Actually, the majority of antibiotics given to livestock are not administered to prevent infection. They are given to healthy animals in order to promote their growth. There is a good overview of the problem here.
No they did not fix it. Grrr. I just removed my dummy second account, and my IMAP mailboxes go away. I put it back, and the folders magically reappear. How hard can it possibly be for them to fix this simple but annoying little interface bug??
I tried BeOS around this time too - release 5 I think. I really liked it, and I even bought GoBe Productive to replace Office. Unfortunately, I could never get the damn sound card to work. It wasn't entirely Be's fault though - my crappy Gateway motherboard didn't have an option to disable plug-and-play, and that was apparently screwing things up. (One thing I did find out - Be users are extremely nice to newbies) I bought a second sound card, but that didn't work either, so I evfentually gave up. My experience with Be did open my eyes to what a terrible operating system Windows is though. Seeing the same computer run twice as fast in Be was pretty dramatic. It's probably part of the reason I have a mac now. I love my ibook and OS X is way better than windows, but sometimes when the aqua interface is a little sluggish, I wonder what things would be like if apple had bought Be...
Making gun cotton (or nitrocellulose) is fun. We did in in organic chem lab when I was in college. IIRC, we mixed equal parts concentrated sulfuric acid + nitric acid, then stired in some cotton. Then we rinsed the cotton and let it dry. Our TAs discreetly suggested that we make some extra stuff, then put it in an empty pringles can (its foil-lined) and drop a match down it. Poof - instant flame thrower!
We have the same deal at the University of Cincinnati. Techically, the apps are free - the 5 bucks covers the cost of distributing the media, so I can legally copy my friend's office x disc if I am too lazy to walk to the bookstore and get it. It's microsoft though, so I feel a little dirty participating in this deal. Maybe I'll try openoffice and then be rid of all my microsoft software.
We also have a similar site license agreement with Adobe, but somebody (either Adobe or the university) decided to be a jackass and extended it to everybody EXCEPT students. So the people who can least afford it because they are busy paying the tuition that partly pays for the license agreement have to pay full price. Nice.
As I user (not administrator) I guess I can't sneer at Netware, but I can grumble a lot. It seems like a great system if everybody uses windows. I'm at a university where the infrastucture is all windows boxes connecting to netware servers. We scientists can buy whatever we want, however, and since we are intelligent and creative people, that means a lot of us have macs;-) For a university that doesn't officially support macs, our department sure has a lot of them (maybe 20%) and our IT guy (who doesn't know a heck of a lot about macs) makes an effort to support us anyway.
Now, for some reason, Novell farms out the mac client developement to a company called Prosoft Enginerring. The OS 9 IPX client was alright, though it lacks some of the features of the windows client. But the new OS X IP client is AWFUL. It behaves like an early beta release, but they call it a 1.0.2 release. I mean, it really is terrible. Kernel panics, the need for frequent rebbots, etc. I've emailed the tech support people at prosoft, and it seems they are really trying to get it to work properly, but they are a long way off. Which leaves the growing number us OS X users in our department with crap. I read about this native file access option and came running to our IT guy and begged him to install it, but he doesn't want to for reasons that are beyond me. He said stuff about security (my boyfriend says appletalk over IP is secure) and losing the ability to push things through the clients (he never pushes anything to the mac users anyway).
So unless you're a windows user, it really sucks to have a netware server. What is the client situation for linux users? Is there a client? Is it this bad?
Mac Outlook is TERRIBLE! It doesn't do html mail correctly, the rules are crippled compared to the windows version, etc etc. It seems like microsoft just cobbled it together to stop mac people from complaining about the lack of an outlook client. I am a recent switcher from the pc world, and outlook is pretty much the only application I prefer to use in windows. Entourage is a good program - I don't get why the same people who wrote that can't write a decent outlook client. Probably for nefarious anti-competitive reasons:-P I'd like to start using Mail/iCal, but Mail won't see the subfolders in my inbox. I don't know whether that is apple's fault or a quirk of the exchange server.
That said, I am quite happy with my decision to switch. The only major problems I had is with third party software that I'm stuck with because of my university's infrastructure - namley exchange mail and novell. The novell client for OS X is pretty awful. They're working on it, but it's really in beta shape, even though they call is a 1.0 release. If our windows-centric IT people would just put native file access on there, then it wouldn't matter. And that damn cisco vpn client for os x - I can' even get that stupid thing to install. But that's because the install script was written by the same unix-ignorant boneheads who do everything they can to avoid providing tech support to non-windows users. (really - IT guys who don't know anything about unix - what's up with that?) ok my rant is over now. I just wish our IT people would acknowlege that not everyone wants to use windows 2000.
