That's interesting, but I didn't see any references which back up the assertion that grape juice does not contain the compound. To the contrary in most of the references. Here's a paper I hunted down:
FWIW, grape juice should also do the trick. You can drink as much of it as you want without negating the effect, since it's non-alcoholic. Now, some might argue that you're missing out on the other effects of wine. I'll just say that you don't get a hangover from grape juice.
I actually just got defrauded by a buyer using PayPal this past month. PayPal has pretty much just dropped it at my feet, which is a bit disconcerting. I was lucky to have an alternate method of communicating with them, but seeing their customer service when dealing with fraud is truly frightening. If Google does come up with a competing service, I'll be the first in line to use it.
I know a fair number of people who would likely choose GIMP given this choice, creative types being what they are. If you're a Mac user, you might remember the old name of mpegger. The GIMP's a lot better than it used to be, having used it since the static Motif binaries they distributed so long ago. No doubt most people's issues will be resolved over time. Once the developers have itegrated the core with littleCMS or something like it, and brought CMYK support up to the level of at least the current RGB support, you'll probably see a lot more people using it.
When I was in college I was doing admin work for a few companies and organizations. There are typically a few good admin types in the CS programs from what I've seen, but realize there are a good number who aren't ready to go into a business environment yet as well. Also realize that you pay for experience. Experience means someone's already made the mistakes that someone new to the field might make on your network. If you can handle a bit of time while the admin learns the ropes, you can spend less. Keep your needs in mind, and definitely get references.
Columbia is at Ames/NAS, not JPL, but of course it definitely runs Linux. Whether it's a server depends on your perspective, and the author of the article was talking about his small space in JPL. HQ definitely uses Linux servers though, which is probably a more useful metric as to what the decision makers think of it.
If by desktop you're talking what O*I* hands you, sure, you're not going to be able to get anything other than what they offer. (Well, you can have anything you want as long as it's one of their limited selection of pre-configured systems.) Many people use their workstation as their desktop though. To say that no servers are running Linux at JPL is also false, although this may be the case in real time systems. If you send something expensive up in space at this point, it's probably running VxWorks. I know of at least one service (Earth-based of course) that is migrating to Linux as we speak though.
In some environments, if a system is compromised then every aspect of the system's downtime is taken into consideration. The cost of employing someone who cannot work while the system is being reviewed, the portion of the SA's salaries paid while working on said compromised system rather than other tasks, the value of potentially lost data, and several other factors I won't even go into are all added together. This figure is used to determine how much to charge the responsible party if (when, really) they are found. It means a significantly harsher sentence in most cases.
If one were to take a similar tack on the amount of time and bandwidth wasted chasing even just the past several worms, I wouldn't be surprised if you could come up with a much higher figure. If you count the damage done by countless Windows zombies spamming people, sniffing passwords, and flooding networks, the figure actually starts looking downright reasonable.
A short time ago, we had attempted to purchase a set of systems from Sun. We have to do a competitive analysis on all purchases due to various regulations, so we did a comparison between a rackmount node from one unnamed vendor and Sun's newest low end Opteron rack mount systems. We even brought in one of our Sun reps to attempt to get the prices closer. In the end, Sun was offering us a system that was $1500 more expensive per box, used one single core opteron, and was otherwise identical to the systems from the other vendor. Unfortunately, the other vendor was packaging two dual core opterons. We were forced to give the other vendor the hardware contract. This is no way to compete when a customer is expanding an existing cluster.
Remember, Infiniband works on other vendor's hardware as well. If Sun doesn't make themselves relevant, it isn't my job to make them so.
There are two issues you're arguing here, one having little to do with the article. First let's look into the administrative issue.
I agree that there's little reason to give any user root access. Note I didn't say in a secure environment, a cluster may very well not even be on the network. In general, a user should not have root access even in such an environment unless they are the person responsible if the system goes down. Limited privileges may be given through sudo, but any program with the ability to modify system files (editors, file modification commands etc) should be blacklisted entirely from sudo. Short scripts which the user may not modify might be exempt, for instance if the user is developing a kernel module and the module needs to be inserted/removed. In a production (non development!) environment, anything that modifies such low level parts of the system is out the window. Starting or stopping a service such as Tomcat may be negotiated through sudo, but this should again be done through scripts which have been examined by an administrator and is not modifiable by the user.
