Next Generation Genome Sequencers Compared

Desktop sequencers promise to democratize genomics, but it is difficult for researchers who are not experts in sequencing technology to sort through the overheated marketing claims made in this fiercely competitive industry. A group of UK-based researchers therefore decided to put the three leading models — Roche’s 454 GS Junior, Illumina’s MiSeq and Life Technologies’ Ion Torrent Personal Genome Machine (PGM) — through their paces. The test was to sequence the genome of the bacterium Escherichia coli, which killed more than 40 people in Germany last summer.

Nature spoke to Nicholas Loman, a bioinformatician at the University of Birmingham, UK, and one of the authors of the study, asking him what the work reveals about the state of genetic microbial diagnostics. The results are published today in Nature Biotechnology1.
So who won?

Each platform has strengths and weaknesses. If you want the most throughout per hour, the Ion Torrent PGM does that. If you need the highest throughput per run, the MiSeq is there. Accuracy-wise, the MiSeq is best; for generating the longest reads, the 454 is best. Both the PGM and 454 have some problems with accuracy concerning homopolymers [stretches of repeating bases]. And, of course, a user is going to want to look at cost. Part of the point of our paper is that genome sequencing is not a one-size-fits-all solution.
Why did you do this analysis?

As next-generation genome sequencing is going to come into the clinic and into public health, it will be targeted at people who don’t necessarily fully understand these issues. Up until now, people have had to depend on marketing information and blog posts for these comparisons, which are really useful, but can be difficult to find. And the marketing is really quite aggressive, if you remember the Personal Genome Machine vs MiSeq videos that played off the Mac vs PC ads. People are crying out for independent analysis.
Next Generation Genome Sequencers Compared

The Sober Truth Behind The Amityville Horror

Paranormal researchers -- if they are prudent -- trust little of what's heard, and nearly nothing of what is read. Sensational stories, one finds, particularly of the supernatural sort, are catnip for a media often geared more to profit than truth.

Such was the case with Amityville.

The evolution of this infamous story traces back to November 13th, 1974: Ronald De Feo, the Long Island son of a prosperous car dealer, fired eight shots from a.35 caliber rifle, killing his mother, father, two brothers and two sisters as they lay sleeping in their spacious, three-story Dutch Colonial home.

News of the murders sent ripples of anxiety through the normally placid town, lifting the floodgates of speculation. Unexplainable wax drippings --leading a trail between rooms in the house -- evoked dark murmurs of Satanic ritual and sacrifice. Others pondered the mystery of how De Feo managed to commit each of the six murders without arousing his victims from sleep, asking why no one in the neighborhood had heard gunshots, and why all six victims were found lying face-down in death.

As Amityville's gossip mill ground overtime, prosecutors in the case hunted for a motive. They did not need to look far. Abundant evidence showed De Feo harbored a deep-seated malice for his family along with a "thirst for money": prosecutors cinched their supposition of robbery with the discovery of a $200, 000 life insurance policy and an empty cash strongbox found hidden beneath the saddle of a closet in the family's master bedroom.

At first protesting his innocence, De Feo finally broke down and confessed. "It all started so fast," he told police. "Once I started, I just couldn't stop." He mentioned he had heard "voices" just prior to the murders and upon looking around saw no one there, and assumed "God was speaking to him". William Weber, De Feo's attorney, pushed for an insanity plea, but lost. On December 4, 1975, De Feo was sentenced to twenty-five years to life on each of the six counts of second-degree murder for which he had been convicted.
Many residents expected that with De Feo's conviction the ugly fog of sensationalism which descended upon Amityville would at last begin to disperse.
The Sober Truth Behind The Amityville Horror

Intel Ivy Bridge chip imminent, Quad-Core First

Ivy Bridge is the first in a series of upcoming Intel mainstream chips that emphasize graphics and multimedia processing over more traditional compute tasks. And most importantly for consumers, Ivy Bridge chips will power the wave of Windows 8 ultrabooks that will break later in the year. Those systems are expected to have touch screens and include hybrid designs that straddle the laptop and tablet markets.

And Apple is expected to tap Ivy Bridge for a thinner 15-inch MacBook Pro-class system as well as future MacBook Airs. And Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Sony, Toshiba, Acer, and Asus will update and/or bring out new systems. These will run the gamut of laptop designs, but more systems are expected to be thin. Even many higher performance systems are expected to have a slimmer chassis. Those laptops typically use a separate graphics chip from suppliers such as Nvidia.

Intel Ivy Bridge chip imminent, Quad-Core First

Download Macrium Reflect Latest Version

A complete disaster recovery solution for your home and office. Protect your personal documents, photos, music and emails. Upgrade your hard disk or try new operating systems in the safe knowledge that everything is securely saved in an easily recovered backup file.

Don't compromise your data integrity with second best
Macrium Reflect uses leading data compression techniques to create accurate and reliable images of your hard disk or partitions on your disk.

Simple step by step operation
Image and Restore using intuitive wizards and interfaces. Macrium Reflect integrates fully with Windows Explorer, a partition image can be created with a simple right click.

Automate the process
With Macrium Reflect you can schedule Images to run at any time. Disk space management ensures that you optimize the available space on external drives.

