I use OpenOffice all the time, and it still has that annoying "80% done" feeling. The "features" have been checked off, but they don't work very well. There's a clear attempt to emulate Microsoft in some areas, but the imitations are second-rate. A few examples:
You're always fighting the automatic form fill in in the spreadsheet. If you type something, and some cell has something similar, it gets "completed", and you have to back up to fix it.
So you can't just type in numbers. Yes, there's probably some l33t way to turn this off. But Microsoft does it better.
Every time you save a file in ".xls" format, you get a message that "some attributes cannot be saved", independent of the content.
The word processor lacks an "envelope" maker.
In imitation of Microsoft, OpenOffice has a little shiny thing that appears to provide "help". But it's even dumber than Microsoft's.
There's PDF export, which is good. But the UI for it is inconsistent. It's an icon in the word processor, rather than being an option in the "save as" dialog. In Draw, though, there's an "export as PDF" option in the File menu.
But it's getting better. I remember when StarOffice came with its own stupid "desktop" system. And Draw is better that Microsoft's, because Microsoft wants you to buy Visio at extra cost.
This is the future of education. The classic residential campus approach is just too luxurious for the United States in its declining period.
A liberal education is today a luxury good. And if you have to pay for it with twenty years of loans, it probably wasn't worth it.
Now a joint IT/MBA four year program - that would have a payoff.
Quit worrying. After half a century of trying, we can't build a space station that works, we can't do more than visit the moon and look around, and we can't send people beyond Lunar orbit. It's been over thirty years since the last time a human left Earth's atmosphere. The Shuttle only goes to low earth orbit, where there's still enough atmospheric drag to bring space stations down in a few years.
We can't even send people to geosynch orbit.
Here it is, the the nuclear powered switchlamp. It's the picture of the guy sitting behind a big red lamp, with a periodic table in the background. At the time, there were still large numbers of oil-burning switch lamps; somebody had to go light them every night, refill them, trim the wick, and so forth..
With nuclear power, they could get ten years between lamp replacements!
From "The Big Train", a documentary about the New York Central Railroad marred by whining from the CEO about highway subsidies.
The Jerusalem Post has a registration system, and for a while many stories there seemed to require registration. But they seem to have backed off on enforcement. Today, not being registered seems to have little, if any, effect.
Other news sites seem to be doing much the same thing. There's registration available, but you don't really need to use it. Even much of the New York Times' content is visible without registration.
Apparently untargeted hits are better than no hits.
Google News puts "subscription" after those links that require a login, and usually offers non-subscription alternatives. So there's some pressure from that direction to avoid registration.
One effect may be to encourage more readership of Government-funded news sites. That's fine, as long as they're not all from the same government. Google News frequently has links to Xinhua, the BBC, the Voice of America, and Al-Jazeera. None require registration.
It's worth reading all four of those. If all four have roughly the same take on some event, the info is probably correct. If they don't, news manipulation may be going on.
(It's also amusing to read the Jerusalem Post, which is Israel's equivalent of Fox News.)
This particular technology won't lead directly to 3D chips, because the chips have to overlap face to face for this to work. 3D stacking requires that you get signals out the bottom of the chip, which requires something like a through-hole to get through the substrate.
There are various schemes for stacking chips, but they all suffer from heat, cost, and yield problems.
Stacking chips doesn't reduce cost, so it's not something the semiconductor industry pursues aggressively. Sure, you could probably make smaller RAM packages. What fraction of your computer's case volume is taken up by RAM now? 1%? That's why it's not a high priority.
Sun is not "coming out with new chips without connectors". Sun has demonstrated a new kind of interconnect in a lab. They might use it in a DoD funded supercomputer project. Maybe.
You're not going to "stack chips like Scrabble tiles". The unpackaged chips have to be aligned within a few microns and held in position. That's going to be done in an IC packaging facility. The result will be a multi-chip module, a single package containing several chips.
Multi-chip modules have been around for a long time. The Pentium Pro, for example, was a multi-chip module.
There's a multi-chip module Linux computer in a single package from ETRAX. Multi-chip modules are expensive and hard to manufacture, and they're generally used only when you need to combine chips that couldn't be manufactured on the same substrate, like a fast CPU and flash memory. They usually cost more than the chips packaged individually. That's why this isn't a mainstream technology.
This new approach might revive the multi-chip module market.
Might. This has to become a cheap process before it will be used outside the supercomputer world.
A whole generation of automated assembly machinery has to be developed to assemble and align chips in multi-chip modules before this is more than a demo technology. But this looks more promising than the way multi-chip modules are currently made.
If it becomes cheaper to put two chips in one package than to put two chips in two packages, this is a significant development. Otherwise, not.
The new rules seem reasonable enough. The video requirement makes sense, because it will avoid a debacle like last time. Last time only seven of twenty vehicles made it out of the starting area.
