I hate to be a stick in the mud but how long till blight, or some other fungas mutates so as to effect these potatos? Once we start mass producing it something will mutate.
Still, it is good news. I support genetic engineering of crops, but if this works well then all the better.
I cannot remember the EXACT wording of this quote from Ben Franklin but it goes something like this.
"Those who are willing to give up essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither the liberty or the safety.
You allow our liberties to be removed, even for a short peroid of time, and the terrorists have won. They are attacking America, and everything it stands for. Our freedoms are what the US stands for, supposadely. We need to keep our freedoms UNCHANGED. We need to show them that they have NOT frightened us, that we will stand strong and continue as normal.
These were terrible acts, and we need to respond to them. We need to look at our priorities, militarily and intelligence wise especially. Fund those seaching for terrorists, but do NOT remove those things that make our country great. Tear down the missle defence program and use some of the $80+ billion to fund a program to protect us from real threats like terrorism.
I will not relax when the government sends messages to me that say that they do not trust us. I will not relax when every one is being treated as though they are terrorists. Our country is supposed to assume that we our innoccent until proven guilty and yet they are doing the opposite.
5,000+ people died becaue we weren't careful. Not because we have too many rights and freedoms. I refuse to reliquish them for I am not a terrorist and do not wish to be treated as such.
I noticed that San Jose Mercury News linked the Jon Katz article on their site for more information.
Slashdot has been quoted by people before though. I have stopped being shocked when I see articles quoting comments from Slashdot. Whether one wants to accept it or not, Slashdot has gained a lot of respect over the past year and a half, and this is just one more feather in their cap.
Quicken didn't win, they submitted to pressure. The president of Intuit testified during the trial that MS approached them and told them that either they made Netscape break with Quicken and other Intuit products, or MS Money would be released for free and then integrated. Intuit rolled over, MS won.
Maybe, maybe not. There are issues here that were not addressed in this article, like performance issues. CE and the first Pocket PC OSes were horribly slow, and bug prone (like many MS products). The idea of placing as much as they have on the product seems like they are, again, asking too much from a palm size device. Also, previous MS OSes for palm devices have been huge, leaving as much space left as Palm devices generally had.
For $600 dollars, if it can only store a few songs, or has severe performance issues then the uptake will be very slow, even in the "high end" area that you talk about.
Could this potentially be a death blow to Palm, maybe. It is far too early to tell.
Well, if you really need an office suite that is at professional level Linux does have one, but it does cost money. I use Corel WordPerfect 2000 for Linux with no problems right now. WordPerfect is as good, if not better then MS Office and cheaper. It is faster than StarOffice, not as buggy as the other office suites, and has decent filters. Downside, Corel is selling its Linux division so support might dissapear. Oh, and it was built for KDE. Just a thought.
I agree, StarOffice is no where near MS Office. But then again MS Office was no where near WordPerfect Suite until Office 95. Frankly, having used MS Office 2000, 97, 95, StarOffice 5.2, WordPerfect Suites 2000, 8, 7, 6, and WordPerfect 5 I prefer the new WordPerfect Suite 2000 over everything else that I have tried. QuattroPro has finally mostly recovered from being down ever since Suite 6 vs Office 95. Of course one definate advantage for me is that WordPerfect Suite 2000 runs on Linux.
True, people like familier setups. I setup an account for my near computer illiterate roommate last year with a gnome desktop that looked very similar to that of Windows. Corel WordPerfect 2000 for Linux and Netscape 4.7* on the desktop, gmc for the graphical shell. He had no problems picking it up, he was sort of confused at first because the desktop looked slightly different. As soon as he started to try to find things he reallized that there was nothing to be afraid of.
It really isn't that hard anymore. Debian on a CD, StarOffice on another, and a fast internet connection. It has become very easy to install systems that people are very comfortable with.
Sun can do what IBM and Corel cannot for several reasons.
It's free. MS Office is $400+ per license. MS is also removing the roaming license, therefore if a machine might use MS Office then it needs its own license. That gets really expensive really quickly, especially in companies with several thousand employees.
It runs everywhere. If the OS has a JRE then StarOffice works. No more need for WinFrame, VMWare, Wine, etc... Slow, yes, but it WORKS.
It has been open sourced. Other people can now work on it, innovate, etc... As everyone has seen, open sourced projects have the ability to evolve very quickly.
Scary thought but it takes no extra work to have StarOffice run over the net because it is Java. So while MS is busy trying to make MS Office ready for their.Net scheme, creating new bugs and problems, StarOffice has time to make up any differences.
This may seem like just small pickings, but it is starting to have an effect. Corel and IBM tried to fight fair and on Microsofts turf. Sun is throwing low blows and invading Microsofts turf while not giving theirs up.
