you like). [If you are an academic, and only want to run BioBike,
we have a deal with Franz to get you a cheaper, BioBike-only ACL.]
However, we have made every effort to code in standard CL (the lead
core engineer works in Lispworks -- also not free, but at least this
helps him keep things pretty standard!), and someone ported it to SBCL
before (about a year ago), so it is likely that this would not be very
difficult, as we would welcome someone who wants to support the SBCL
port joining the development team.
All of the above not withstanding, however, please consider whether
you, as an individual, really need to download and install your own
KnowOS. It is really intended to be an enterprise server for a
community. You as an individual would probably be better off either (a)
running your own lisp image and just working in it, or (b) getting
together with a group of folks who are working on the same project and
installing a KnowOS as a group -- thus amortizing the cost of ACL. If
you don't have a community, you might consider becoming the world's
first KnowOS-based ISP, charging a small support fee to folks who want
to host on the world's first Knowledge Operating System. [Our team
supports several running KnowOS servers for different academic
communities for free. As I've said elsewhere, it is quite stable.] I'd
be willing to discuss seed-funding for someone willing to try to do
this.
Complex things are complex. To make them simpler takes time and money,
or the efforts and good will of a large volunteer community. We (the
BioBike/KnowOS team) welcome the volunteer efforts any of you who would
like to help us improve KnowOS, and thereby simplify the foregoing (as
well as making is cheaper if, for example, it were re-ported to SBCL).
I hope that this is helpful. If anyone would like to discuss becoming a
part of the KnowOS development team, please let me/us know. There is an
infinite list of important and interesting Lisp implementation
challenges (even aside from SBCL porting!), and given that KnowOS (or
something like it) is going to be The Future of Lisp (and everything
else -- cf. Google!) KnowOS (or something like it) going to be The
Place to Be if you're doing Lisp (or something like it) in the near
future!
Cheers,
'Jeff
[1] Why do we pay for ACL? Why pay for Lisp? Why pay for software at
all? Oh puuuuleeeeese grow up! How much do you pay for laptops, lab
materials, and books? Why should software be free when nothing else is?
BioBike itself is free, and who do you think pays us to frequently
answer your frequently asked questions? We eat and pay rent too, and
have to pay for our software and servers!
Okay, enough ranting.... More seriously.... We pay for it because then
we can harass Franz to fix things -- which they do!
Even aside from the cost (or not) of software, the effort it takes to
setup and support it -- esp. with complex systems of biological data,
knowledge, and tools -- could cost plenty in terms of time and tears!
This is a big part of the reason that we developed BioBike in this
weird web-based way; we had in mind that either a whole university, or
perhaps the whole community of interest in a particular organism, say
the whole C. Elegans community, would buy one license and one server
and pay for one person's time to support it for the whole community.
(In our case it was the cyanobacterial community, which is why the main
BioBike server contains cyanobacterial models.)
The community might even put in a small grant proposal to build
themselves a BioBike server, or add it on as a small cost to their
already probably pretty big genome database grants. Those costs are
then amortized over the whole user community. And more importantly,
someone else gets to do the dirty work of integrating the data and
supporting the server. When every lab has to pay for software it can
get expensive, but a single BioBike license, server, and support staff
can be amortized over a whole community of users.