Most newly minted PhD's aren't looking for a real job yet - they're looking for a postdoctoral position, and you can't be a postdoc from home. (If you know something I don't, please pass it on!) So if she's on a research track, he's going to have to follow her around for several years before they settle down.
My boyfriend and I are sort of in the same situation. I'm an MD/PhD candidate, and he's currently looking for work. When we planned for him to move out here, the market was still ok, and he was optimistic about finding something. He has said that he wouldn't mind following me around because he likes to switch jobs periodically. In this economy though, it has been rough. He's a mac guy, and it seems like what few jobs there are in Cincinnati deal exclusively with Windows. I feel guilty for bringing him here, but he's maintained a much better attitude that I could have under the circumstances.
I'm guessing the 3000 series. The client download is called vpnclient-macosx-3.5.rel-k9.tar.gz. I can't get the damn thing to even install. I run the install script and get a zillion "no such directory" errors. So despite having all this advanced technology at my disposal, I use ftp to get my files. And because I'm new to the mac, I get extremely frustrated because the resource fork thing gets lost, and my ftp'ed files never open in the right application.
Well, our IT guy refuses to install Native File Access, for reasons unknown to me. I think I remember him saying something about security. I think he just hates macs. I hate the stupid novell server more.
This is nothing new. I have been using this client for almost a month now, with limited success. It is VERY buggy, but it beats having to rely on ftp or booting into OS 9.
To the people making fun of novell users -I don't use novell by choice. I hate our university's network. I wish our departmental IT guy would dump that stupid novell server, but he's always raving about it for some reason. And I still can't figure out how to configure the #@%^! OS X Cisco VPN client so I can login from home. Thanks to the total lack of support for anything besides windoze, I probably never will. Hmph.
...there was no time for gaming. (Although, I'm a stereotypical girl and am not really into gaming.) Anyway, I tried bringing books on my college fencing trips, but there was never really time to read them. The van rides to the meets were too full of good discussion, juicy gossip and just plain silliness. And while there cane be a lot of down time during the fencing meets, that time is best spent rooting for your teammates or watching fencers who are better than you. And after a day full of fencing, we had enough energy for a dinner out and then we were tired. As far as I can remember, guys on the men's team didn't bring much in the way of gaming eqipment either, aside from the occasional game boy. (And this was the Johns Hopkins team, so they're as geeky as they get:-)
IMHO, going to all the trouble of coming up with a portable gaming setup will ultimately be a waste of time. He's not going to have that much time to use it, and if he does, then he's missing the point of going away to fencing meets.
The fastest and easiest OS install I've ever done was BeOS. (the intel version, in my case) From the time I opened the shrinkwrap, it was about 10-15 minutes until I was browsing the web. If I remember correctly, this included the time it took to partition my hard drive. During the actual OS install, I had to click ok maybe 3 times. I miss that OS:-( Especially the haiku error messages...
Second easiest install - Mac OS X. (yep, I'm one of those switcher people)
In Jaguar there's even a new UI for setting the sensitivity of the scroll wheel. Apple totally supports three button and complex mice, but won't ship them for good reasons.
Why must the media try and distill every genetics study into a "we've found the X gene" story? It's this kind of sensationalistic reporting that perpetuates the skewed image the average American has about science. Behavior is complicated, and you aren't going to be able to explain something like criminal behavior with a single "crime gene." Behavioral disorders likely involve multiple genes. There is evidence that this is the case in schizophrenia - familiy members of schizophrenics often have a spectrum of symptoms to varying degrees without being full-blown schizophrenics themselves. This is one reason the new gene chip array technologies are so popular in the neurosciences. You can screen changes in the expression of thousands of genes at the same time. It is the combined effect of sets of genes - not one single gene - that cause complex changes in behavior. I wish the media would get a clue. This was on the BBC for chrissakes.
Sorry if I sound ornery. I guess I got in a bad mood when on odyssey5 tonight, the science geek went on about how serotonin reuptake inhibitors worked "just like ketamine." You're a science fiction show. Hire a science consultant dammit.
I know you're not supposed to "grouse about rejected submissions" but I can't help it this time. I submitted this half an hour after it was posted on maccentral at 7:30 AM eastern. What to you have to do, pay that Taco guy to get your story posted!? No thanks:-P
As a graduate student in the biomedical sciences, I wholeheartedly agree with what the article says about professional journals and copyright. It's a racket. You have to publish your work to advance, and the most prestigious scientific journals require you to sign the copyright over to them and pay a fee for each page and figure. Then they have the audacity to charge a subscription fee, as well as take in advertising revenue and sell your name to junk mail lists (yes, there is science spam and junk mail too). You're actually supposed to get permission to use one of your own figures in a talk or other type of publication.