Is it up to par right now? Of course not. Was MS Office up to par with WordPerfect Suite until MS Office 95? Not even close. These things take time.
Microsoft is being attacked by three directions by threats that could could topple them. The Justice Department, Linux, and Sun. This could get really bloody.
With the hot water, I did notice that several apartments that I saw had their own water heaters. I stayed with a family, actually it was only an pensioner who supplemented her income through home stays, and she had one of these water heaters. Even if they do do maintenance there every summer, they are spending quite a bit of money on refurbing a lot of stuff for the big b-day party in two years. While I was there most of Nevski Prospekt, and Bolshoi Prospekt on Vassilevski island were torn up as part of the refrubishing for said event.
I never saw any automatic doors at the supermarkets, but I only visited a handful. I tried to avoid them because they were generally a lot more expensive then the rinoks, and there wasn't any difference in quality.
One problem that will have a major effect on Russia in the up coming years if the economy doesn't turn around is their new policy on higher education. Up until just recently, college in Russia was paid for, now they are approaching the system, as they put it, American style. I met a few people who had just eeked by the deadline, but new students have to find their own way of paying for college. This is the beginnings of a brain drain, as time passes a fewer percentage of people will have college level education. I do know that the Russian undergraduate degree is a two year program, but that is two years of schooling that won't be had.
I just came back from a 9 week trip to Russia a little over a month ago. Yes, they have some severe economic problems, mostly stemming from corruption. The government needs to stamp out corruption within the country in order for an economy to thrive. Stamp out corruption and they would be fine, trust me.
As for Russia throwing away its science programs, that is just plain dumb. They cannot afford to have another brain drain. Frankly, what space has is money. Tito payed $20 million dollars to go up in space for a while. If I remember correctly the Soyez space vehicle only takes roughly $10 million per launch. This is money in the pocket. Money desparately needed to fund other programs, education, military, science, you name it. Russia IS focusing on rebuilding their "ruined" country by focusing on space.
Doctors are not paid in trade by the government anymore. There are not huge lines for buying food at markets. In fact I bought food at a fancy place called an univermag, which translates to supermarket, where they had everything that a US supermarket would have except for the automatic doors. Moscow looks as clean and modern, discounting the 14th-19th century architecture that seems randomly scattered about the city and the lack of a "sky line", as most of Denver. St. Petersburg is going through major restoration as they prepair for their 300th birthday in 2003. While I was there a good portion of the St. Petersburg lost hot water because they were fixing all of the pipes.
Russia is focusing on rebuilding their country, and if it weren't for the corruption, they would be doing very well. People are working hard to try and get their country back on track. I am not surprised at how frustrated they get, and the drinking they do, when all of that hard work seems to be going nowhere as the ruble slips to the dollar weekly. They are hard working people, and smart people, they just don't have a handle on capitalism yet, nor have they eliminated the biggest problem that is preventing their economy from growing.
I only wish that the US honored and reviered its scientists and poets as the Russians do. They continue to fund science because they know that when their economy turns around, their being on par, or slightly behind, the rest of the major economic players scientifically is going to be necessary. When their economy turns around they will be a major force quickly.
Add to that that Solaris is, as you say, very basic and you have to fork out a fortune for Veritas to have volume management and clustering, and the price gets even worse.
Actually, I believe with the release of Solaris 8 Sun started telling people to stop buying Veritas because of a newly added feature to UFS that causes problems with Veritas. Benifit, you don't have to deal with forking over huge amounts of money to Veritas. Downside, UFS still sucks and everyone, including Sun, knows it.
By support, if you mean calling someone up on tech support then I believe they go back to 2.5, their first release of a 64 bit OS, it was a duel release with the UltraSPARC I. The documentation online still has information for those who use the old SunOS, when it was 100% BSD. I know this because I had to deal with said documentation.
the next generation of them will definitely use McKinley processors because their customers value reliability over speed and cost, and any processor will suffice.
Something tells me that the next generation of Tandem will not be using the McKinley processors. First the next generation would have to be YEARS off from now because Intel seems to having a lot of trouble getting Merced, err Itanium, out the door, let alone McKinley. Second isn't there talk about how McKinley really isn't going to be the next best thing sence sliced bread that Intel and HP had been toating it to be.
I haven't heard anything about the reliability of the McKinley chip, but I doubt that it will be nearly as reliable as MIPS or the Alpha for two reasons. First the McKinley has not had years of in the field testing that the other two have had. The second is Intels record for reliability.
Re:IA64 is the "heir apparent"
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Itanium Update
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Someone needs to defend the SPARC chipset, and what [I see] Sun Microsystems is doing, so here I am.
