These two are the only programs in KOffice I tried. Older versions just sucked,I don't know about the newest release. Both had a tendency to crash without any reason, both had problems printing. Kspread had serious importing problems, while kword didn't even reliably open files it has just created.
But that shouldn't deter you from using linux, openoffice 638c is very good, so is gnumeric. They should suit your needs. Considering how rest of kde evolved, I'm pretty sure that most koffice problems with stability will be solved soon, too.
I interpreted your previous message as implying russians just tried different things to go into space without planning for them. After re-reading your message, I see it was my mistake to do so.
Well, I get this idea of Russian space mentality from several (Russian) friends that followed Russia's space program during the 60's.
I wish I had one of those. I have to rely on books instead.
Maybe you're just used to using some method of inertialess propulsion to get around, in which case we'd all be really interested to hear about it.
Check woodward engine, you might find interesting. See http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/bpp/ (sorry I don't know how to make those clickable, look for research proposal about mach's principle) for credibility, james woodward's homepage http://chaos.fullerton.edu/Woodward.html for more info.
For all too lazy to floow links guys out there, woodward claims to have detected transient mass effects, which might be used for propellantless propulsion. The idea is sound and experimental confirmation is present, but the experimental values are a few orders of magnitude less than predicted. It is unclear whether the theory or experiment design is incorrect right now. Both NASA and Mr. Woodward is looking into it, though the results have been painfully slow to arrive.
You are dead wrong about 50ties and 60ties russian mentality. Soviet space program was planned in advance to establish orbital stations and lunar bases, while state's program was not planned at all. It was (and still is, to some extend) planned around single missions, with no vision of future direction. Alas, soviet engineering was inferior, and they failed. What did communist pary care abou future directions, they were after probaganda! Failing to be a good tool for probaganda, soviet space program lost support. 70ies and 80ties soviet space program was quite like states', lacking vision of any kind.
For individual crafts, you are correct that soviets didn't care to lose one. But that was not a difference in engineering mentality, that was a (good) side effect of not having to disclose failures to public. So they could launch and learn, instead of going thru cumbersome process of checking and rechecking and then some more checking. Would you really care if you send ten times more probes to each target and have five times more failures? I thing it is sensible for unmanned missions.
It is the ONLY thing I LOVE about USA. I guess many foreigners feel the same way. There is bound to be problems, after all, it is rocket science. That is the agency brought Apollo 13 crew back, how hard could it be to clean a camera lens? Or just bring amazing amount of information with a faulty cam. It is one of two, after all, and there are other data collectors. Have some faith, NASA will solve... Unless your stupid president and idiotic congress cut their budgets further, not leaving enough staff to maintain the lonely probe. Remote possibility? No, just look what had happened to voyagers and pionners.
Do you have any links to the problem about camera? I checked the site but didn't see an obvious link to quoted problem or a link to "mission log of stardust" kind of thing.
Why not interview Tolkien by method of infinite monkeys? We would have a dead accurate interview with Tolkien and as an added bonus, not raise sceptics' concerns.
performance of gnome 1.4 (?) sucked, I endee up using kde, falling back to gonme apps under it too often. I believe botb destktop environments are quite ready for prime time, feature-wise. But both suck in terms of performace, windows 2k runs waaaay faster. SO I guess they would something about speed in gnome 2.0, and that something shouldn't be 10%-20%. KDe is already lost, 3.0 alpha is out and beta is near. Gnome 2.0 is our only hope. (help me obi van...[well, I'm as drunk as I could be, bear with me will you?])
I just today tried to explain emergence to a crowd, and failed. What I did not tell them, which could have succeed but make matter less interesting for them, is where redecutionism fails, emergence prevails. It is about state of art, rather than an insrinct property of the system. If you can say "rules X, conditions Y makes behaviour Z" there is no emergence to speak about. The concept of emergent property has nothing to do with complex systems analysis, when whole is more than sum of its parts, the extras in the whole are said to be emergent. Ofcourse if you really know how to sum things, the whole is always sum of its parts. Water's properties were emergent from hydrogen's burning once, since water had nothing in common with either hydrogen or oxygen. Now that Schrodinger's equation can be solved for the system, water's properties are no more emergent, they are summation of hydrogen and oxygen; only that addition operation involves not simple addition but a system of differentials. The same idea applies to emergence in complex systems, but I don't have a ready example for emergence->reduction in those systems.
DDR-P4 combo not tested in open market? Intel's chipset is the third one! Both solutions from via and sis performed rather good, keeping up and sometimes even surpassing dual channel rdram solutions.
