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MIS in my mind is Master in Information Science. And at least here at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville (Go Vols) Information Science is its own school and more like library science with a heavy computer slant. So if what you want to do is deal primarily with the information, and not the system it runs on this is the type of degree you want.

UTK School of Information Science

And finally, China

Wow, that site is really cool. I remember going to it a long time ago, they certainly have kept it going.

Anyway, here's another great pic of 2 more galaxies collding.

And hell, I might as well borrow their html of the description:

Billions of years from now, only one of these two galaxies will remain. Until then, spiral galaxies NGC 2207 and IC 2163 will slowly pull each other apart, creating tides of matter, sheets of shocked gas, lanes of dark dust, bursts of star formation, and streams of cast-away stars. Astronomers predict that NGC 2207, the larger galaxy on the left, will eventually incorporate IC 2163, the smaller galaxy on the right. In the most recent encounter that peaked 40 million years ago, the smaller galaxy is swinging around counter-clockwise, and is now slightly behind the larger galaxy. The space between stars is so vast that when galaxies collide, the stars in them usually do not collide.

(To quote myself)
You can in fact write (and compile) code for JVM in Eiffel, Fortran, LISP, Visual Basic, Ada 95, Python, PERL, C, any language that GCC supports, and a whole slew of other languages (170 or so).

See the comments to cid 135 and this page.

BS! You can in fact write (and compile) code for JVM in Eiffel, Fortran, LISP, Visual Basic, Ada 95, Python, PERL, C, any language that GCC supports, and a whole slew of other languages.

In the future, keep your uninformed ramblings to yourself.

See the comments to cid#135this page.

po_boy wrote: I refuse to believe that in the few thousand years since humans started being "civilized" that we have caused more animal species to become extinct than in the few million years before that. Unless species are becoming extinct at several thousand times the previous rates of extinctions, this is pretty much impossible.

well, If you "refuse to believe" then you are mindlessly dogmatic and debate with you is pointless... but, on the offchance that you were just being melodramatic when you employed that damning phrase, I'll present an argument here. Even if you refuse to believe what you don't like to hear, others who have been misled by your dogma may ne more open minded.

Widley accepted figures indicate that current rates of extinction are 100 times the "natural" rate and climbing to something between 1,000 and 10,000 times the natural rate of extinction. According to an article in the Washington Post:

"The speed at which species are being lost is much faster than any we've seen in the past -- including those [extinctions] related to meteor collisions," said Daniel Simberloff, a University of Tennessee ecologist and prominent expert in biological diversity who participated in the museum's survey. [Note: the last mass extinction caused by a meteor collision was that of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago.]

Most of his peers apparently agree. Nearly seven out of 10 of the biologists polled said they believed a "mass extinction" was underway, and an equal number predicted that up to one-fifth of all living species could disappear within 30 years. Nearly all attributed the losses to human activity, especially the destruction of plant and animal habitats.

Other sources of depressing news you won't want to believe:

According to scientists at the American Museum of Natural History:"This mass extinction is the fastest in Earth's 4.5-billion-year history and, unlike prior extinctions, is mainly the result of human activity and not of natural phenomena." The same scientists note that "In strong contrast to the fears expressed by scientists, the general public is relatively unaware of the loss of species and the threats that it poses." I guess they've been talking to po_boy...

http://www.greenpeace.org/majordomo/index-press-re leases/1997/msg00184.html

http://beacon-www. asa .utk.edu/issues/v78/n2/asteroids.2n.html

http://www.mapcruzin.com/ scr uztri/docs/news0922991.htm

http://www.well.com/user/davidu/ fie ldguide.html

http://www.pupress.princeton.e du/ titles/6276.html

http://www.well.com/user/davidu/ ext inction.html

According to this article the original cost of a Cray Y-MP C90 was $30.5 million.

Some specs from utk.edu :

• 4.1 ns Clock Cycle
• 15.6 Gflops/s maximal
• 16 GB main memory
• 12 GB/s single proc. memory bandwith
• 2-16 processors

Apparently, today's fastest supercomputers are at about 12.3 teraflops! Still, I bet the power bill on the C90 still packs a punch! (But at least you won't need a heater in the winter!)

---
In a hundred-mile march,

If you liked this Moody (heh) article, check this one out.