On a brighter note, I was quite pleased last week when I received the first issue of a new journal called The Journal of Biology. This publication aims to be a top rank journal on par with Science and Nature, but follows the "open access" approach. Specifically, there will never be a subscription fee, all content is available online for free, and most importantly, authors retain copyright of their papers. I think this is a huge step in the right direction. Harold Varmus, the former director of the NIH, was a big supporter of open access, and I think the time is ripe for this kind of change. This journal's publisher BioMed Central seems to be leading the way in this direction. Good for them! I hope to be sending lots of papers their way!
-margaret
ps if I posted part of this before, I'm sorry. My hand accidentally bumped the enter key. New keyboard.
Because imaging can't tell you things like: Is the beta-catenin really being overexpressed ? By how much? In which neurons? Has the expression of other proteins been altered too?
To answer these kinds of questions, you need to stain thin slices of the brains or grind up the brains.
I think it would be a great idea to do one of those slashdot interviews with Bowie! He's a visionary artist with a lifetime of experience in the industry and he actually understands the technology that the entertainment industry fears so much. I'd really like to hear more of his take on things. Is there a form or something for suggesting interviewees?
I'm new to both macs and unix, and at the risk of opening myself up to some flamage here, I have a supid newbie question about this root business. Now that we've established that logging on as root is bad, how do I know if I'm logging on as root? When I got my ibook, the os x setup created an account for me, and I've always logged on with it by default. I've done some minor tweaking (like changing the system icons) that requires the terminal and commands like sudo. So am I logging on as root to be able to do this? If so, what do I need to do - create another account for myself?
Slashdot Mirror
I had my credit card out to buy one, but saw the MPEG1 quality, and put the card away.
;-)
My Time Warner digital cable is so blocky already I doubt I would notice a difference in quality
Yeah, to paraphrase George Carlin: We have an immune system but it needs stuff to practice on!
Actually, the majority of antibiotics given to livestock are not administered to prevent infection. They are given to healthy animals in order to promote their growth. There is a good overview of the problem here.
No they did not fix it. Grrr. I just removed my dummy second account, and my IMAP mailboxes go away. I put it back, and the folders magically reappear. How hard can it possibly be for them to fix this simple but annoying little interface bug??
The web browser that came with BeOS had haiku error messages built-in. The only one I remember was a 404 error that went something like
The page that you seek
No longer exists
But many others remain.
Anybody remember any others?
I tried BeOS around this time too - release 5 I think. I really liked it, and I even bought GoBe Productive to replace Office. Unfortunately, I could never get the damn sound card to work. It wasn't entirely Be's fault though - my crappy Gateway motherboard didn't have an option to disable plug-and-play, and that was apparently screwing things up. (One thing I did find out - Be users are extremely nice to newbies) I bought a second sound card, but that didn't work either, so I evfentually gave up. My experience with Be did open my eyes to what a terrible operating system Windows is though. Seeing the same computer run twice as fast in Be was pretty dramatic. It's probably part of the reason I have a mac now. I love my ibook and OS X is way better than windows, but sometimes when the aqua interface is a little sluggish, I wonder what things would be like if apple had bought Be...
:-)
Oh yeah, and I miss the haiku error messages
Making gun cotton (or nitrocellulose) is fun. We did in in organic chem lab when I was in college. IIRC, we mixed equal parts concentrated sulfuric acid + nitric acid, then stired in some cotton. Then we rinsed the cotton and let it dry. Our TAs discreetly suggested that we make some extra stuff, then put it in an empty pringles can (its foil-lined) and drop a match down it. Poof - instant flame thrower!
We have the same deal at the University of Cincinnati. Techically, the apps are free - the 5 bucks covers the cost of distributing the media, so I can legally copy my friend's office x disc if I am too lazy to walk to the bookstore and get it. It's microsoft though, so I feel a little dirty participating in this deal. Maybe I'll try openoffice and then be rid of all my microsoft software.
We also have a similar site license agreement with Adobe, but somebody (either Adobe or the university) decided to be a jackass and extended it to everybody EXCEPT students. So the people who can least afford it because they are busy paying the tuition that partly pays for the license agreement have to pay full price. Nice.