That's embarassing. Very bad TV. This time we should see most of the field disappear into the distance.
We're recruiting. Programmers, this time; we have most of the hardware working. Silicon Valley only; we're in Redwood City. Send us 1000 lines of C++ code that you're proud of.
We'll be having an open house in late August. Watch the Overbot web site for details.
The question is whether this self-aligns all the projectors. If it does, it's a step forward. If it doesn't, it's Yet Another Mosaic Display With Alignment Headaches.
Self-alignment is quite feasible today, because you can get multi-megapixel cameras. Or you could aim a cheap webcam at each join point. Somehow you've got to get high-resolution images of the join points. Then alignment is a straightforward process, if you get to project test patterns.
For a production product, it would make sense to put a cheap camera in each projector, looking at the screen. Doesn't even have to be color. Some CRT-based projectors have this now, for auto-convergence. Then you could just aim a few projectors at the screen, get them roughly aligned, and let the software do the setup. This could even work for LAN parties.
Under the new program, users reporting critical security bugs - as judged by the Mozilla Foundation staff - will collect a $500 cash prize.
Unless applications are evaluated by some pro-consumer third party (something like Consumer's Union), it's not much of an offer. The proposed "bounty" gives the staff too much wiggle room.
The concept of a $100 million executive jet is a bit much. For comparison, a Grumman Gulfstream IV, considered the top-of-the-line executive jet, costs about $18 million.
And note that this boom-diffuser approach increases drag, which means more fuel consumption.
As a rule of thumb, supersonic flight uses 3x as much fuel per unit distance as subsonic flight already. This is worse.
And it still produces an 0.5psi overpressure, which is above what the FAA allows now.
It can probably be made to work, but as a commercial product, it seems marginal.
Agreed. The browser has no business running nonstandard external file formats. Whomever put in this backdoor should be found from the CVS comments and should lose the ability to put code into Mozilla. They're a security risk.
The nuclear-powered car. The Ford Nucleon concept car made it to the concept stage.
The nuclear-powered locomotive. The Baldwin Locomotive Company did some design sketches, but never got very far.
The nuclear-powered railroad switch lamp. The New York Central actually built some prototypes.
The nuclear-powered airplane.
This got quite far along. A working nuclear reactor was actually flown in an B-36 aircraft, although it wasn't powering the aircraft. Huge nuclear aircraft engines were designed and prototyped by Pratt and Whitney. Although that project was cancelled, the fan for the Boeing 747 engine was borrowed from the nuclear aircraft project. Nothing else was big enough.
The nuclear rocket. Early Apollo plans called for a nuclear upper stage. The NERVA project produced a working nuclear rocket engine. But it was deemed too dangerous to fly.
There have been widget libraries built on top of OpenGL for years. See GLOW, for example. It's straightforward to do, and works reasonably well. Works on any OS that will run OpenGL.
There are people who are somewhat annoyed with Gates, but the Newt has serious enemies.
Gates's house is starting to look like the Obsolete House of the Future, anyway. He wanted big monitors everywhere. But this was before flat screens. So there are access corridors behind the walls for the equipment. This makes for a bulky house.
Could be worse, though. There's Larry Ellison's house in Woodside, which is the size of a mall, has way too much quarried rock, and is too close to the San Andreas Fault. It's something of a joke locally.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it has one. It's a PITA, like many other aspects of OO, but it's in there.
Found the envelope maker. (It's under Insert->Envelope). Thank you.
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You're always fighting the automatic form fill in in the spreadsheet. If you type something, and some cell has something similar, it gets "completed", and you have to back up to fix it.
So you can't just type in numbers. Yes, there's probably some l33t way to turn this off. But Microsoft does it better.
-
Every time you save a file in ".xls" format, you get a message that "some attributes cannot be saved", independent of the content.
-
The word processor lacks an "envelope" maker.
-
In imitation of Microsoft, OpenOffice has a little shiny thing that appears to provide "help". But it's even dumber than Microsoft's.
-
There's PDF export, which is good. But the UI for it is inconsistent. It's an icon in the word processor, rather than being an option in the "save as" dialog. In Draw, though, there's an "export as PDF" option in the File menu.
But it's getting better. I remember when StarOffice came with its own stupid "desktop" system. And Draw is better that Microsoft's, because Microsoft wants you to buy Visio at extra cost.Now a joint IT/MBA four year program - that would have a payoff.
Quit worrying. After half a century of trying, we can't build a space station that works, we can't do more than visit the moon and look around, and we can't send people beyond Lunar orbit. It's been over thirty years since the last time a human left Earth's atmosphere. The Shuttle only goes to low earth orbit, where there's still enough atmospheric drag to bring space stations down in a few years. We can't even send people to geosynch orbit.