Sure the single processor, or even up to 8 processor results are not the greatest thing out there. In the single through four processor units Intel beats them, and higher the Power series takes over. What one tends to forget is, for a processor that is designed for SMP, A) 1024 processors linearly is damn good, and B) it is relatively cheap for a server class processor. Also the SPARC line is known to have the least number of hardware bugs of any major processor out there.
Sun really doesn't need a sports car of a chip anyway. Servers and workstations need uptime. They don't need to attack the user market yet. First they seem to be more actively attacking the workstation market with the sub-$1000 SunBlades. With a Sun solution the workstation only needs to be moderately fast, but the server needs to be DAMN fast because the most intensive processes run on the server and display over the network. Small steps.
even for people that need to do design docs in Word, this won't help. Please, don't feel the urge to mention StarOffice or OpenOffice as we all know they just flat suck.
Okay, how about WordPerfect Suite 2000 for Linux? Costs about a quarter of MS Office and has full functionality. And don't give me this crap about how MS Office is SOO much better unless you have ACTUALLY TRIED both. WordPerfect is as good, if not better than Word. QuattroPro is not as good as Excel, but it is not something to scoff at. The everything else, Presentations, Paradox, etc... is as good as any MS product. Just because MS has illegaly used their monopoly to pressured the computer manufactures to install MS Office, and on top of that, broke all conversions as soon as they had the upper hand, thereby creating larger dominance in the market does not make their product orders of magnitude better.
Funny thing, unless the people are trying to attach Visual Basic scripts to their documents or spreadsheets, which I doubt your part-time secretary will be doing, someone who learns on WordPerfect and QuattroPro will have no problems with moving over to Word and Excel. This is probably because MS copied the WordPerfect and QuattroPro layouts (yes, WordPerfect and QuattroPro were there before Word and Excel).
Anyway, cost is a huge deal. When I was in high school Windows 95 came out. First the school was not about to install Windows 95 on their 486SX25's, but they A) didn't have the money for new computers, and B) didn't have the money for the OS. 20 licenses at $100 each is $2000, that could buy one classroom full of books. And considering our US Government class's text book was from 1984 we desperately need the books over an expensive OS.
Look at today. If you are a principal who is working with a very tight budget you have a couple options.
Spend $X per license each time MS comes out with a new OS or a new Office suite. That way your school can produce those workers for the "standard" jobs. Thereby running your school in the ground by spending way too much money on expensive software.
Have the volentary Sys-Admin install Linux, which is free, and then 1/4th as much on licenses for Office software that is just as good as any MS product.
In the end it not only costs less to do the second plan but there are also other benifits. Students can learn how to work with a UNIX environment, which, in big businesses, is not as uncommon as one might think. The students, especially in a charter school, are probably getting quite a bit of experience with Windows at home anyway.
What I personally think would be the best solution is as such.
Most importantly is that one needs to allow for choice. If MS wants to integrate a web browser, mail utility, isp, etc..., let them, but allow for choice. If they want to integrate then they must release all information on how the integration is done, and allow for third parties to replace the MS component with their own, seamlessly. Ie, if someone, or an OEM, wants Eudora instead of Outlook, then they should be able to completely replace Outlook with Eudora and not lose ANY productivity/compatibilty. Third party products should have the ability to merge seamless into MS products. Merging isn't always bad.
Nautilus and Mozilla. Sure it is slow, but it also has a lot of potential.
Any flavor of UNIX or Linux requires that a mail program be installed. They don't have to be set up, but they have to be installed.
Other things that I feel should be done are.
Force MS to release all of the APIs. Have a group of coders from third parties review MSs source code to insure that all of the APIs have in fact been released. Until they give the okay no product leaves the door.
All OEMs are treated the same. Same price for OS, all given the OS on the same day. If an OEM wishes to us the OS, MS cannot refuse even if the OEM is also shipping other OSes. Deals must be made in the open.
Office products, MS Office, Internet Explorer... must be released for all the OSes that it will support at the same time. Must include support for other OSes other than Windows and MacOS. Including either a Linux or a major UNIX faction (Sun, IBM, etc...).
The Ultra III was only started about 7 years ago, if I correctly remember the info that I got when I worked at Sun. It was released after 6 years of development, only a year behind schedule. Frankly, I don't understand you arguments of why the Ultra's and RISC processors are going to die.
Although I agree that the Alpha and the MIPS that SGI uses are going out. Also there is, or at least was, a planned kill date for the PA-RISC chips that HP uses. Those have evidence but the IBM Power series and the Sun Ultra series still seem to sell very well. Companies still need very large machines to take care of business, and the big players still use RISC architecture, architecture that scales.