When it comes to clustering, I disagree wholeheartedly. I've worked with several variants of computational systems, including many large systems, and I have to say that Sun is really not the best choice for brute force computation. They make excellent workstations and servers, but for throwing a lot of CPUs at a problem Linux on x86 hardware and its variants is simply a better platform in my experience. The programming environment needn't be as different as you suspect, and there are a variety of excellent clustering packages such as Scyld and OpenMosix which make clustering quite painless if ease of use is more important than the results. Typically the speed of obtaining results is the most important issue of course, and this is the area where Linux/x86 shines. You simply get more CPU for dollar on commodity hardware these days.
People trade movies on the internet because they want to be able to download it easily. Seriously, look at the ads used to sell ADSL or Cable internet services. "Download music and videos faster" is their typical sales mantra. The problem at this point is that there isn't an easy way to download videos legally. If a quick and easy, yet legal way to download video content that people want becomes available, one that doesn't involve jumping through hoops of DRM fire to get at the content, I assure you a lot of money will be made. If not, people will continue to find easier ways to get what they want. Convenience is king.
I'll give credit where it's due, there are now several good and legal ways to download a lot of music. This is not based on the RIAA's actions however, unless you count their Russian counterpart.
That (the relative difficulty) is part of why the current set of proposed technologies aren't going to replace HTML completely. Once someone comes up with a sane web-friendly document description language without the rendering ambiguity of HTML, that is also as easy to write for a human and efficient to parse, then we'll have a good replacement for HTML. As long as it's unencumbered by patents, of course. I'm sure it will happen, I just don't know when.
I suppose one might have said the same thing about DOS 15 years ago. I even remember an article in a PC magazine back then where a priest condemned the GUI, stating that "Icons belong in the church, not in the computer." Times have changed since then. I'm sure something better and probably even easier than HTML will come along and take over eventually, we just don't know when or what it is yet.
But when forced to work with MS Office files, it's incredibly difficult to use any other tool.
That's probably the number one reason to get rid of office. That, and the fact that it can be difficult to use different versions of Office in the same environment. When older versions of office are phased out, and no longer for sale or supported by Microsoft, it becomes necessary to upgrade everyone at what can be an inconvenient time due to version compatibility problems. Better IMO to work with something that you can add to any system without having to worry about the software being available.
In any case, for any planned upgrade such as this it's often a good idea to solicit a group where in the company that would like to function as a test case for the software. Ask, don't force. There are plenty of people who like to try new things, as well as those who are afraid of change. Better to work with the former first if possible. You may well find out that there really isn't anything to worry about, but at least you'll know.
I think what we really need to be looking at here is why a government would want to use an OpenDocument format. Anyone who has went through a couple of MS Office version transitions could come up with several good reasons, including older documents which require modifications to look correct on other versions; documents which cause MS Office to crash; and documents which are just unreadable even with MS Office's input file repair option. It's important to be able to preserve your data, especially if you have mountains of it. A proprietary, opaque format which can and will change over time without documentation is not as useful for this purpose.
Given that a government has solid reasons for wanting this, and requests it for inclusion, that gives Microsoft a very good reason for supporting the format. If said government is actually mandating an open format, in this case OpenDocument, that goes from a good to excellent reason. It's Microsoft's choice really, governments in general tend to be one of Microsoft's larger customers. If they choose to ignore such requests, they shouldn't be surprised if organizations pursue other options when governments require other formats. That'll take a much larger chunk of business away from Microsoft than simply supporting the new format.
Finally, keep in mind that other office apps almost always support MS Office formats, although usually with glitches. To be fair however, these glitches are not dissimilar to those problems found between different Office versions. The current documents are thus about as readable as they might be with the next version of MS Office. Switching to an alternative isn't really more or less painful than moving to the next version of MS Office. If one gains document transparency in the transition, that's a solid reason to switch.