There are at least two family of boards operating on dual channel sdram principle, nforce boards and some server stuff company's (anand's older servers were powered from them, you can find the name in their older news archives.) One works with athlons, other with p3's but idea is similarly applicable to p4 chipsets.
My comments were only applicable to programs that stress memory subsystem, otherwise you won't see much of a difference between sdram and rdram anyway. So I didn't (at least didn't intend to) claim that all (even most) apps should be tuned for optimal memory performance.
I don't agree with you comment about context switching emphasising latency. Context switching takes doesn't happen frequently, time slices are too long from a cpu perspective (linux defaults to 10ms, I guess that corresponds to ten million or so cycles.) Contexts are loaded in burst rates so latency would have little effect on overall performance. Offcourse it might be that context switching occurs more frequently because programs are releasing their time slices, but that would mean you don't need performance either since your processes are idle. A busy process still gets its ten million cycles, wasting a tiny percentage on context switching - high latency or not.
If SDRAM is challenging RDRAM with a cpu that can make use of much higher bandwidth RDRAM offers, I'd rather blame the software. It would mean that (pick any two or all three) data access is essentially random, in very small chunks or alignment is bad. Otherwise hardware prefetch (helps little on SDRAM) or bandwidth for could compansate for it. Few apps have to use such an access pattern, it is usually programmer's laziness. There is no excuse for bad alignment except in extremly tight memory, byte or word size data condition.
And it is latency that usually counts, peak transfer rate is not sustainable anyway. A dual channel DDR-SDRAM platform would be faster than dual channel RDRAM platform, single channel ddrs are already competing with dual channel rdrams. With 166*2MHz DDRs on the horizon, I think it is a very sensible solution.
There are numerous problem reports with XPs in thunder boards, and a few reports with XPs in tigers. I decided to give it a try and now using dual XP 1800+s for about a month without any problems. Be careful, they might not work in your configuration.
All athlons, including the first ones, are mp capable if you build a chipset to support them. So surrent athlon mps are fourth generation of mp capable chips amd has produced.
And why would replicators be scarce? Conspiracy? Even in the face of some unlikely(?) totalitarian world government, enforcing such an artificial scarcity for any length of time would be almost impossible.
Perhaps they can only operate in a near sun orbit, and their owners are unwilling to make rockets for public use. Perhaps they consume so much energy that operating thousands of them would lead to huge environmental problems. Perhaps we just build a cumborsome, hard to make thought controller, and first replicator makers made a billion of those thought controllers so nobody wants replicators for themselves. Nobody have seen a replicator so nobody can tell for sure if they will be common.
We can be sure of one thing though, they will consume huge amounts of energy. The idea is basically reducing local entropy vast amounts, which mean increasing non-local entropy by even higher amounts. Making a pure gold bar out of pure gold requires less energy than making a pure gold bar from a 90% gold source. This is basic thermodynamics and can not be tricked by use of nanotechnology. The better technology for refining process only makes entropy increase outside system approach entropy decrease inside system. The dirt we assume to be inputs of replicator is possibly not nearly pure in any of its components. So there will be huge amounts of entropy decrease required for using it as input. Entropy transfer (if you excuse the term) needs energy. The more you go against natural evolution (has nothing to do with "natural evolution" in biology) of the system, the more energy you have to use. So it may be possible that we invent a replicator (a far possibility), but we don't have means to operate it because we don't know how to supply energy for it.
Forget open source for a revolution, next big thing will be affordable computers surpassing human brains in computational power, which could happen in thirty years if moore's law continues to hold, and our estimates about brain's processing capacity is not very misguided. Building one today for just half a million top-end processors, and billions of dollars will do no good, AI researchers must be able access such machines for long time periods.
The next BIG thing will be actually putting that processing power to use, building machines more intelligent than ourselves. I can't see how that can not happen, maybe it will take much longer than 30 years but I'm pretty sure the number is closer to 30 than 300.
Anything else happening in the period are just details, minor details.
So, I locate a few nice neighbors using cable modems and convince them that their HDs are mostly unused, so they'd better backup my data and find a use for them. No wonder all this time those capitalist cdr producers have kept us in the dark...
There are a few arguments against possibility of self replicating nanobots that can produce anything and they make sense to me, though my interest in the matter have been very little so far.