The IA-64 has had major problems, and is several years late. Sun has pulled its support of the IA-64 chips even after they proved that Solaris 8 runs without a hitch on them because they realize that there is nothing to worry about right now. There are huge performance problems, and being a brand new architecture, it will have to go through several generations before the bugs are worked out. Meanwhile the Ultra chips have a reputation of having the fewest number of bugs upon release.
The big SMP machines may start to make more of a come back. The idea of having applications on the net and having bare bones machines in peoples homes is the directions that I see all of the major players going. The best machines to handle large loads are not x86 style machines but the "slow" work horses that today are all RISC.
Aging Ultra II processors may be nothing to write home about but they work, and work, and work. The chip is and more importantlyand more importantlystable, and reliable, and so is the OS. People can depend on their ability to handle large loads, even if they are not exactly the fastest things out there.
Rack mounted Alpha's could most likely handle the load of the Sun ES10000, but there are several drawbacks. First you have to deal with Alpha's, which, althought are amazing machines, have issues of lack of support and development, and frankly are very expensive. I am currently working in a High Energy Physics lab with huge numbers of relatively new Alphas and trying to find software that is not a rev or two behind the other UNICes is difficult. On top of that the Ultra 60 that was purchased was a much better deal with better support. Alpha clusters are powerful but a
multiprocessor Sun box will do a more effecient job because the processors are designed for it.
Um, I don't think that Marc Garneau made it into space. On Jan. 28th 1984 the Challenger blew up on takeoff. If he was on it then he died before he made it.
I live in Boulder, CO and have seen drastic differences between ADSL and Cable connections.
Although ADSL has the capability of 4+ Megabit connections, Qwest Communications limits ones max speed depending on how much money you spend a month. $40-month will get you 640k, 6 months ago it was 256k (ATT@Home started offering Cable service 6 months ago). In order to get 1M you need to spend ~$100 a month.
These prices also assume that you choose "Deluxe" service and have a free DNS server. The "Deluxe" service allows one to stay online indefinately, whereas the regular service kicks you off if the number or regular service members goes up and you have been online for a while. When you get bumped during regular service you must waite at least 5 minutes before reconnecting. Also, if you aren't a student using the University service then you have to pay for a DNS server to handle your account, which costs roughly another $18 per month. Therefore, for 640k speeds then expect to pay ~$58 per month.
The cable modem I now have averages download speeds of ~1M, I have seen speeds of no lower than 640k download but as high as 3M. Upload speeds are currently capped at 128k. Due to the competition ATT informed me that if I were to see noticeable degredation of speed during peak hours to contact them and they would alliviate the problem. According to the technicion, when ATT put in the new infastructure they allowed for easy branching of the cable cells to allow for growth. I pay $40 per month, no extra charge for a DNS hookup or having to choose "Deluxe" service.
Qwest is having their lunch taken by ATT right now. I have not heard a single complaint from Bouder users about ATT@Home, whereas the number of people who are discontent with their ADSL service seems to grow monthly. I suspect that in order to compete with ATT that Qwest will bump up the speeds of the basic connection again. I must say, competition can be great when it exists.
The GULag Achipelago by Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, and any book discussing the Russian revolution of 1917.
But you should THANK GOD that there was Stalin as he saved the world and YOU from being swallowed by the Nazi machinery. And NEVER DARE to forget about that!
Even if I did believe in God, I wouldn't thank Stalin for his contribution to WWII.
It has been said that only two men from the Bolshevik party could have suceeded in stopping the German war machine on the Soviet front, one being Stalin the other being Trotsky. Many of the ideas for the modernization of the Soviet Union that Stalin used were actually Trotsky's ideas. Trotsky saw that there was an abundance of minerals at the Ural mountains and that they needed to move factories there to prevent the destruction Soviet industry in case of attack from Europe. Trotsky was the one who came up with the 5 year plans. Trotsky was also a great general, if you have studied the revolution you would know that he lead the Red Army. But it was shown that Trotsky had more compassion for the Soviet people than Stalin. Stalin stole the leadership of the Soviet Union and murdered tens of millions of people, whether it be from lack of safety in his 5 year plans, or the GULag, or what he did in WWII.
Stalin threw divisions of soldiers who did not have guns at the Germans. If a general retreated for any reason what-so-ever and survived, he was executed. The only reason why Stalin did as well as he did during WWII was not because he was a military genius but because he cared so little about the Soviet people that he was willing to sacrifice every last one of them in order to defeat Germany.
The Allies would have eventually defeated the Nazis. The Russians sped the processes up dramatically, but by the end of the war all of factories in Europe could not compete with the production of the United States. That is a KNOW FACT! There were factories in Detroit that were producing a B-29 EVERY DAY! No factory in the Luftwafa had that capability.