Apparently Fred Moody has pissed off more than just the Linux crowd.

This quote is particularly interesting:

Since when did America's scientists lose their senses of humor? I have long experience in readers misinterpreting my prose, motives and morals, but I'm consistently surprised at being taken far more seriously than I take myself. Thus, "Shame on you for fearmongering! You have needlessly frightened many thousands of people with your writing," has me succumbing to grandiose fantasies about the size of my audience.

What planet is this guy FROM? He's writing on the web site of one of the "big three" major US TV networks! This guy needs to get his head examined.

rLowe

Fred Moody was the same guy who wrote a column last year saying that the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider project should be stopped because it might create a black hole and destroy the earth.

Here is the relevant link to the above-referenced piece:

• Atlas Shrugs

Yet he refused to retract any of his statements, and remained convinced that the earth was in great danger.

More interesting of course is his response to reader mail, available here:

• Apocalypse Two

From the latter article, the most interesting line may be the last:

"And here's hoping my editors take this guy's advice and beam my columns into interstellar space. It's my only hope for immortality."

The defensive posture of many of the respondents to Jon's article is quite instructive. Indeed, his point "...to be ignorant of the past is to be defenseless against the future..." is bolstered by the feverish reactions of a very priviledged sector of the world's population (I myself am among them).

One respondent asserted how hard we geeks have worked to gain our technical expertise. "Tough Noogies" he says to those who lack an understanding such as his, because they are obviously lazy or stupid if they don't understand email encryption programs.

Most of my tech friends are white, male, middle-class 20-somethings, who benefitted from access to a CS department in some university, parents who paid for their first Commodore, and life in an advanced capitalist economy which values their tech skills. All too often they are unaware of the blood and sweat from which they directly benefit. Arrogantly, they talk of how hard they worked to get where they are.

I don't agree with Jon's praise of individualism, as it ignores the weight carried by those who toiled in some sweatshop to assemble everything from the boards in your PC to the shirt on your back to the coffee your drinking. There is an egregious arrogance in the tech community about the historical role of colonial subjugation, military brutality, and fierce labor exploitation in bringing us to our current state of technical comfort.

What is needed in the opensource community is not a focus on more individualism, but rather an emphasis on how our feelings about freedom of speech and information are directly related to realities of the global economy. What Jon described as a handful of protestors in Seattle was estimated by some to be almost 50,000 mostly peaceful demostrators who were taking to the streets in protest of what the corporations are doing to the planet.

Those of you concerned about freedom and democracy have a lot in common with the people protesting in Seattle, DC and now Philadelphia.

With the support of volunteers ftp site administrators, Pinstripe is available from several mirrors. The following have complete copies of Pinstripe, please use a mirror close to you:

North Carolina, USA:
ftp://metalab. unc.edu/pub/Linux/distributions/redhat/beta/pinstr ipe/
http://metala b.unc.edu/pub/Linux/distributions/redhat/beta/pins tripe/

California, USA:
ftp://ftp.sourc eforge.net/pub/mirrors/redhat/redhat/beta/pinstrip e/
http://ftp.sou rceforge.net/pub/mirrors/redhat/redhat/beta/pinstr ipe/

California, USA:
ftp://ftp.kernel.org /pub/mirrors/redhat/redhat/beta/pinstripe/
http://www.kernel.o rg/pub/mirrors/redhat/redhat/beta/pinstripe/

Connecticut, USA:
ftp://ftp.uselinux.org/pub/redhat /beta/pinstripe/

Indiana, USA:
ftp://csociety-ftp.ecn .purdue.edu/pub/redhat/beta/pinstripe/
http://csociety-ftp.e cn.purdue.edu/pub/redhat/beta/pinstripe/

Michigan, USA: ftp://mrhankey.bizserve.com/pub/linux/redhat/ftp.r edhat.com/redhat/beta/pinstripe/

New York, USA: ftp://ftp.ee.cornell.edu/p ub/linux/redhat/beta/pinstripe

Pennsylvania, USA: ftp ://carroll.cac.psu.edu/pub/linux/distributions/red hat/redhat/beta/pinstripe/

Pennsylvania, USA: ftp://cronus.res. cmu.edu/pub/linux/ftp.redhat.com/beta/pinstripe/