FWIW, I think you'll find that the government does release a lot of documents in PDF format, especially forms. That's certainly the case with our state's DMV and the USCIS.
Yes, actually it doesn't hurt to ask. Sue first and ask questions later is a rather bad practice, especially for a business which is trying to protect its image. They're only going to drag their own name through the mud now.
I should have anticipated the angled brackets not being escaped, sigh. The command was "rpm -qi |grep packagename", one can typically type "rpm -qi packagename" but the former should work if the latter gives up.
You're dead on with this, but it seems to be a general issue with RPM. I've had this happen on several RPM-based distros, including updates to RHEL 4 through up2date on x86_64 not terribly long ago. This was on an HP xw9300, which is supposedly supported by both HP and Redhat. This is something that the packaging systems should check for IMO and offer a reasonable fix along with the short explanation.
On the other hand, I have installed, configured and administered literally thousands of Linux systems over the last 10 years and can state with confidence that the problem is quite rare. When it happens it's quite annoying though, and like being gored by a bull it only needs to happen once. The best thing to do is just remove the package appending the full version name, and (in Mandriva) urpmi again. Typing "rpm -qa |grep " will give you the whole list of files matching the package name if all else fails.
More likely the company would get manufacturing costs plus an amount, all told well below retail, determined by the government to be fair compensation. Retail costs are ridiculously overblown, that seems to be the entire point behind the Taiwanese government's actions in this case.
I stand corrected, I believe it's ":help uganda" for all versions of vim.;) Rather embarassing to be caught confusing mozilla and vim keywords/protocols.
Re:I just want to say thanks.
on
Vim 6.4 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Start up a copy of vim, type ":about uganda" (without quotes) and press enter to find out. In short, the author of vim did volunteer work for the clinic for a year and has visited there on several occasions since then. He wishes for others to help the clinic as well.
Slashdot Mirror
That's interesting, but I didn't see any references which back up the assertion that grape juice does not contain the compound. To the contrary in most of the references. Here's a paper I hunted down:
a ls/resveratrol/index.html#sources
http://lpi.oregonstate.edu/infocenter/phytochemic
Since you can drink more grape juice than you can wine without losing its beneficial effects, it appears grape juice is an equally valid choice.
FWIW, grape juice should also do the trick. You can drink as much of it as you want without negating the effect, since it's non-alcoholic. Now, some might argue that you're missing out on the other effects of wine. I'll just say that you don't get a hangover from grape juice.
No accounting for tastes, now is there? :)
I actually just got defrauded by a buyer using PayPal this past month. PayPal has pretty much just dropped it at my feet, which is a bit disconcerting. I was lucky to have an alternate method of communicating with them, but seeing their customer service when dealing with fraud is truly frightening. If Google does come up with a competing service, I'll be the first in line to use it.
I know a fair number of people who would likely choose GIMP given this choice, creative types being what they are. If you're a Mac user, you might remember the old name of mpegger. The GIMP's a lot better than it used to be, having used it since the static Motif binaries they distributed so long ago. No doubt most people's issues will be resolved over time. Once the developers have itegrated the core with littleCMS or something like it, and brought CMYK support up to the level of at least the current RGB support, you'll probably see a lot more people using it.
I guess so, I always thought it was "Did Not Finish"...
When I was in college I was doing admin work for a few companies and organizations. There are typically a few good admin types in the CS programs from what I've seen, but realize there are a good number who aren't ready to go into a business environment yet as well. Also realize that you pay for experience. Experience means someone's already made the mistakes that someone new to the field might make on your network. If you can handle a bit of time while the admin learns the ropes, you can spend less. Keep your needs in mind, and definitely get references.
Columbia is at Ames/NAS, not JPL, but of course it definitely runs Linux. Whether it's a server depends on your perspective, and the author of the article was talking about his small space in JPL. HQ definitely uses Linux servers though, which is probably a more useful metric as to what the decision makers think of it.
