This has some neat ramifications. If one assumes two things: one that people have something that a computer doesn't namely intuition, but a simple computer program can measure the "goodness" of two possible moves, then one should be able to combine the two. The plan then is that people submit their moves based on their intuition or whatever and then the computer finds the relative goodness of the moves. Spending more time on those moves that people think are "better" and less on those that people think are "worse." This way the computer benifits from the agragate skills of many people, but mantains that same computational power unique to it's breed.
As an occational user of StarOffice 5.0 (whenever I need to interact with the Windows world or write a presentation) I have seen no real problems with it. It is quite fast an useable (on a P100 32 megs -- admittedly it takes about 45 seconds to load, but that's the ONLY slowness I have seen).
Secondly, most of the problems people have relate to "ease-of-use" and "it looks to damn much like windows, so it's from hell." Ok, I have almost never used MS-Office, but I found StarOffice Trivial to use, I reciently wrote a nice looking presentation with all of the "useless" imbeded objects, and my time was spend thinking about the presentation, not the software -- perfect. The result is nice too.
Lastly I don't care if it looks like windows. An office package is a tool and this one works for me.
I am a physics graduate student who occatioanly needs to code (oh.. and I teach a computational physics lab class), but I spend *perhaps* 2% of my time codeing and in the last year I made just under 10K lines of debugged and well commented code. I don't understand how a full time professional coder could possibly produce less than 40 or 50k lines/year.
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This has some neat ramifications. If one assumes two things: one that people have something that a computer doesn't namely intuition, but a simple computer program can measure the "goodness" of two possible moves, then one should be able to combine the two. The plan then is that people submit their moves based on their intuition or whatever and then the computer finds the relative goodness of the moves. Spending more time on those moves that people think are "better" and less on those that people think are "worse." This way the computer benifits from the agragate skills of many people, but mantains that same computational power unique to it's breed.
As an occational user of StarOffice 5.0 (whenever I need to interact with the Windows world or write a presentation) I have seen no real problems with it. It is quite fast an useable (on a P100 32 megs -- admittedly it takes about 45 seconds to load, but that's the ONLY slowness I have seen).
Secondly, most of the problems people have relate to "ease-of-use" and "it looks to damn much like windows, so it's from hell." Ok, I have almost never used MS-Office, but I found StarOffice Trivial to use, I reciently wrote a nice looking presentation with all of the "useless" imbeded objects, and my time was spend thinking about the presentation, not the software -- perfect. The result is nice too.
Lastly I don't care if it looks like windows. An office package is a tool and this one works for me.
I was startled by the few avialble lines of code.
I am a physics graduate student who occatioanly needs to code (oh.. and I teach a computational physics lab class), but I spend *perhaps* 2% of my time codeing and in the last year I made just under 10K lines of debugged and well commented code. I don't understand how a full time professional coder could possibly produce less than 40 or 50k lines/year.