I refuse to thank a person who is responsible for the deaths of more than 40 million people, and that number continues to grow as more records are uncovered. Stalin should never be praised, anything he did that might be considered "good" came from him standing on the dead bodies of giants. It sickens me to think that someone would praise Stalin, who I consider the most evil man of the 20th century.
And yes, I have studied the differences between Stalinism and Leninism. I have studied Russian and Soviet history, and I have quite a few good friends who are Russian who I talk to about their culture's history.
The proposal for the detector said that it would have a luminosity of 2 fb-1 (inverse femto-barns for those who don't know the units) but the techs at Fermilabs have a reputation of getting better then predicted luminosity. It is probably too early to tell, but does someone know if they have once again done better then expected? Talking with my advisor 2 fb-1 isn't good enough to get reliable information on the existance of the Higgs, and considering I am doing some research in Supersymmetry I am very interested the potential discovery of a "low" energy higgs.
Actually there are several reasons why building a lunar station is not as practical as a space station.
Cost:
Lunar landers have not been upgraded since the Apollo program. Design then building spacecraft capable of landing and taking off of the lunar surface costs a lot of money. Much more than reusing existing technology and finishing up the X33 (or whatever the incarnation is now).
The amount of fuel used to travel to the moon is drastically more than to reach the ISS. Remember, now you have to worry about leaving both the Earth's and the moon's gravity wells, and landing, and both trips. Even one way supply missions would require more money.
Complexity:
The largest transport rocket available today is the Proton 2, a Russian rocket. So first we have to make sure that everything fits into the Proton 2. Now the easiest way would have the components be able to land on their own. This then requires that each component has quite a bit of space taken up with what is required to land. The other approach would require a vehicle in space to transport the component to the surface and place it where it needs to be, this is not easy.
Assuming that there is no construction vechile, so we are using the all components make their own landing approach, we now have to combine the components. If one does not want to combine the components expect loss of time due to amount of time spent doning space gear and moon walks. Does the new component have everything it needs to combine inside it, or will that require supply launches? How close can you have the components land to each other without threatening the safetey of the other components?
As mentioned above in the Cost section the need for a up to date moon lander is needed. Do you first get something very basic and then construct a "runway" on the moon so that things like the X33 can land there, or do you construct a vehicle that can land vertically on the moon and like a plane on Earth?
Safety: Something goes wrong and they need a fix NOW. As it is, the ISS has to wait for the shuttle to be prepaired or an emergency launch, weather has to be perfect... or a rocket is launched with the materials, but again there is the whole weather issue. By moving the base out to the moon there is a larger travel time for supplies to get there.
Been there: MIR has been up in space, constantly manned since 1986. The US had Space Lab for a short while also. Russia and the US have experience with space stations. No one has been to the moon in a very long time.
Usefulness:
NASA and RKa need something up in space NOW. The public here in the US is getting bored with NASA, which means that NASA is in danger of losing funding. They need a big project that will succeed. They don't want to throw billions of dollers into a project that has not been done before.
Someone mentioned natural resources from the moon. That is silly. The construction of mines on the moon would be horribly expensive. It is cheeper to mine in on Earth then it is to deal with setting up a low grav. environment and then using large amounts of fuel to transport the materials back to Earth. There are uses for mining the moon but I will discuss that later.
We need to be performing experiments in zero-g. Although performing experiments in a low-g environment would be useful, the experiments performed in zero-g are more useful.
The moon may become useful for planetary exploration. There are two approaches for going to Mars, there is Dr. Zubrin's Mars Direct approach, and there is the stepping stone approach. The first is to just go to Mars, do not go to the moon, do not build a station there. The second approach is to first go to the moon, and get some experience building in a low-g enivronment. From there use the moon station as a stepping stone to other planets like mars.
Personally I think that the Mars direct approach is what is needed right now, and then we should come back to build the stepping stone. I feel this way because I have little faith in the American people to keep interest in going to Mars while we sit on the moon. After the public becomes interested in space exploration again, after going to Mars, convince them that building the stepping stone on the moon is necessary. Build factories on the moon and then launch larger vehicles from the moon and its smaller gravity well. etc...
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to be a stick in the mud but how long till blight, or some other fungas mutates so as to effect these potatos? Once we start mass producing it something will mutate.
Still, it is good news. I support genetic engineering of crops, but if this works well then all the better.
You allow our liberties to be removed, even for a short peroid of time, and the terrorists have won. They are attacking America, and everything it stands for. Our freedoms are what the US stands for, supposadely. We need to keep our freedoms UNCHANGED. We need to show them that they have NOT frightened us, that we will stand strong and continue as normal.