If by desktop you're talking what O*I* hands you, sure, you're not going to be able to get anything other than what they offer. (Well, you can have anything you want as long as it's one of their limited selection of pre-configured systems.) Many people use their workstation as their desktop though. To say that no servers are running Linux at JPL is also false, although this may be the case in real time systems. If you send something expensive up in space at this point, it's probably running VxWorks. I know of at least one service (Earth-based of course) that is migrating to Linux as we speak though.
In some environments, if a system is compromised then every aspect of the system's downtime is taken into consideration. The cost of employing someone who cannot work while the system is being reviewed, the portion of the SA's salaries paid while working on said compromised system rather than other tasks, the value of potentially lost data, and several other factors I won't even go into are all added together. This figure is used to determine how much to charge the responsible party if (when, really) they are found. It means a significantly harsher sentence in most cases.
If one were to take a similar tack on the amount of time and bandwidth wasted chasing even just the past several worms, I wouldn't be surprised if you could come up with a much higher figure. If you count the damage done by countless Windows zombies spamming people, sniffing passwords, and flooding networks, the figure actually starts looking downright reasonable.
A short time ago, we had attempted to purchase a set of systems from Sun. We have to do a competitive analysis on all purchases due to various regulations, so we did a comparison between a rackmount node from one unnamed vendor and Sun's newest low end Opteron rack mount systems. We even brought in one of our Sun reps to attempt to get the prices closer. In the end, Sun was offering us a system that was $1500 more expensive per box, used one single core opteron, and was otherwise identical to the systems from the other vendor. Unfortunately, the other vendor was packaging two dual core opterons. We were forced to give the other vendor the hardware contract. This is no way to compete when a customer is expanding an existing cluster.
Remember, Infiniband works on other vendor's hardware as well. If Sun doesn't make themselves relevant, it isn't my job to make them so.
There are two issues you're arguing here, one having little to do with the article. First let's look into the administrative issue.
I agree that there's little reason to give any user root access. Note I didn't say in a secure environment, a cluster may very well not even be on the network. In general, a user should not have root access even in such an environment unless they are the person responsible if the system goes down. Limited privileges may be given through sudo, but any program with the ability to modify system files (editors, file modification commands etc) should be blacklisted entirely from sudo. Short scripts which the user may not modify might be exempt, for instance if the user is developing a kernel module and the module needs to be inserted/removed. In a production (non development!) environment, anything that modifies such low level parts of the system is out the window. Starting or stopping a service such as Tomcat may be negotiated through sudo, but this should again be done through scripts which have been examined by an administrator and is not modifiable by the user.
When it comes to clustering, I disagree wholeheartedly. I've worked with several variants of computational systems, including many large systems, and I have to say that Sun is really not the best choice for brute force computation. They make excellent workstations and servers, but for throwing a lot of CPUs at a problem Linux on x86 hardware and its variants is simply a better platform in my experience. The programming environment needn't be as different as you suspect, and there are a variety of excellent clustering packages such as Scyld and OpenMosix which make clustering quite painless if ease of use is more important than the results. Typically the speed of obtaining results is the most important issue of course, and this is the area where Linux/x86 shines. You simply get more CPU for dollar on commodity hardware these days.
People trade movies on the internet because they want to be able to download it easily. Seriously, look at the ads used to sell ADSL or Cable internet services. "Download music and videos faster" is their typical sales mantra. The problem at this point is that there isn't an easy way to download videos legally. If a quick and easy, yet legal way to download video content that people want becomes available, one that doesn't involve jumping through hoops of DRM fire to get at the content, I assure you a lot of money will be made. If not, people will continue to find easier ways to get what they want. Convenience is king.
I'll give credit where it's due, there are now several good and legal ways to download a lot of music. This is not based on the RIAA's actions however, unless you count their Russian counterpart.
Not really hell as such, it's more of a Hotel California-esque purgatory.
That (the relative difficulty) is part of why the current set of proposed technologies aren't going to replace HTML completely. Once someone comes up with a sane web-friendly document description language without the rendering ambiguity of HTML, that is also as easy to write for a human and efficient to parse, then we'll have a good replacement for HTML. As long as it's unencumbered by patents, of course. I'm sure it will happen, I just don't know when.
