For me it isn't as much about Google being "brave", but rather breaking the trust users had with them. They are changing their content on for a personal whim. That whim may be to make money in China. And some people may defend that decision. But, it doesn't get around that fact that Google != Google depending on where you access it.
> I'm looking into some of the low-end tablet
> PCs for a project and I'm hesitating over
> the CPU included (particularly the very
> bad floating point performance) but I'm
> curious nontheless.
The big drawback in the fpu for the nehemiah cores (like the tablets have) is in the extended math functions. To quote VIA...
Certain little-used and complex floating point
instructions (sin, tan etc.), however, are
implemented in microcode and are represented
by a long stream of instructions coming from the
ROM. These instructions "tie up" the integer
instruction pipeline such that integer
execution cannot proceed until they complete".
From my experiance the performance of the cpus is very good. But, when I use some trig functions in generating hypercomplex based fractals it does choke pretty heavy.
I've used x86, SPARC, and Alpha boxes for math research and SPEC numbers tend to best predict math software performance. As long as that software is well written and compiled correctly.
Basically you should see the low end 64bit CPUs from AMD crushing any of the G5's for any math software you are running. And considering you can get an Athlon 64 (with 1Gig of memory) for under $1400 it is a steal for number crunching.
And you are better off going with a full 64bit solution than 32bit. Which means SUSE linux and using octave ( http://www.octave.org/ ) and/or scilab ( http://www.scilab.org ) rather than Matlab, and one of the free CAS software projects rather than Mathematica. I don't know if any of the free CAS projects...
axiom ( http://www.nongnu.org/axiom/ ) This is in flux right now because axiom is transitioning from commercial (NAG) to free. This software
represents about 30 years of research into computer algebra systems.
maxima ( http://maxima.sf.net ) another CAS. Represents over 30 years of research into computer algebra systems. Went opensource 1998.
yacas ( http://yacas.sf.net/ ) Yet Another Computer Algebra System. Not as mature as Axiom, Maxima, etc, but small and fast.
are really 64 bit clean yet. I have compiled and used octave and scilab on 64bit Linux with the Alpha. And scilab had some 64bit clean problems back then.
But with Mupad, Maple, and Mathematica available under Linux you have good 32bit closed source options to run if you want them. And CPU performance usually isn't the big problem with a CAS. Rather design of the software itself.
I just sent the review to the CorelLinux users list. Might as well post it here.
I just bought 2 copies WP Office 2000 deluxe for work (and home) along with Office standard (no paradox). Just some notes:
First warning . . . It looks like this is a "stop gap" measure to give Corel some time to get a true Linux native application. Why do I say this? These are modified Windows binaries that are being run on Corel's version of WINE. So not only do you get WP Office you get a rather nice version of WINE. (look at the script wordperfect and you should see how it can be made to run other windows binaries) Now WINE does give longer startup times, but once the applications are running they are rather quick. I've run this an a Cyrix 166MHz, K6 333MHz, K6 266MHz, and Celeron 400MHz and I am happy with the performance.
Installation. WP Office Deluxe comes with Corel Linux 1.1 and I installed this fresh on a Cyrix 166 and upgraded from Corel Linux 1.0 on a K6 266MHz and a K6 333MHz (this is a laptop). I didn't have any problems with the fresh install and it was the easiest. To upgrade just boot from the Corel Linux cdrom and choose the upgrade option. The upgrade actually fixed my network problems on the K6 266 and but is also killed my laptop. I was able to fix the laptop because the boot cd comes with a rather complete running version of Linux (vi,etc) so that I could mount my hard drive and get my system running again. The main problem seems to be with not having interactive control of dpkg during the upgrade to handle conflicts. In the end I just tar > gzip'ed my home directory and/etc to save settings and then did a fresh install of Corel 1.0 and then upgraded to 1.1 without installing the new kernel.
Also they fixed the 98% bug. And the partition program is Much Much better. You can now use your entire disk, keep existing partitions, choose to format an existing partition or not, and the overall interface in nicer.
Actually you don't need Corel Linux 1.1 to install WP Office. I've heard of success stories with RedHat 6.1 and Mandrake. To install Office all you need to do is mount -o exec/mnt/cdrom/,run/mnt/cdrom/setup and follow the instructions. I run setup this way because even though the install program is graphical it writes information to the console that you launched it from. So you can see what files are being installed, problems that might occur, and you can make sure that the true type font server (fontastic) is run at the end of the install. Only problem: I had to run the setup twice on my laptop (first time segfaulted), but the other machines took it just fine the first time out.