As I user (not administrator) I guess I can't sneer at Netware, but I can grumble a lot. It seems like a great system if everybody uses windows. I'm at a university where the infrastucture is all windows boxes connecting to netware servers. We scientists can buy whatever we want, however, and since we are intelligent and creative people, that means a lot of us have macs ;-) For a university that doesn't officially support macs, our department sure has a lot of them (maybe 20%) and our IT guy (who doesn't know a heck of a lot about macs) makes an effort to support us anyway.
Now, for some reason, Novell farms out the mac client developement to a company called Prosoft Enginerring. The OS 9 IPX client was alright, though it lacks some of the features of the windows client. But the new OS X IP client is AWFUL. It behaves like an early beta release, but they call it a 1.0.2 release. I mean, it really is terrible. Kernel panics, the need for frequent rebbots, etc. I've emailed the tech support people at prosoft, and it seems they are really trying to get it to work properly, but they are a long way off. Which leaves the growing number us OS X users in our department with crap. I read about this native file access option and came running to our IT guy and begged him to install it, but he doesn't want to for reasons that are beyond me. He said stuff about security (my boyfriend says appletalk over IP is secure) and losing the ability to push things through the clients (he never pushes anything to the mac users anyway).
So unless you're a windows user, it really sucks to have a netware server. What is the client situation for linux users? Is there a client? Is it this bad?
Mac Outlook is TERRIBLE! It doesn't do html mail correctly, the rules are crippled compared to the windows version, etc etc. It seems like microsoft just cobbled it together to stop mac people from complaining about the lack of an outlook client. I am a recent switcher from the pc world, and outlook is pretty much the only application I prefer to use in windows. Entourage is a good program - I don't get why the same people who wrote that can't write a decent outlook client. Probably for nefarious anti-competitive reasons :-P I'd like to start using Mail/iCal, but Mail won't see the subfolders in my inbox. I don't know whether that is apple's fault or a quirk of the exchange server.
That said, I am quite happy with my decision to switch. The only major problems I had is with third party software that I'm stuck with because of my university's infrastructure - namley exchange mail and novell. The novell client for OS X is pretty awful. They're working on it, but it's really in beta shape, even though they call is a 1.0 release. If our windows-centric IT people would just put native file access on there, then it wouldn't matter. And that damn cisco vpn client for os x - I can' even get that stupid thing to install. But that's because the install script was written by the same unix-ignorant boneheads who do everything they can to avoid providing tech support to non-windows users. (really - IT guys who don't know anything about unix - what's up with that?) ok my rant is over now. I just wish our IT people would acknowlege that not everyone wants to use windows 2000.
Most newly minted PhD's aren't looking for a real job yet - they're looking for a postdoctoral position, and you can't be a postdoc from home. (If you know something I don't, please pass it on!) So if she's on a research track, he's going to have to follow her around for several years before they settle down.
My boyfriend and I are sort of in the same situation. I'm an MD/PhD candidate, and he's currently looking for work. When we planned for him to move out here, the market was still ok, and he was optimistic about finding something. He has said that he wouldn't mind following me around because he likes to switch jobs periodically. In this economy though, it has been rough. He's a mac guy, and it seems like what few jobs there are in Cincinnati deal exclusively with Windows. I feel guilty for bringing him here, but he's maintained a much better attitude that I could have under the circumstances.
Whew! I thought I was having a massive attack of deja vu...
I'm guessing the 3000 series. The client download is called vpnclient-macosx-3.5.rel-k9.tar.gz. I can't get the damn thing to even install. I run the install script and get a zillion "no such directory" errors. So despite having all this advanced technology at my disposal, I use ftp to get my files. And because I'm new to the mac, I get extremely frustrated because the resource fork thing gets lost, and my ftp'ed files never open in the right application.
Well, our IT guy refuses to install Native File Access, for reasons unknown to me. I think I remember him saying something about security. I think he just hates macs. I hate the stupid novell server more.
-margaret
This is nothing new. I have been using this client for almost a month now, with limited success. It is VERY buggy, but it beats having to rely on ftp or booting into OS 9.
To the people making fun of novell users -I don't use novell by choice. I hate our university's network. I wish our departmental IT guy would dump that stupid novell server, but he's always raving about it for some reason. And I still can't figure out how to configure the #@%^! OS X Cisco VPN client so I can login from home. Thanks to the total lack of support for anything besides windoze, I probably never will. Hmph.