From "The Big Train", a documentary about the New York Central Railroad marred by whining from the CEO about highway subsidies.
I suspect that's the number of people with Amazon affiliate accounts, linking to Amazon for a kickback.
The Jerusalem Post has a registration system, and for a while many stories there seemed to require registration. But they seem to have backed off on enforcement. Today, not being registered seems to have little, if any, effect.
Other news sites seem to be doing much the same thing. There's registration available, but you don't really need to use it. Even much of the New York Times' content is visible without registration. Apparently untargeted hits are better than no hits.
One effect may be to encourage more readership of Government-funded news sites. That's fine, as long as they're not all from the same government. Google News frequently has links to Xinhua, the BBC, the Voice of America, and Al-Jazeera. None require registration.
It's worth reading all four of those. If all four have roughly the same take on some event, the info is probably correct. If they don't, news manipulation may be going on.
(It's also amusing to read the Jerusalem Post, which is Israel's equivalent of Fox News.)
There are various schemes for stacking chips, but they all suffer from heat, cost, and yield problems. Stacking chips doesn't reduce cost, so it's not something the semiconductor industry pursues aggressively. Sure, you could probably make smaller RAM packages. What fraction of your computer's case volume is taken up by RAM now? 1%? That's why it's not a high priority.
Sun is not "coming out with new chips without connectors". Sun has demonstrated a new kind of interconnect in a lab. They might use it in a DoD funded supercomputer project. Maybe.
You're not going to "stack chips like Scrabble tiles". The unpackaged chips have to be aligned within a few microns and held in position. That's going to be done in an IC packaging facility. The result will be a multi-chip module, a single package containing several chips.
Multi-chip modules have been around for a long time. The Pentium Pro, for example, was a multi-chip module. There's a multi-chip module Linux computer in a single package from ETRAX. Multi-chip modules are expensive and hard to manufacture, and they're generally used only when you need to combine chips that couldn't be manufactured on the same substrate, like a fast CPU and flash memory. They usually cost more than the chips packaged individually. That's why this isn't a mainstream technology.
This new approach might revive the multi-chip module market. Might. This has to become a cheap process before it will be used outside the supercomputer world. A whole generation of automated assembly machinery has to be developed to assemble and align chips in multi-chip modules before this is more than a demo technology. But this looks more promising than the way multi-chip modules are currently made. If it becomes cheaper to put two chips in one package than to put two chips in two packages, this is a significant development. Otherwise, not.
John Nagle
Team Overbot
We're recruiting. Programmers, this time; we have most of the hardware working. Silicon Valley only; we're in Redwood City. Send us 1000 lines of C++ code that you're proud of. We'll be having an open house in late August. Watch the Overbot web site for details.
Please put your video on the web. Thank you.
Self-alignment is quite feasible today, because you can get multi-megapixel cameras. Or you could aim a cheap webcam at each join point. Somehow you've got to get high-resolution images of the join points. Then alignment is a straightforward process, if you get to project test patterns.
For a production product, it would make sense to put a cheap camera in each projector, looking at the screen. Doesn't even have to be color. Some CRT-based projectors have this now, for auto-convergence. Then you could just aim a few projectors at the screen, get them roughly aligned, and let the software do the setup. This could even work for LAN parties.
Unless applications are evaluated by some pro-consumer third party (something like Consumer's Union), it's not much of an offer. The proposed "bounty" gives the staff too much wiggle room.
And note that this boom-diffuser approach increases drag, which means more fuel consumption. As a rule of thumb, supersonic flight uses 3x as much fuel per unit distance as subsonic flight already. This is worse. And it still produces an 0.5psi overpressure, which is above what the FAA allows now.
It can probably be made to work, but as a commercial product, it seems marginal.
Remember, this comes out of your pension fund.
I was going to write something like Metacrap, but now I don't have to.
Yawn.
Agreed. The browser has no business running nonstandard external file formats. Whomever put in this backdoor should be found from the CVS comments and should lose the ability to put code into Mozilla. They're a security risk.
There have been widget libraries built on top of OpenGL for years. See GLOW, for example. It's straightforward to do, and works reasonably well. Works on any OS that will run OpenGL.
View Design for Dreaming on line, from the Internet Archive.
Gates's house is starting to look like the Obsolete House of the Future, anyway. He wanted big monitors everywhere. But this was before flat screens. So there are access corridors behind the walls for the equipment. This makes for a bulky house.
Could be worse, though. There's Larry Ellison's house in Woodside, which is the size of a mall, has way too much quarried rock, and is too close to the San Andreas Fault. It's something of a joke locally.
So direct synthesis of a prion, and demonstrating that it was disease-causing, was a useful research project. Now we know.
We need this, just to erase the memory.
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