Tennessee, USA: ftp://sunsite.utk.edu /pub/linux/redhat/redhat/beta/pinstripe/
http://sunsite.u tk.edu/ftp/pub/linux/redhat/redhat/beta/pinstripe/

Australia: ftp://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pu b/redhat/beta/pinstripe/
http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/ pub/redhat/beta/pinstripe/

Germany: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/mirrors /redhat.com/redhat/beta/pinstripe/

Germany:
ftp://ftp.uni-bayreuth.d e/pub/linux/redhat/beta/pinstripe/
http://ftp.uni-bayreuth .de/pub/linux/redhat/beta/pinstripe/

Norway: (ISO images only) ftp ://carroll.cac.psu.edu/pub/linux/distributions/red hat/redhat/beta/pinstripe/

Peru: ftp://sajino.terra.com.p e/pub/linux/redhat/beta/pinstripe/

Japan: ftp://ftp.kddl abs.co.jp/Linux/packages/RedHat/redhat/beta/pinstr ipe/

With the support of volunteers ftp site administrators, Pinstripe is available from several mirrors. The following have complete copies of Pinstripe, please use a mirror close to you:

North Carolina, USA:
ftp://metalab. unc.edu/pub/Linux/distributions/redhat/beta/pinstr ipe/
http://metala b.unc.edu/pub/Linux/distributions/redhat/beta/pins tripe/

California, USA:
ftp://ftp.sourc eforge.net/pub/mirrors/redhat/redhat/beta/pinstrip e/
http://ftp.sou rceforge.net/pub/mirrors/redhat/redhat/beta/pinstr ipe/

California, USA:
ftp://ftp.kernel.org /pub/mirrors/redhat/redhat/beta/pinstripe/
http://www.kernel.o rg/pub/mirrors/redhat/redhat/beta/pinstripe/

Connecticut, USA:
ftp://ftp.uselinux.org/pub/redhat /beta/pinstripe/

Indiana, USA:
ftp://csociety-ftp.ecn .purdue.edu/pub/redhat/beta/pinstripe/
http://csociety-ftp.e cn.purdue.edu/pub/redhat/beta/pinstripe/

Michigan, USA: ftp://mrhankey.bizserve.com/pub/linux/redhat/ftp.r edhat.com/redhat/beta/pinstripe/

New York, USA: ftp://ftp.ee.cornell.edu/p ub/linux/redhat/beta/pinstripe

Pennsylvania, USA: ftp ://carroll.cac.psu.edu/pub/linux/distributions/red hat/redhat/beta/pinstripe/

Pennsylvania, USA: ftp://cronus.res. cmu.edu/pub/linux/ftp.redhat.com/beta/pinstripe/

Tennessee, USA: ftp://sunsite.utk.edu /pub/linux/redhat/redhat/beta/pinstripe/
http://sunsite.u tk.edu/ftp/pub/linux/redhat/redhat/beta/pinstripe/

Australia: ftp://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pu b/redhat/beta/pinstripe/
http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/ pub/redhat/beta/pinstripe/

Germany: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/mirrors /redhat.com/redhat/beta/pinstripe/

Germany:
ftp://ftp.uni-bayreuth.d e/pub/linux/redhat/beta/pinstripe/
http://ftp.uni-bayreuth .de/pub/linux/redhat/beta/pinstripe/

Norway: (ISO images only) ftp ://carroll.cac.psu.edu/pub/linux/distributions/red hat/redhat/beta/pinstripe/

Peru: ftp://sajino.terra.com.p e/pub/linux/redhat/beta/pinstripe/

Japan: ftp://ftp.kddl abs.co.jp/Linux/packages/RedHat/redhat/beta/pinstr ipe/

"Real FORTRAN programmers can program FORTRAN in any language." --Allen Brown

I really don't care for their choices at all. A lot of them are more like general approaches than algorthms, and I'm not at all sure they are the most influential. I think they are supposed to be "the cleverest of the common fancy methods"

Simple algorithms for common problems are much more widely used, and have far more impact and influence, but try telling *them* that!

I hope these links help. (Warning: many are technical) If anyone has personal favorites that are less dry than many of these, please post!.