But alternative paths to the gift society exist. It is not necessary everyone is able to produce anything, that scarcity is no more a major factor in "economics" (calling trade *that* would then be an oxymoron) is sufficient. Exploitation of outer space, a huge productivity boost due to super-intelligence, almost unlimited energy, sufficiently advanced genetic engineering...all could elminitae scarcity on primary goods on a global scale.
OTOH, even if nanotech is avaliable to build a replicator, if replicators are scarce it won't do any good on reducing scarcity of other goods.
Anyway, it all actually boils down to "is greed a primary human motive? if it is, can it be controlled?" I have no answers to those questions; I'm just a capitalist pig, exploiting workers and driving a SUV.
A general purpose miner and constructor, together with practically infinite amount of energy and dirt would make economy look like software bussiness. Yet, I haven't seen any on the horizon, so I'd rather insist on my points without objecting to yours.
>>As long as physical goods require scarce and specilized physical resources, the economy can not be analysed in FS, OS concepts.
> You really mean, muscles ? You believe the grey matter developpers rely on to develop software is no some kind of muscle ?
No, I mean CAM boards, fertilizers, petrolium, areble land, pumps, burners, pure silicon, temperature sensors, zeolites... Those things that you can't just dig your backyard and expect to find in quantity. How many little things does it take to build a refrigerator? If you think the number is lower than 100, go to a junkyard and check it out. Now consider stuff you need to build stuff used in refrigerator. Now consider the stuff you need to build the builders. Continue until you grasp the fact that building seemmingly simple things require expertise (which is arguably transferable without destruction) and special hardware, adequate raw materials. Also for many things, production time that does not scale well with quantity (eg. building a million of them [or a million units, if it is uncountable] takes much less time than building one a million times.)
These three replies, and the fact that I got moderated up 4 pts are clear indications that I couldn't explain myself. I try again:
Physical goods have very different characteristics than computer programs, because computers are very different mediums of production .
It doesn't matter if information about a product can worth 99% of the whole production cost, it doesn't matter whether this information can be transmitted just the same way as computer programs. As long as physical goods require scarce and specilized physical resources, the economy can not be analysed in FS, OS concepts.
Hope my point is clear now. If that's the case, you can see your post is irrelevant. I didn't say article was a piece of shit, that assumed things I knew to be wrong. His points about differences between material and informational stuff is correct. The idea that this differences change the global economy in a way that can be alikened to FS vs. non-free and closed source software is what I'm objecting.
Both of you are misreading my sentence about uniquenness of computers. No other production tool can be used for producing arbitrary things (unless you count humans as tools), computers can.
When I see interviews or articles like this one, I always wonder where people get the idea that computer programs are something like other commodities. Computers are not like any other production tool invented in the whole history of man, computers are general purpose. That is whatever you do with a screwdriver is set (that does not mean you can't find creative uses for it) but with different computer programs and a little bit of hardware you can make a computer do whatever you like. Therefore computer programs are giving a useful existance to computers, without them nothing can be done by computers. Producing one for your own needs is relatively easy (how could you make a car yourself, ground up?), getting, changing and sending one is much to easier than with physical goods. The only major investment is time in producing one.
On the other hand producing physical goods require physical resources. A physical good is not instantly transportable, infinitely reproduceable and generally doesn't stay the way it was during usage. The tools for producing them are specialized and one can do very little to change them without those tools. People do and will need physical goods.
Therefore drawing conclusions about general econmic trends by observing trends in open source/free software concepts/community is fundementally wrong. There are just too many differences. Unless/until somebody invents a general purpose things builder (like you give it blueprints and the machine creates whatever it is out of dirt) a true information society is not be possible, and open source ideas ar not applicable to general economy.
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But that shouldn't deter you from using linux, openoffice 638c is very good, so is gnumeric. They should suit your needs. Considering how rest of kde evolved, I'm pretty sure that most koffice problems with stability will be solved soon, too.
Well, I get this idea of Russian space mentality from several (Russian) friends that followed Russia's space program during the 60's.
I wish I had one of those. I have to rely on books instead.
Check woodward engine, you might find interesting. See http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/bpp/ (sorry I don't know how to make those clickable, look for research proposal about mach's principle) for credibility, james woodward's homepage http://chaos.fullerton.edu/Woodward.html for more info.
For all too lazy to floow links guys out there, woodward claims to have detected transient mass effects, which might be used for propellantless propulsion. The idea is sound and experimental confirmation is present, but the experimental values are a few orders of magnitude less than predicted. It is unclear whether the theory or experiment design is incorrect right now. Both NASA and Mr. Woodward is looking into it, though the results have been painfully slow to arrive.
