[TriLUG] Can open source solutions be viable companies?

[John F Davis]

What I'm trying to convey was that she used a machine to collect/manipulate
samples.  From her description,
she had a large rack of test tubes (100x100 grid maybe) and the robot would
move from tube to tube taking
samples in some pattern.  She was automating the sample pattern using  TCL
For what its worth, many test
and mesaurement equipment vendors use TCL whenever they have scripting
capabilities.

What I was also trying to say is maybe she did/didn't write the code which
processed the sample results.  If she did,
then I would conjecture that it would be easier to developmet on a Unix box
than a WinTel box.

Lastly, I know from my wife's experience (she is a clinical trials
researcher for Quintiles) that a lot of drug companies
work with SAS.  The last I heard,  SAS is unix based.  Maybe they will be
Linux based in the future.
However, my wife uses a WindowsNT box to run the front end program which
collects the data.
I am pretty sure this program feeds a unix computer someplace where the SAS
code runs.  I think they did the
same thing when she was at Duke CRI.  I can't remember what she used at
Glaxo.

JD

Kim Green <kndrkim at employees.org>@trilug.org on 06/28/2002 12:04:32 PM

Please respond to trilug at trilug.org

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Subject:    RE: [TriLUG] Can open source solutions be viable companies?



I know somebody who also used to work there, although not PhD (she's down
at Emory now).  They were very limited in the specialized software
available, meaning no they did no programming, and had to deal with the
software available.  She dearly wanted to upgrade some other software, but
the specialized stuff was designed in a very limited way and would have
gone bonkers if anything in the hardware or OS was changed.  Niche markets
at their finest... :<   Perhaps this PhD was trying to find other ways
around such limitations...

Kim...

On Fri, 28 Jun 2002, John F Davis wrote:

> Ok that brings to mind my one and only contact with the human genome
> project.  I met this lady in a TCL class in San Jose who was working on
the
> human genome project.  She had
> a piece of equipment which had a robotic arm that picked up samples
> arranged on a grid and did things to them.  What she did, I didn't
> understand.  But, I understood the bit about controlling the machine.
The
> machine had a TCL interpeter embedded in its control board so that you
> could automate it.  The lady was had a Phd in Genetics and not
programming
> but she talked about running simulations as
> well.  I don't know if she did the programming for the simulation or used
> someone else's program.  Maybe the program was written in C and she just
> entered the numbers.
>
> She could have used Windows or Linux to create her TCL files for
> downloading to the machine.  I would venture to say she would have a
easier
> time doing the development with TCL.  ie. TCL is cross platform, but the
> windows version has some differences which she may not want to work
around.
> The linux box would have a wealth of better tools which are present from
> the very beginning.

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