Running. The first time you run an Office application it checks to see if you have a.wpo2000 directory (which by the way is a WINE system directory). If you don't it pops up a "read this and then click yes" prompt and installs a default.wpo2000. So you have to be patient. Actually you need to be patient when loading any of the applications. After install the average start time was 20 secs to splash screen and another 20 secs to a running application on a Cyrix 166. All of the applications look like their Windows counterparts (probably because they ARE the Windows version). Again I recommend starting the programs the first time from a console by typing wordperfect, quattropro, or presentations (or paradox). After the first run you can just use the links in the start menu.
Problems. If you run into a error box that says something like "The application has encountered a fatal error. If the problem persists, contact Corel Technical Support." Just try and run the application via a console and get better information like:
mand:~$ wordperfect wine:'/home/arrasmith/.wpo2000/wineserver-mand/s ocket' exists,but I cannot connect to it; maybe the server has crashed? If this is the case, you should remove the socket file and try again.
And so all you have to do is
rm/home/arrasmith/.wpo2000/wineserver-mand/socket
and have everything working again. Which makes the graphical error box REALLY REALLY STUPID! Couldn't they add the message explaining the real problem to the box? Of course I could just see if the wine error message can be dumped to the kmessage box by looking at the wordperfect launch script (anyone what to give this a try? my bash programming isn't that good).
WordPerfect. Nice. If you have used any word processor you should feel right at home. Weird things: File Open(Save) maps ~/,/,/mnt/floppy, and/mnt/cdrom to "virtual drives". Which is actually really nice for normal users. No equation editor of the WP 8-9 type, just the one from WP 5.1 - 7. Also pick a good default font because some video cards have problems with displaying "_" or "." (I've only seen this problem on one computer).
I've been able to import several large Word 9 (MS Office 2000) and the formating is mainly intact. Equations are really screwed up though. It looks like the solution to the equation problem is to get the true type font that MS uses for their equations onto the Linux box (anybody know what font that is?). Word 8 and Word 7 conversions retain the formatting more closely to the original.
QuattroPro The number one reason to get this package. A REAL spreadsheet. I haven't found any major show stoppers so far. By the way I have tried StarOffice, Applix, SIAG, Gnumeric, KSpread, and several other spreadsheets for Linux. None of them comes even close to QuattroPro.
Problems: you have to drag to resize and not use the maximize button. Also it seems to have problems with some very large spreadsheets. The windows version does 1,000+ by 1,000+ cell documents (where each cell is the average of the surrounding cells) and the Linux version just sits there. Updating of cells is also much slower than the windows version.
Presentations Just plain cool. The Show on the Go feature can export your presentation as an executable. Your options are to make one that runs on Linux (2.2.x kernel), Windows 9.x, or Windows 9x/NT/Win3.11. The drawing side is really intuitive and suitable for minor graphics work. You can make an excellent presentation in very little time that is as interactive or automated as you like. Just plain cool.
Paradox, Corel Central I haven't worked with these other than to see if they run, which they do. Corel Central doesn't interface to any email program which is really poor in my book. We need better graphical email applications than kmail or Netscape. Corel, can you bring back the one from Corel Central 8 (or was it 7)? If Corel Central just added a nice email/news reader it would be a killer application.
Bean filled penguin My daughter (2.5 years old) loves him.
Personal Opinion. If you want a working Office suite and have a Pentium 166MHz+ look into Corel. I am very happy with it so far, and I've been able to get several other windows applications to run with the included version of WINE. I just hope the upgraded versions will be native because nearly 40 seconds to load (on slow machines) is a very long time.
Slashdot Mirror
For me it isn't as much about Google being "brave", but rather breaking the trust users had with them. They are changing their content on for a personal whim. That whim may be to make money in China. And some people may defend that decision. But, it doesn't get around that fact that Google != Google depending on where you access it.
Right now it is http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen+massac re versus http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen+massacr e. When will http://images.google.com/images?q=saddam%20mass%20 grave change to fit the whims of those that run Google? When will those of us in America be deemed by Google to not need to view certain information? Now that they have broken the unwritten search rules of "don't alter the content to fit your personal agenda" ... can we trust the content they do give us?