10. 1987: Fast Multipole Method. A breakthrough in dealing with the complexity of n-body calculations, applied in problems ranging from celestial mechanics to protein folding. [Overview] [A math/visual approach]

9. 1977: Integer Relation Detection. A fast method for spotting simple equations satisfied by collections of seemingly unrelated numbers. [Nice article with links]

8. 1965: Fast Fourier Transform. Perhaps the most ubiquitous algorithm in use today, it breaks down waveforms (like sound) into periodic components. Everyone knows this one (or should) [Part II of my personal favorite FFT and wavelet tutorial]

7. 1962: Quicksort Algorithms for Sorting. For the efficient handling of large databases. [Definition][Basic Method][Mathworld][More technical explanation][A lecture with animations and simulations]

6. 1959: QR Algorithm for Computing Eigenvalues. Another crucial matrix operation made swift and practical. [Math] [Algorithm

5. 1957: The Fortran Optimizing Compiler. Turns high-level code into efficient computer-readable code. (pretty much self-explanatory) [History and lots of info]

4. 1951: The Decompositional Approach to Matrix Computations. A suite of techniques for numerical linear algebra. [matrix decomposition theorem] [Strategies]

3. 1950: Krylov Subspace Iteration Method. A technique for rapidly solving the linear equations that abound in scientific computation. [History] [various Krylov subspace iterative methods]

2. 1947: Simplex Method for Linear Programming. An elegant solution to a common problem in planning and decision-making. [English} [Explanation with Java simulator] [An interactive teaching tool

1. 1946: The Metropolis Algorithm for Monte Carlo. Through the use of random processes, this algorithm offers an efficient way to stumble toward answers to problems that are too complicated to solve exactly. [English] [Code and Math] [Math explained]

When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)

Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.

This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.

There is also another site that is worth a visit. "Since there are plans to take this company public, those of you who missed the chance to invest in cold fusion will be given another chance to become a millionaire". I missed both Linux IPOs, but this is one where I will surely take part...

• ftp://mirrors.xmission.com /mozilla/mozilla/releases/m12/
  
• ftp://sunsite.utk.e du/pub/netscape-source/mozilla/releases/m12/
  
• ftp:// sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk/Mirrors/ftp.mozilla.org/pub/m ozilla/releases/m12/
  
• ftp://sunsite.ua lberta.ca/pub/Mirror/mozilla/mozilla/releases/m12/
  

The article is a little vague. Did this craft come down on water or dry land?

The "Shenzhou" spacecraft landed in the Inner Mongolia region of China, on land.

They mention parachutes and retro-rockets and resemblance to Apollo.

Actually, Shenzhou far more closely resembles the Russian Soyuz spacecraft than any American vehicle; close enough that many have wondered how much Russian assistance was provided to the Chinese.

Incidentally, Mark Wade's excellent Encyclopedia Astronautica has a great deal of additional information and images of Shenzhou; perhaps the most comprehensive online resource available.

- Jeff

http://solar.rtd.utk.edu/~mwa de/articles/chidoors.htm

Cheers,
-j.

but enabled other programmers to write their own Fat
Fourier Transformation algorithms for special chips.


I believe you meant Fast, of course, but this little typo is really cute :o)

And who knows, maybe the good 'ol frenchman was actually fat and didn't mind it a bit!

To stay on topic, here is a link to clues about Fourier Transforms.

Look at http://csep10.phys.utk. edu/astr162/lect/light/spectrum.html There is a chart showing the divisions of types of radiation (can anyone suggest a better one?). If you examine the user's manual for the Nokia 6000 series phones (big PDF file), you see that this cell phone uses 1.8x10^3-2.0x10^3MHz.

If you look at the above mentioned chart, you will see that these frequencies fall very low (high?) on the radio spectrum. You will also note that at these frequencies, the total energy is also very low. Also, keep this in mind, the natural frequency of water is in the Microwave spectrum, thus this is bad for you. Above the visible spectrum, the energies get pretty high: this is bad for you too.

In order to prove problems with cell phones, you have to convince people that listening to your radio (not even listening but just being in an area with a radio station), TV, cordless phones, and you name it, is not dangerous for you.

If anyone more knowledgable than can expound on this please do.

~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"

There is an article about Polyus at one of the coolest web sites there is: Encyclopedia Astronautica.