-margaret
...there was no time for gaming. (Although, I'm a stereotypical girl and am not really into gaming.) Anyway, I tried bringing books on my college fencing trips, but there was never really time to read them. The van rides to the meets were too full of good discussion, juicy gossip and just plain silliness. And while there cane be a lot of down time during the fencing meets, that time is best spent rooting for your teammates or watching fencers who are better than you. And after a day full of fencing, we had enough energy for a dinner out and then we were tired. As far as I can remember, guys on the men's team didn't bring much in the way of gaming eqipment either, aside from the occasional game boy. (And this was the Johns Hopkins team, so they're as geeky as they get :-)
IMHO, going to all the trouble of coming up with a portable gaming setup will ultimately be a waste of time. He's not going to have that much time to use it, and if he does, then he's missing the point of going away to fencing meets.
-margaret
The fastest and easiest OS install I've ever done was BeOS. (the intel version, in my case) From the time I opened the shrinkwrap, it was about 10-15 minutes until I was browsing the web. If I remember correctly, this included the time it took to partition my hard drive. During the actual OS install, I had to click ok maybe 3 times. I miss that OS :-( Especially the haiku error messages...
Second easiest install - Mac OS X. (yep, I'm one of those switcher people)
-margaret
In Jaguar there's even a new UI for setting the sensitivity of the scroll wheel. Apple totally supports three button and complex mice, but won't ship them for good reasons.
OK, I'll bite. What are the reasons?
-margaret
Why must the media try and distill every genetics study into a "we've found the X gene" story? It's this kind of sensationalistic reporting that perpetuates the skewed image the average American has about science. Behavior is complicated, and you aren't going to be able to explain something like criminal behavior with a single "crime gene." Behavioral disorders likely involve multiple genes. There is evidence that this is the case in schizophrenia - familiy members of schizophrenics often have a spectrum of symptoms to varying degrees without being full-blown schizophrenics themselves. This is one reason the new gene chip array technologies are so popular in the neurosciences. You can screen changes in the expression of thousands of genes at the same time. It is the combined effect of sets of genes - not one single gene - that cause complex changes in behavior. I wish the media would get a clue. This was on the BBC for chrissakes.
Sorry if I sound ornery. I guess I got in a bad mood when on odyssey5 tonight, the science geek went on about how serotonin reuptake inhibitors worked "just like ketamine." You're a science fiction show. Hire a science consultant dammit.
-margaret
I know you're not supposed to "grouse about rejected submissions" but I can't help it this time. I submitted this half an hour after it was posted on maccentral at 7:30 AM eastern. What to you have to do, pay that Taco guy to get your story posted!? No thanks :-P
As a graduate student in the biomedical sciences, I wholeheartedly agree with what the article says about professional journals and copyright. It's a racket. You have to publish your work to advance, and the most prestigious scientific journals require you to sign the copyright over to them and pay a fee for each page and figure. Then they have the audacity to charge a subscription fee, as well as take in advertising revenue and sell your name to junk mail lists (yes, there is science spam and junk mail too). You're actually supposed to get permission to use one of your own figures in a talk or other type of publication.
On a brighter note, I was quite pleased last week when I received the first issue of a new journal called The Journal of Biology. This publication aims to be a top rank journal on par with Science and Nature, but follows the "open access" approach. Specifically, there will never be a subscription fee, all content is available online for free, and most importantly, authors retain copyright of their papers. I think this is a huge step in the right direction. Harold Varmus, the former director of the NIH, was a big supporter of open access, and I think the time is ripe for this kind of change. This journal's publisher BioMed Central seems to be leading the way in this direction. Good for them! I hope to be sending lots of papers their way!
-margaret
ps if I posted part of this before, I'm sorry. My hand accidentally bumped the enter key. New keyboard.
Because imaging can't tell you things like:
Is the beta-catenin really being overexpressed ?
By how much?
In which neurons?
Has the expression of other proteins been altered too?
To answer these kinds of questions, you need to stain thin slices of the brains or grind up the brains.
-margaret
I think it would be a great idea to do one of those slashdot interviews with Bowie! He's a visionary artist with a lifetime of experience in the industry and he actually understands the technology that the entertainment industry fears so much. I'd really like to hear more of his take on things. Is there a form or something for suggesting interviewees?
-m.
PS I got Area2 tickets! Woo hoo!
I'm new to both macs and unix, and at the risk of opening myself up to some flamage here, I have a supid newbie question about this root business. Now that we've established that logging on as root is bad, how do I know if I'm logging on as root? When I got my ibook, the os x setup created an account for me, and I've always logged on with it by default. I've done some minor tweaking (like changing the system icons) that requires the terminal and commands like sudo. So am I logging on as root to be able to do this? If so, what do I need to do - create another account for myself?
The register has another review that's a little more in-depth...