> I'm looking into some of the low-end tablet
> PCs for a project and I'm hesitating over
> the CPU included (particularly the very
> bad floating point performance) but I'm
> curious nontheless.
The big drawback in the fpu for the nehemiah cores (like the tablets have) is in the extended math functions. To quote VIA ...
From my experiance the performance of the cpus is very good. But, when I use some trig functions in generating hypercomplex based fractals it does choke pretty heavy.
I've used x86, SPARC, and Alpha boxes for math research and SPEC numbers tend to best predict math software performance. As long as that software is well written and compiled correctly.
SPECfp base2000
2Ghz G5 - 840
Opteron 146 (2Ghz) - 1291
SPECint base2000
2Ghz G5 - 800
Opteron 146 (2Ghz) - 1170
SPECfp rate2000
Dual 2Ghz G5 - 15.7
RackSaver RSN-1164/op (1.8 GHz Opteron) - 22.5
SPECint rate2000
Dual 2Ghz G5 - 17.2
RackSaver RSN-1164/op (1.8 GHz Opteron) - 24.0
Basically you should see the low end 64bit CPUs from AMD crushing any of the G5's for any math software you are running. And considering you can get an Athlon 64 (with 1Gig of memory) for under $1400 it is a steal for number crunching.
And you are better off going with a full 64bit solution than 32bit. Which means SUSE linux and using octave ( http://www.octave.org/ ) and/or scilab ( http://www.scilab.org ) rather than Matlab, and one of the free CAS software projects rather than Mathematica. I don't know if any of the free CAS projects ...
axiom ( http://www.nongnu.org/axiom/ ) This is in flux right now because axiom is transitioning from commercial (NAG) to free. This software represents about 30 years of research into computer algebra systems.
giac ( http://www-fourier.ujf-grenoble.fr/~parisse/englis h.html )
maxima ( http://maxima.sf.net ) another CAS. Represents over 30 years of research into computer algebra systems. Went opensource 1998.
yacas ( http://yacas.sf.net/ ) Yet Another Computer Algebra System. Not as mature as Axiom, Maxima, etc, but small and fast.
are really 64 bit clean yet. I have compiled and used octave and scilab on 64bit Linux with the Alpha. And scilab had some 64bit clean problems back then.
But with Mupad, Maple, and Mathematica available under Linux you have good 32bit closed source options to run if you want them. And CPU performance usually isn't the big problem with a CAS. Rather design of the software itself.
- mark
Crap that should be Cyrix ~ 40 seconds. (note to self: proofread your messages)
Celeron 333 ~ 19 seconds
:)
Cyrix 166 ~ 20 seconds
sounds about right. Maybe I should just buy an Athlon 800 for home. That should take it down to under 10 seconds.
I just sent the review to the CorelLinux users list. Might as well post it here.
/etc to save settings and then did a fresh install of Corel 1.0 and then upgraded to 1.1 without installing the new kernel.
/mnt/cdrom/ ,run /mnt/cdrom/setup and follow the instructions. I run setup this way because even though the install program is graphical it writes information to the console that you launched it from. So you can see what files are being installed, problems that might occur, and you can make sure that the true type font server (fontastic) is run at the end of the install. Only problem: I had to run the setup twice on my laptop (first time segfaulted), but the other machines took it just fine the first time out.
.wpo2000 directory (which by the way is a WINE system directory). If you don't it pops up a "read this and then click yes" prompt and installs a default .wpo2000. So you have to be patient. Actually you need to be patient when loading any of the applications.
s ocket' exists,but I cannot connect to it; maybe the server has crashed? If this is the case, you should remove the socket file and try again.
/home/arrasmith/.wpo2000/wineserver-mand/socket
/, /mnt/floppy, and /mnt/cdrom to "virtual drives". Which is actually really nice for normal users. No equation editor of the WP 8-9 type, just the one from WP 5.1 - 7. Also pick a good default font because some video cards have problems with displaying "_" or "." (I've only seen this problem on one computer).