For individual crafts, you are correct that soviets didn't care to lose one. But that was not a difference in engineering mentality, that was a (good) side effect of not having to disclose failures to public. So they could launch and learn, instead of going thru cumbersome process of checking and rechecking and then some more checking. Would you really care if you send ten times more probes to each target and have five times more failures? I thing it is sensible for unmanned missions.
It is the ONLY thing I LOVE about USA. I guess many foreigners feel the same way. There is bound to be problems, after all, it is rocket science. That is the agency brought Apollo 13 crew back, how hard could it be to clean a camera lens? Or just bring amazing amount of information with a faulty cam. It is one of two, after all, and there are other data collectors. Have some faith, NASA will solve... Unless your stupid president and idiotic congress cut their budgets further, not leaving enough staff to maintain the lonely probe. Remote possibility? No, just look what had happened to voyagers and pionners.
Do you have any links to the problem about camera? I checked the site but didn't see an obvious link to quoted problem or a link to "mission log of stardust" kind of thing.
Why not interview Tolkien by method of infinite monkeys? We would have a dead accurate interview with Tolkien and as an added bonus, not raise sceptics' concerns.
performance of gnome 1.4 (?) sucked, I endee up using kde, falling back to gonme apps under it too often. I believe botb destktop environments are quite ready for prime time, feature-wise. But both suck in terms of performace, windows 2k runs waaaay faster. SO I guess they would something about speed in gnome 2.0, and that something shouldn't be 10%-20%. KDe is already lost, 3.0 alpha is out and beta is near. Gnome 2.0 is our only hope. (help me obi van...[well, I'm as drunk as I could be, bear with me will you?])
I just today tried to explain emergence to a crowd, and failed. What I did not tell them, which could have succeed but make matter less interesting for them, is where redecutionism fails, emergence prevails. It is about state of art, rather than an insrinct property of the system. If you can say "rules X, conditions Y makes behaviour Z" there is no emergence to speak about. The concept of emergent property has nothing to do with complex systems analysis, when whole is more than sum of its parts, the extras in the whole are said to be emergent. Ofcourse if you really know how to sum things, the whole is always sum of its parts. Water's properties were emergent from hydrogen's burning once, since water had nothing in common with either hydrogen or oxygen. Now that Schrodinger's equation can be solved for the system, water's properties are no more emergent, they are summation of hydrogen and oxygen; only that addition operation involves not simple addition but a system of differentials. The same idea applies to emergence in complex systems, but I don't have a ready example for emergence->reduction in those systems.
There are at least two family of boards operating on dual channel sdram principle, nforce boards and some server stuff company's (anand's older servers were powered from them, you can find the name in their older news archives.) One works with athlons, other with p3's but idea is similarly applicable to p4 chipsets.
I don't agree with you comment about context switching emphasising latency. Context switching takes doesn't happen frequently, time slices are too long from a cpu perspective (linux defaults to 10ms, I guess that corresponds to ten million or so cycles.) Contexts are loaded in burst rates so latency would have little effect on overall performance. Offcourse it might be that context switching occurs more frequently because programs are releasing their time slices, but that would mean you don't need performance either since your processes are idle. A busy process still gets its ten million cycles, wasting a tiny percentage on context switching - high latency or not.
Its almost 4am here, I'd better sleep now.
If SDRAM is challenging RDRAM with a cpu that can make use of much higher bandwidth RDRAM offers, I'd rather blame the software. It would mean that (pick any two or all three) data access is essentially random, in very small chunks or alignment is bad. Otherwise hardware prefetch (helps little on SDRAM) or bandwidth for could compansate for it. Few apps have to use such an access pattern, it is usually programmer's laziness. There is no excuse for bad alignment except in extremly tight memory, byte or word size data condition.
And it is latency that usually counts, peak transfer rate is not sustainable anyway. A dual channel DDR-SDRAM platform would be faster than dual channel RDRAM platform, single channel ddrs are already competing with dual channel rdrams. With 166*2MHz DDRs on the horizon, I think it is a very sensible solution.
Tiger. I couldn't wait for Mpx boards.
There are numerous problem reports with XPs in thunder boards, and a few reports with XPs in tigers. I decided to give it a try and now using dual XP 1800+s for about a month without any problems. Be careful, they might not work in your configuration.
All athlons, including the first ones, are mp capable if you build a chipset to support them. So surrent athlon mps are fourth generation of mp capable chips amd has produced.