There is an article about Polyus at one of the coolest web sites there is: Encyclopedia Astronautica.

This site has the rate at 18%.

This one has it at 33%.

Another says 35% of women are sexually abused as children.

This one (currently down, check Google cache) gives the magic 25%, listing Mary Koss, et al., A Criminalogical Study, 1990 as the reference.

HealthCentral says 50+% of women have been physically assaulted and 1 in 5 raped, citing the HHS/DoJ survey from the first link.

So... not just a concoction of my imagination, not just more bullshit to prop up my thesis... sadly, it's true.

This stuff has been around for years. With the exception of speed however this particular implementation looks fairly nice. It doesn't have many artifacts on steep surfaces (thanks to the linear interpolation probably), although the distance resolution dropping artifacts are quite noticable.. Mac users may want to check out Matt's Fract for a more flexible, much faster and open source (tho not public domain) implementation of this algorithm.

You left out China, which actually does have missiles with sufficient range to hit the Lower 48.

Indeed. In fact China is about to launch it's first manned mission in a few months, please browse Mark Wade's excellent Encyclopedia Astronautica for more information. AFAIK, most other nuclear powers ('sides Russia) don't have land-based ballistic missiles of sufficient range, and generally don't need to (as their arsenals are mostly aimed at their immediate neighbors).

Well, India has launched some satellites on it's own, so I guess they can nuke whoever and whereever they want - even with heavy warheads.

UT? University of Tennessee? ;-> LOL

Check out "Phatoms of Space" (Scroll down a bit) in the Encyclopedia Astronautica

ftp://sunsite.u tk.edu/pub/pub2/StarDivision/unxlnxi/so51_lnx_01.t ar worked for me.

STAR OFFICE 5.1 Download Sites:
FTP SITES:
Sun SITE UTK at University of Tennessee - Knoxville
TU Clausthal - Germany
Sun SITE Central Europe at RWTH-Aachen - Germany
Sun SITE Finland at the Tampere University of Technology
Sun SITE Switzerland - cnlab & SWITCH - Rapperswil & Zurich
Star Division - Germany
Star Division - Germany
AARNet Mirror Project - Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

HTTP SITES:
Sun SITE USA at University of North Carolina - UNC Chapel Hill
Sun SITE UTK at University of Tennessee - Knoxville
Sun SITE Central Europe at RWTH-Aachen - Germany
Sun SITE Finland at the Tampere University of Technology
Sun SITE Nordic at Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan - Stockholm
Sun SITE Belgium
Sun SITE Northern Europe at Imperial College - London
Sun SITE Switzerland - cnlab & SWITCH - Rapperswil & Zurich

STAR OFFICE 5.1 Download Sites:
FTP SITES:
Sun SITE UTK at University of Tennessee - Knoxville
TU Clausthal - Germany
Sun SITE Central Europe at RWTH-Aachen - Germany
Sun SITE Finland at the Tampere University of Technology
Sun SITE Switzerland - cnlab & SWITCH - Rapperswil & Zurich
Star Division - Germany
Star Division - Germany
AARNet Mirror Project - Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

HTTP SITES:
Sun SITE USA at University of North Carolina - UNC Chapel Hill
Sun SITE UTK at University of Tennessee - Knoxville
Sun SITE Central Europe at RWTH-Aachen - Germany
Sun SITE Finland at the Tampere University of Technology
Sun SITE Nordic at Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan - Stockholm
Sun SITE Belgium
Sun SITE Northern Europe at Imperial College - London
Sun SITE Switzerland - cnlab & SWITCH - Rapperswil & Zurich

Just installed the english version of 5.1 from sunsite.utk.edu/pub/ StarDivision/unxlnxi/. My mashine is running rawhide from about a week before 6.0 came out - should be pretty similar.
SO works with libc-2.1.1 ok with about 5 minutes of testing. It still slightly munged a test M$ Word 97 doc I had laying around. Abiword did a better job of importing the same doc.

A proxy isn't neccessary. Because of the was X handles font names, you can have aliases. Like you can specify "fixed" or "variable" as a font name, you can alias, say Arial to Helvetica and Verdana to Lucida. This is what I did. You can get this fonts.alias file and append it to your /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/fonts.alias file. Just restart X and you have "new" fonts Arial and Verdana mapped to Helvetica and Lucida