These were terrible acts, and we need to respond to them. We need to look at our priorities, militarily and intelligence wise especially. Fund those seaching for terrorists, but do NOT remove those things that make our country great. Tear down the missle defence program and use some of the $80+ billion to fund a program to protect us from real threats like terrorism.
I will not relax when the government sends messages to me that say that they do not trust us. I will not relax when every one is being treated as though they are terrorists. Our country is supposed to assume that we our innoccent until proven guilty and yet they are doing the opposite.
5,000+ people died becaue we weren't careful. Not because we have too many rights and freedoms. I refuse to reliquish them for I am not a terrorist and do not wish to be treated as such.
I noticed that San Jose Mercury News linked the Jon Katz article on their site for more information.
Slashdot has been quoted by people before though. I have stopped being shocked when I see articles quoting comments from Slashdot. Whether one wants to accept it or not, Slashdot has gained a lot of respect over the past year and a half, and this is just one more feather in their cap.
Kudos to the Slashteam.
Quicken didn't win, they submitted to pressure. The president of Intuit testified during the trial that MS approached them and told them that either they made Netscape break with Quicken and other Intuit products, or MS Money would be released for free and then integrated. Intuit rolled over, MS won.
Maybe, maybe not. There are issues here that were not addressed in this article, like performance issues. CE and the first Pocket PC OSes were horribly slow, and bug prone (like many MS products). The idea of placing as much as they have on the product seems like they are, again, asking too much from a palm size device. Also, previous MS OSes for palm devices have been huge, leaving as much space left as Palm devices generally had.
For $600 dollars, if it can only store a few songs, or has severe performance issues then the uptake will be very slow, even in the "high end" area that you talk about.
Could this potentially be a death blow to Palm, maybe. It is far too early to tell.
Well, if you really need an office suite that is at professional level Linux does have one, but it does cost money. I use Corel WordPerfect 2000 for Linux with no problems right now. WordPerfect is as good, if not better then MS Office and cheaper. It is faster than StarOffice, not as buggy as the other office suites, and has decent filters. Downside, Corel is selling its Linux division so support might dissapear. Oh, and it was built for KDE. Just a thought.
I agree, StarOffice is no where near MS Office. But then again MS Office was no where near WordPerfect Suite until Office 95. Frankly, having used MS Office 2000, 97, 95, StarOffice 5.2, WordPerfect Suites 2000, 8, 7, 6, and WordPerfect 5 I prefer the new WordPerfect Suite 2000 over everything else that I have tried. QuattroPro has finally mostly recovered from being down ever since Suite 6 vs Office 95. Of course one definate advantage for me is that WordPerfect Suite 2000 runs on Linux.
True, people like familier setups. I setup an account for my near computer illiterate roommate last year with a gnome desktop that looked very similar to that of Windows. Corel WordPerfect 2000 for Linux and Netscape 4.7* on the desktop, gmc for the graphical shell. He had no problems picking it up, he was sort of confused at first because the desktop looked slightly different. As soon as he started to try to find things he reallized that there was nothing to be afraid of.
It really isn't that hard anymore. Debian on a CD, StarOffice on another, and a fast internet connection. It has become very easy to install systems that people are very comfortable with.
This may seem like just small pickings, but it is starting to have an effect. Corel and IBM tried to fight fair and on Microsofts turf. Sun is throwing low blows and invading Microsofts turf while not giving theirs up.
Is it up to par right now? Of course not. Was MS Office up to par with WordPerfect Suite until MS Office 95? Not even close. These things take time.
Microsoft is being attacked by three directions by threats that could could topple them. The Justice Department, Linux, and Sun. This could get really bloody.
I don't know much about the "genius" visa, luckly other comments have dealt with that issue.
I believe in order to be an "official" genius one needs to have one of two qualifications. Either an IQ score of over 160, or be accepted into MENSA.
Most of my stay was in Petersburg.
With the hot water, I did notice that several apartments that I saw had their own water heaters. I stayed with a family, actually it was only an pensioner who supplemented her income through home stays, and she had one of these water heaters. Even if they do do maintenance there every summer, they are spending quite a bit of money on refurbing a lot of stuff for the big b-day party in two years. While I was there most of Nevski Prospekt, and Bolshoi Prospekt on Vassilevski island were torn up as part of the refrubishing for said event.
I never saw any automatic doors at the supermarkets, but I only visited a handful. I tried to avoid them because they were generally a lot more expensive then the rinoks, and there wasn't any difference in quality.