I just bought 2 copies WP Office 2000 deluxe for work (and home) along with Office standard (no paradox). Just some notes:
First warning . . . It looks like this is a "stop gap" measure to give Corel some time to get a true Linux native application. Why do I say this? These are modified Windows binaries that are being run on Corel's version of WINE. So not only do you get WP Office you get a rather nice version of WINE. (look at the script wordperfect and you should see how it can be made to run other windows binaries) Now WINE does give longer startup times, but once the applications are running they are rather quick. I've run this an a Cyrix 166MHz, K6 333MHz, K6 266MHz, and Celeron 400MHz and I am happy with the performance.
Installation.
WP Office Deluxe comes with Corel Linux 1.1 and I installed this fresh on a Cyrix 166 and upgraded from Corel Linux 1.0 on a K6 266MHz and a K6 333MHz (this is a laptop). I didn't have any problems with the fresh install and it was the easiest. To upgrade just boot from the Corel Linux cdrom and choose the upgrade option. The upgrade actually fixed my network problems on the K6 266 and but is also killed my laptop. I was able to fix the laptop because the boot cd comes with a rather complete running version of Linux (vi,etc) so that I could mount my hard drive and get my system running again. The main problem seems to be with not having interactive control of dpkg during the upgrade to handle conflicts. In the end I just tar > gzip'ed my home directory and
Also they fixed the 98% bug. And the partition program is Much Much better. You can now use your entire disk, keep existing partitions, choose to format an existing partition or not, and the overall interface in nicer.
Actually you don't need Corel Linux 1.1 to install WP Office. I've heard of success stories with RedHat 6.1 and Mandrake. To install Office all you need to do is mount -o exec
Running.
The first time you run an Office application it checks to see if you have a
After install the average start time was 20 secs to splash screen and another 20 secs to a running application on a Cyrix 166. All of the applications look like their Windows counterparts (probably because they ARE the Windows version). Again I recommend starting the programs the first time from a console by typing wordperfect, quattropro, or presentations (or paradox). After the first run you can just use the links in the start menu.
Problems.
If you run into a error box that says something like "The application has encountered a fatal error. If the problem persists, contact Corel Technical Support." Just try and run the application via a console and get better information like:
mand:~$ wordperfect
wine:'/home/arrasmith/.wpo2000/wineserver-mand/
And so all you have to do is
rm
and have everything working again. Which makes the graphical error box REALLY REALLY STUPID! Couldn't they add the message explaining the real problem to the box? Of course I could just see if the wine error message can be dumped to the kmessage box by looking at the wordperfect launch script (anyone what to give this a try? my bash programming isn't that good).
WordPerfect.
Nice. If you have used any word processor you should feel right at home. Weird things: File Open(Save) maps ~/,
I've been able to import several large Word 9 (MS Office 2000) and the formating is mainly intact. Equations are really screwed up though. It looks like the solution to the equation problem is to get the true type font that MS uses for their equations onto the Linux box (anybody know what font that is?). Word 8 and Word 7 conversions retain the formatting more closely to the original.
QuattroPro
The number one reason to get this package. A REAL spreadsheet. I haven't found any major show stoppers so far. By the way I have tried StarOffice, Applix, SIAG, Gnumeric, KSpread, and several other spreadsheets for Linux. None of them comes even close to QuattroPro.
Problems: you have to drag to resize and not use the maximize button. Also it seems to have problems with some very large spreadsheets. The windows version does 1,000+ by 1,000+ cell documents (where each cell is the average of the surrounding cells) and the Linux version just sits there. Updating of cells is also much slower than the windows version.
Presentations
Just plain cool. The Show on the Go feature can export your presentation as an executable. Your options are to make one that runs on Linux (2.2.x kernel), Windows 9.x, or Windows 9x/NT/Win3.11. The drawing side is really intuitive and suitable for minor graphics work. You can make an excellent presentation in very little time that is as interactive or automated as you like. Just plain cool.
Paradox, Corel Central
I haven't worked with these other than to see if they run, which they do. Corel Central doesn't interface to any email program which is really poor in my book. We need better graphical email applications than kmail or Netscape. Corel, can you bring back the one from Corel Central 8 (or was it 7)? If Corel Central just added a nice email/news reader it would be a killer application.
Bean filled penguin
My daughter (2.5 years old) loves him.
Personal Opinion.
If you want a working Office suite and have a Pentium 166MHz+ look into Corel. I am very happy with it so far, and I've been able to get several other windows applications to run with the included version of WINE. I just hope the upgraded versions will be native because nearly 40 seconds to load (on slow machines) is a very long time.
- mark arrasmith