Restore individual files and folders
Create a 'Virtual' drive in Windows Explorer and recover selected files and directories using simple copy and paste operations.

Recovery
In the event of a total loss of the Windows operating system your PC can be started using the Reflect recovery CD.
Download Macrium Reflect Latest Version

Download phpMyAdmin Latest Version

phpMyAdmin is a free software tool written in PHP intended to handle the administration of MySQL over the World Wide Web. phpMyAdmin supports a wide range of operations with MySQL.

phpMyAdmin Features:

Intuitive web interface
Support for most MySQL features:
browse and drop databases, tables, views, fields and indexes
create, copy, drop, rename and alter databases, tables, fields and indexes
maintenance server, databases and tables, with proposals on server configuration
execute, edit and bookmark any SQL-statement, even batch-queries
manage MySQL users and privileges
manage stored procedures and triggers
Import data from CSV and SQL
Download phpMyAdmin Latest Version

How to build your own 135TB RAID6 storage pod for $7,384

Backblaze, one of the last remaining reasonably-priced cloud-based backup solutions, has revealed how it provides storage so cheaply: instead of using commercial hard drive enclosures, Backblaze makes its own. Last year it showed us the first Backblaze Storage Pod — 67TB for a build price of $7,867 — and now it has developed the Storage Pod 2.0, which uses Hitachi’s new 3TB drives to create a 135TB RAID6 storage array for just $7,384.

For a start, bear in mind that building your own 135TB array isn’t exactly easy: you’re going to have to wire together 45 hard drives — and you’ll need a case to put them in (Backblaze uses an $875 custom case (ZIP) from Protocase). You’ll only need one motherboard, an Intel i3 540 CPU, and 8GB of RAM — but you’ll also need three PCIe 4-port SATA II cards, nine port multiplier backplanes, and two (!) 760W power supplies to provide the juice. You’ll obviously need lots of little bits, too, like fans, SATA cables, screws, and so on. For a complete list of the components, scroll down to Appendix A in Backblaze’s blog post. You might want to build the Storage Pod in situ as it will weigh no less than 143lbs (64kg) when complete.
How to build your own 135TB RAID6 storage pod for $7,384

Download IncrediMail Latest

IncrediMail is a free email program that manages all your email messages, communications, contact details, and email transactions. IncrediMail is all about having fun with your email.
IncrediMail lets you:
Choose from 100's of amazing email backgrounds
Add fun emoticons and animations to your emails
Bring your emails to life with animated 3D effects
Download IncrediMail Latest

Download Windows 7 Codecs

All the codecs you need for Windows 7 to play AVIs, DVDs and more!

It does not contain a media player and it does not associate file-types. With the Windows 7 codec package installed you will be able to use any media player, limited only by the players' capabilities, to play all movies and video clips. Streaming video is supported in several formats in all popular web browsers. Users of the Windows 7 media center codecs have the ability to choose what is installed and where to install it using the public redistributable. After installation you can select to remove specific portions without removing the entire package. You can also re-add the removed items at any time.
Things the Shark pack does that other packs cannot do . .
Download Windows 7 Codecs

Download VLC Media Player

VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols without external codec or program.

It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

VLC can play:
MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 / DivX files from a hard disk, a CD-ROM drive, and so on
DVDs, VCDs, and Audio CDs
From satellite cards (DVB-S)
Several types of network streams: UDP/RTP Unicast, UDP/RTP Multicast, HTTP, RTSP, MMS, etc.
From acquisition or encoding cards (on GNU/Linux and Windows only)
Download VLC Media Player

Download Fresh View

Fresh View gives you the ability to organize and view multimedia files (images, audio, video). Watch movies, listen to music, and view graphics in a slide show. Image files in a folder can be displayed using a number of views, including a thumbnail view that lets you quickly see what your images are without having to open them.

You can convert graphics from one type to another, print, and even create an HTML album. This easy-to-use software supports 86 different formats (more and more added regularly).

You can convert graphics from one type to another, print, and even create an HTML album. This easy-to-use software supports 86 different formats (more and more added regularly). Below are the list of some currently supported formats:
Download Fresh View

Download Fresh View

Fresh View gives you the ability to organize and view multimedia files (images, audio, video). Watch movies, listen to music, and view graphics in a slide show. Image files in a folder can be displayed using a number of views, including a thumbnail view that lets you quickly see what your images are without having to open them.

You can convert graphics from one type to another, print, and even create an HTML album. This easy-to-use software supports 86 different formats (more and more added regularly).

You can convert graphics from one type to another, print, and even create an HTML album. This easy-to-use software supports 86 different formats (more and more added regularly). Below are the list of some currently supported formats:
Download Fresh View

Download Java Runtime Environment Latest

Java software allows you to run applications called "applets" that are written in the Java programming language. These applets allow you to have a much richer experience online than simply interacting with static HTML pages.

Java Plug-in technology, included as part of the Java 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (JRE), establishes a connection between popular browsers and the Java platform. Java allows applications to be downloaded over a network and run within a guarded sandbox. Security restrictions are easily imposed on the sandbox.
Download Java Runtime Environment