Perhaps they can only operate in a near sun orbit, and their owners are unwilling to make rockets for public use. Perhaps they consume so much energy that operating thousands of them would lead to huge environmental problems. Perhaps we just build a cumborsome, hard to make thought controller, and first replicator makers made a billion of those thought controllers so nobody wants replicators for themselves. Nobody have seen a replicator so nobody can tell for sure if they will be common.
We can be sure of one thing though, they will consume huge amounts of energy. The idea is basically reducing local entropy vast amounts, which mean increasing non-local entropy by even higher amounts. Making a pure gold bar out of pure gold requires less energy than making a pure gold bar from a 90% gold source. This is basic thermodynamics and can not be tricked by use of nanotechnology. The better technology for refining process only makes entropy increase outside system approach entropy decrease inside system. The dirt we assume to be inputs of replicator is possibly not nearly pure in any of its components. So there will be huge amounts of entropy decrease required for using it as input. Entropy transfer (if you excuse the term) needs energy. The more you go against natural evolution (has nothing to do with "natural evolution" in biology) of the system, the more energy you have to use. So it may be possible that we invent a replicator (a far possibility), but we don't have means to operate it because we don't know how to supply energy for it.
The next BIG thing will be actually putting that processing power to use, building machines more intelligent than ourselves. I can't see how that can not happen, maybe it will take much longer than 30 years but I'm pretty sure the number is closer to 30 than 300.
Anything else happening in the period are just details, minor details.
So, I locate a few nice neighbors using cable modems and convince them that their HDs are mostly unused, so they'd better backup my data and find a use for them. No wonder all this time those capitalist cdr producers have kept us in the dark...
But alternative paths to the gift society exist. It is not necessary everyone is able to produce anything, that scarcity is no more a major factor in "economics" (calling trade *that* would then be an oxymoron) is sufficient. Exploitation of outer space, a huge productivity boost due to super-intelligence, almost unlimited energy, sufficiently advanced genetic engineering...all could elminitae scarcity on primary goods on a global scale.
OTOH, even if nanotech is avaliable to build a replicator, if replicators are scarce it won't do any good on reducing scarcity of other goods.
Anyway, it all actually boils down to "is greed a primary human motive? if it is, can it be controlled?" I have no answers to those questions; I'm just a capitalist pig, exploiting workers and driving a SUV.
A general purpose miner and constructor, together with practically infinite amount of energy and dirt would make economy look like software bussiness. Yet, I haven't seen any on the horizon, so I'd rather insist on my points without objecting to yours.
> You really mean, muscles ? You believe the grey matter developpers rely on to develop software is no some kind of muscle ?
No, I mean CAM boards, fertilizers, petrolium, areble land, pumps, burners, pure silicon, temperature sensors, zeolites... Those things that you can't just dig your backyard and expect to find in quantity. How many little things does it take to build a refrigerator? If you think the number is lower than 100, go to a junkyard and check it out. Now consider stuff you need to build stuff used in refrigerator. Now consider the stuff you need to build the builders. Continue until you grasp the fact that building seemmingly simple things require expertise (which is arguably transferable without destruction) and special hardware, adequate raw materials. Also for many things, production time that does not scale well with quantity (eg. building a million of them [or a million units, if it is uncountable] takes much less time than building one a million times.)
Physical goods have very different characteristics than computer programs, because computers are very different mediums of production .
It doesn't matter if information about a product can worth 99% of the whole production cost, it doesn't matter whether this information can be transmitted just the same way as computer programs. As long as physical goods require scarce and specilized physical resources, the economy can not be analysed in FS, OS concepts.
Hope my point is clear now. If that's the case, you can see your post is irrelevant. I didn't say article was a piece of shit, that assumed things I knew to be wrong. His points about differences between material and informational stuff is correct. The idea that this differences change the global economy in a way that can be alikened to FS vs. non-free and closed source software is what I'm objecting.
Both of you are misreading my sentence about uniquenness of computers. No other production tool can be used for producing arbitrary things (unless you count humans as tools), computers can.
On the other hand producing physical goods require physical resources. A physical good is not instantly transportable, infinitely reproduceable and generally doesn't stay the way it was during usage. The tools for producing them are specialized and one can do very little to change them without those tools. People do and will need physical goods.
Therefore drawing conclusions about general econmic trends by observing trends in open source/free software concepts/community is fundementally wrong. There are just too many differences. Unless/until somebody invents a general purpose things builder (like you give it blueprints and the machine creates whatever it is out of dirt) a true information society is not be possible, and open source ideas ar not applicable to general economy.