There is no substitute for PowerPoint, unfortunately.

The other Office components have varying degrees of compatibility, so I also need to have them around for odd cases. But, PowerPoint just has no equivalent.
 

I have been wanting to move to Linux for a few years, but I have to use PowerPoint daily, and other Office apps occasionally. This means that dual boot (as in rebooting) isn't really viable. I can't be taking that kind of a detour several times a day. I see frequent mentions of VMs. Is there a VM setup that allows me to fire up Windows/Powerpoint quickly? Ideally with a shared filesystem so that I can easily import/export files from the Windows world to the my regular Linux directories. It would be awesome if there was a setup that allowed me to just keep a Windows virtual desktop hanging around while I live in Linux. Jump over there to edit some content and then return to a Linux desktop or shell. Specific implementation details are very welcomed, John

Brookfield Renewable Partners is buying Westinghouse from Brookfield Business Partners. Coincidently enough for what Brookfield Business Partners paid to buy them from Toshiba back in 2016, plus a ton of debt.

This looks like private equity shell games. One Brookfield is going to collect over $3B in quick profit from selling a very troubled company, and the Brookfield/Westinghouse side is going to be loaded up with debt to pay them.

Have we seen this story before? It sure seems familiar. Anyone recall how it ends? Something along the lines of Westinghouse being bled dry to pay off the debt, until they go belly up and we hear how unforeseeable market forces were to blame.

The only twist here is that these parasites have become so bold they don't even try to disguise the shenanigans with some creative renaming. Guess who the overseeing deal management company is? Brookfield Asset Management. Can't make this stuff up.

In the old days they would have enough respect for propriety to use some Bahama based shell corp with a name like Future Energy.

They spastically switch without direction between different threaded programming "standards". Often endorsing several at once, depending on which of their web pages you happen to land upon.

Right now you can find some of the company telling you that Cilk is the answer here, other groups saying OpenMP is certainly the way to go, and even some Threaded Building Blocks advice. But, SYCL is certainly the flavor of the month.

And, they bundle this up in the nebulous OneAPI just so you can't figure out which compiler is compatible. Even the government labs which have been strong-armed into using this nonsense on the latest Intel supercomputers have hedged their bets with home-brew alternatives like Kokkos.

Personally, your best bet here is to use OpenMP for portable GPU programming. At least you won't be at their mercy when they silently abandon SYCL, like they did with OpenCL, and have effectively done for most of the above.

Regardless of whether you think glyphosate is indispensable (Europe has just banned it, and already greatly limits it use), you might be concerned that over the past decade its use went from a pre-planting herbicide that was supposed to decompose over the season, to a much larger harvest-time application to help desiccate the crops.

The end result is much, much greater usage and exposure. To the point that this was the deciding factor for many of my fellow life science researchers to commit to organic products, where they had been pretty selective before.

The highest power in the UK is the Queen. She can dissolve parliament at any time. It would be controversial if she were to do it capriciously, but it is the law.

This is why there was so much uproar when it was thought that Boris was dishonest in briefing her about Brexit. She may have made another choice.

You make some cogent arguments below. What would you suggest as good reading for someone that understands QM? Either a textbook or some good papers.

You make some cogent arguments below. What would you suggest as good reading for someone that understands QM? Either a textbook or papers.

This quotation is nonsense. We are not talking about an insecticide, where one might hope that it effects only on the surface. This is an herbicide targeting the harvested plant, and it works by permeating the plant to terminate its metabolism. As your cited article says, it "shuts the plant machinery down". It is consequently found throughout the plant tissues. Use a little common sense and skepticism when reading what is essentially Monsanto authored product info.

Also, your greatest exposure as an average American (this practice is banned in Europe) is via corn, then soy, and then wheat.

But really the bottom line is that our exposure has been greatly increasing. It is trivial to Google that data, but since you ask, I'll point you at a meta-study as a starting point: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fp...

Originally Glyphosate was used solely as a weed-killer, and many major industrial crops today have been developed to be Glyphosate tolerant, allowing large doses of the herbicide. However, the idea was that the application was done early in the season and that most of the chemical had decomposed by the time it was harvested for consumption.

However, about a decade ago some genius noticed that if it was applied in a massive dose shortly before harvest it would act as a desiccant, allowing the crops to dry out much more quickly. Farmers refer to this as "pre-harvest treatment". The mechanism is quite simple: the dose is so large that it quickly kills even these Glyphosate resistant plants.

The end result is that not only has the dispensed quantity gone way up, but its late application means that is does not have any time to decompose, and the residual amount left in food products has sky rocketed by orders of magnitude.

Note that trace amounts in certified organic products have also gone up. The popular hypotheses is that this is due to overspray or runoff. These amounts are also typically a fraction of a percent of non-organic.

For better and worse, to me it isn't history. I was a PVM programmer and heavily involved in the transition to MPI. So this story simply doesn't make sense. As anyone from that era can readily attest.

First, not true. The initial version of MPI was designed by a very knowledgeable committee (effectively led by Jack) and building closely upon PVM, the previous "standard".

Second, you repeat the canard that because MPI requires skill and attention, that there must be some simpler alternative. Turns out large scale parallel computing is hard.

All these years (and many well-funded government programs) later, MPI is still the only method used at large scale. I do not exaggerate, well in excess of 99% of compute cycles on the big supercomputers are used for MPI codes.

X and Chapel and many PGAS and APGAS languages and compilers have failed to gain traction because they simply don't work outside of toy academic problems.

Feel free to suggest a practical alternative.

Sadly, very much not the same firm. All of those people have moved on and been replaced by MBAs.

Well, although I wish it were otherwise, there are only two nations that play at the top level, the US and China. Both of which should shortly announce exascale machines - but no, we aren't there yet. I try not to come across as arrogant, but I also don't want to see completely incorrect information get propagated. Only one of us above was making assertions they weren't qualified to make.

I _am_ at your local (actually national) computing lab, and I am where people go to get parallel programming help.

You are oversimplifying what are complex problems, but if you want to name one of those codes you imply achieve this, I would be delighted to follow up. I may well have already contributed if it is really a petascale code - there aren't many.