I suppose one might have said the same thing about DOS 15 years ago. I even remember an article in a PC magazine back then where a priest condemned the GUI, stating that "Icons belong in the church, not in the computer." Times have changed since then. I'm sure something better and probably even easier than HTML will come along and take over eventually, we just don't know when or what it is yet.
But when forced to work with MS Office files, it's incredibly difficult to use any other tool.
That's probably the number one reason to get rid of office. That, and the fact that it can be difficult to use different versions of Office in the same environment. When older versions of office are phased out, and no longer for sale or supported by Microsoft, it becomes necessary to upgrade everyone at what can be an inconvenient time due to version compatibility problems. Better IMO to work with something that you can add to any system without having to worry about the software being available.
In any case, for any planned upgrade such as this it's often a good idea to solicit a group where in the company that would like to function as a test case for the software. Ask, don't force. There are plenty of people who like to try new things, as well as those who are afraid of change. Better to work with the former first if possible. You may well find out that there really isn't anything to worry about, but at least you'll know.
I think what we really need to be looking at here is why a government would want to use an OpenDocument format. Anyone who has went through a couple of MS Office version transitions could come up with several good reasons, including older documents which require modifications to look correct on other versions; documents which cause MS Office to crash; and documents which are just unreadable even with MS Office's input file repair option. It's important to be able to preserve your data, especially if you have mountains of it. A proprietary, opaque format which can and will change over time without documentation is not as useful for this purpose.
Given that a government has solid reasons for wanting this, and requests it for inclusion, that gives Microsoft a very good reason for supporting the format. If said government is actually mandating an open format, in this case OpenDocument, that goes from a good to excellent reason. It's Microsoft's choice really, governments in general tend to be one of Microsoft's larger customers. If they choose to ignore such requests, they shouldn't be surprised if organizations pursue other options when governments require other formats. That'll take a much larger chunk of business away from Microsoft than simply supporting the new format.
Finally, keep in mind that other office apps almost always support MS Office formats, although usually with glitches. To be fair however, these glitches are not dissimilar to those problems found between different Office versions. The current documents are thus about as readable as they might be with the next version of MS Office. Switching to an alternative isn't really more or less painful than moving to the next version of MS Office. If one gains document transparency in the transition, that's a solid reason to switch.
FWIW, I think you'll find that the government does release a lot of documents in PDF format, especially forms. That's certainly the case with our state's DMV and the USCIS.
Yes, actually it doesn't hurt to ask. Sue first and ask questions later is a rather bad practice, especially for a business which is trying to protect its image. They're only going to drag their own name through the mud now.
I should have anticipated the angled brackets not being escaped, sigh. The command was "rpm -qi |grep packagename", one can typically type "rpm -qi packagename" but the former should work if the latter gives up.
You're dead on with this, but it seems to be a general issue with RPM. I've had this happen on several RPM-based distros, including updates to RHEL 4 through up2date on x86_64 not terribly long ago. This was on an HP xw9300, which is supposedly supported by both HP and Redhat. This is something that the packaging systems should check for IMO and offer a reasonable fix along with the short explanation.
On the other hand, I have installed, configured and administered literally thousands of Linux systems over the last 10 years and can state with confidence that the problem is quite rare. When it happens it's quite annoying though, and like being gored by a bull it only needs to happen once. The best thing to do is just remove the package appending the full version name, and (in Mandriva) urpmi again. Typing "rpm -qa |grep " will give you the whole list of files matching the package name if all else fails.
More likely the company would get manufacturing costs plus an amount, all told well below retail, determined by the government to be fair compensation. Retail costs are ridiculously overblown, that seems to be the entire point behind the Taiwanese government's actions in this case.
I stand corrected, I believe it's ":help uganda" for all versions of vim. ;) Rather embarassing to be caught confusing mozilla and vim keywords/protocols.
Start up a copy of vim, type ":about uganda" (without quotes) and press enter to find out. In short, the author of vim did volunteer work for the clinic for a year and has visited there on several occasions since then. He wishes for others to help the clinic as well.
I agree, that sounds almost as ridiculous as claiming ownership on an ex-employee's personal growth.