One problem that will have a major effect on Russia in the up coming years if the economy doesn't turn around is their new policy on higher education. Up until just recently, college in Russia was paid for, now they are approaching the system, as they put it, American style. I met a few people who had just eeked by the deadline, but new students have to find their own way of paying for college. This is the beginnings of a brain drain, as time passes a fewer percentage of people will have college level education. I do know that the Russian undergraduate degree is a two year program, but that is two years of schooling that won't be had.
I just came back from a 9 week trip to Russia a little over a month ago. Yes, they have some severe economic problems, mostly stemming from corruption. The government needs to stamp out corruption within the country in order for an economy to thrive. Stamp out corruption and they would be fine, trust me.
As for Russia throwing away its science programs, that is just plain dumb. They cannot afford to have another brain drain. Frankly, what space has is money. Tito payed $20 million dollars to go up in space for a while. If I remember correctly the Soyez space vehicle only takes roughly $10 million per launch. This is money in the pocket. Money desparately needed to fund other programs, education, military, science, you name it. Russia IS focusing on rebuilding their "ruined" country by focusing on space.
Doctors are not paid in trade by the government anymore. There are not huge lines for buying food at markets. In fact I bought food at a fancy place called an univermag, which translates to supermarket, where they had everything that a US supermarket would have except for the automatic doors. Moscow looks as clean and modern, discounting the 14th-19th century architecture that seems randomly scattered about the city and the lack of a "sky line", as most of Denver. St. Petersburg is going through major restoration as they prepair for their 300th birthday in 2003. While I was there a good portion of the St. Petersburg lost hot water because they were fixing all of the pipes.
Russia is focusing on rebuilding their country, and if it weren't for the corruption, they would be doing very well. People are working hard to try and get their country back on track. I am not surprised at how frustrated they get, and the drinking they do, when all of that hard work seems to be going nowhere as the ruble slips to the dollar weekly. They are hard working people, and smart people, they just don't have a handle on capitalism yet, nor have they eliminated the biggest problem that is preventing their economy from growing.
I only wish that the US honored and reviered its scientists and poets as the Russians do. They continue to fund science because they know that when their economy turns around, their being on par, or slightly behind, the rest of the major economic players scientifically is going to be necessary. When their economy turns around they will be a major force quickly.
Cray was sold off, I think it was last year, to a company that is now named Cray.
SGI may still be a player, but they are having some severe problems right now.
Actually, I believe with the release of Solaris 8 Sun started telling people to stop buying Veritas because of a newly added feature to UFS that causes problems with Veritas. Benifit, you don't have to deal with forking over huge amounts of money to Veritas. Downside, UFS still sucks and everyone, including Sun, knows it.
By support, if you mean calling someone up on tech support then I believe they go back to 2.5, their first release of a 64 bit OS, it was a duel release with the UltraSPARC I. The documentation online still has information for those who use the old SunOS, when it was 100% BSD. I know this because I had to deal with said documentation.
Something tells me that the next generation of Tandem will not be using the McKinley processors. First the next generation would have to be YEARS off from now because Intel seems to having a lot of trouble getting Merced, err Itanium, out the door, let alone McKinley. Second isn't there talk about how McKinley really isn't going to be the next best thing sence sliced bread that Intel and HP had been toating it to be.
I haven't heard anything about the reliability of the McKinley chip, but I doubt that it will be nearly as reliable as MIPS or the Alpha for two reasons. First the McKinley has not had years of in the field testing that the other two have had. The second is Intels record for reliability.
Someone needs to defend the SPARC chipset, and what [I see] Sun Microsystems is doing, so here I am.
Sure the single processor, or even up to 8 processor results are not the greatest thing out there. In the single through four processor units Intel beats them, and higher the Power series takes over. What one tends to forget is, for a processor that is designed for SMP, A) 1024 processors linearly is damn good, and B) it is relatively cheap for a server class processor. Also the SPARC line is known to have the least number of hardware bugs of any major processor out there.
Sun really doesn't need a sports car of a chip anyway. Servers and workstations need uptime. They don't need to attack the user market yet. First they seem to be more actively attacking the workstation market with the sub-$1000 SunBlades. With a Sun solution the workstation only needs to be moderately fast, but the server needs to be DAMN fast because the most intensive processes run on the server and display over the network. Small steps.
Okay, how about WordPerfect Suite 2000 for Linux? Costs about a quarter of MS Office and has full functionality. And don't give me this crap about how MS Office is SOO much better unless you have ACTUALLY TRIED both. WordPerfect is as good, if not better than Word. QuattroPro is not as good as Excel, but it is not something to scoff at. The everything else, Presentations, Paradox, etc... is as good as any MS product. Just because MS has illegaly used their monopoly to pressured the computer manufactures to install MS Office, and on top of that, broke all conversions as soon as they had the upper hand, thereby creating larger dominance in the market does not make their product orders of magnitude better.
Funny thing, unless the people are trying to attach Visual Basic scripts to their documents or spreadsheets, which I doubt your part-time secretary will be doing, someone who learns on WordPerfect and QuattroPro will have no problems with moving over to Word and Excel. This is probably because MS copied the WordPerfect and QuattroPro layouts (yes, WordPerfect and QuattroPro were there before Word and Excel).
Anyway, cost is a huge deal. When I was in high school Windows 95 came out. First the school was not about to install Windows 95 on their 486SX25's, but they A) didn't have the money for new computers, and B) didn't have the money for the OS. 20 licenses at $100 each is $2000, that could buy one classroom full of books. And considering our US Government class's text book was from 1984 we desperately need the books over an expensive OS.
Look at today. If you are a principal who is working with a very tight budget you have a couple options.
- Spend $X per license each time MS comes out with a new OS or a new Office suite. That way your school can produce those workers for the "standard" jobs. Thereby running your school in the ground by spending way too much money on expensive software.
- Have the volentary Sys-Admin install Linux, which is free, and then 1/4th as much on licenses for Office software that is just as good as any MS product.
In the end it not only costs less to do the second plan but there are also other benifits. Students can learn how to work with a UNIX environment, which, in big businesses, is not as uncommon as one might think. The students, especially in a charter school, are probably getting quite a bit of experience with Windows at home anyway.Other things that I feel should be done are.
The Ultra III was only started about 7 years ago, if I correctly remember the info that I got when I worked at Sun. It was released after 6 years of development, only a year behind schedule. Frankly, I don't understand you arguments of why the Ultra's and RISC processors are going to die.
Although I agree that the Alpha and the MIPS that SGI uses are going out. Also there is, or at least was, a planned kill date for the PA-RISC chips that HP uses. Those have evidence but the IBM Power series and the Sun Ultra series still seem to sell very well. Companies still need very large machines to take care of business, and the big players still use RISC architecture, architecture that scales.
The IA-64 has had major problems, and is several years late. Sun has pulled its support of the IA-64 chips even after they proved that Solaris 8 runs without a hitch on them because they realize that there is nothing to worry about right now. There are huge performance problems, and being a brand new architecture, it will have to go through several generations before the bugs are worked out. Meanwhile the Ultra chips have a reputation of having the fewest number of bugs upon release.
The big SMP machines may start to make more of a come back. The idea of having applications on the net and having bare bones machines in peoples homes is the directions that I see all of the major players going. The best machines to handle large loads are not x86 style machines but the "slow" work horses that today are all RISC.
Aging Ultra II processors may be nothing to write home about but they work, and work, and work. The chip is and more importantlyand more importantlystable, and reliable, and so is the OS. People can depend on their ability to handle large loads, even if they are not exactly the fastest things out there.
Rack mounted Alpha's could most likely handle the load of the Sun ES10000, but there are several drawbacks. First you have to deal with Alpha's, which, althought are amazing machines, have issues of lack of support and development, and frankly are very expensive. I am currently working in a High Energy Physics lab with huge numbers of relatively new Alphas and trying to find software that is not a rev or two behind the other UNICes is difficult. On top of that the Ultra 60 that was purchased was a much better deal with better support. Alpha clusters are powerful but a
multiprocessor Sun box will do a more effecient job because the processors are designed for it.
Um, I don't think that Marc Garneau made it into space. On Jan. 28th 1984 the Challenger blew up on takeoff. If he was on it then he died before he made it.
I live in Boulder, CO and have seen drastic differences between ADSL and Cable connections.
Although ADSL has the capability of 4+ Megabit connections, Qwest Communications limits ones max speed depending on how much money you spend a month. $40-month will get you 640k, 6 months ago it was 256k (ATT@Home started offering Cable service 6 months ago). In order to get 1M you need to spend ~$100 a month.
These prices also assume that you choose "Deluxe" service and have a free DNS server. The "Deluxe" service allows one to stay online indefinately, whereas the regular service kicks you off if the number or regular service members goes up and you have been online for a while. When you get bumped during regular service you must waite at least 5 minutes before reconnecting. Also, if you aren't a student using the University service then you have to pay for a DNS server to handle your account, which costs roughly another $18 per month. Therefore, for 640k speeds then expect to pay ~$58 per month.
The cable modem I now have averages download speeds of ~1M, I have seen speeds of no lower than 640k download but as high as 3M. Upload speeds are currently capped at 128k. Due to the competition ATT informed me that if I were to see noticeable degredation of speed during peak hours to contact them and they would alliviate the problem. According to the technicion, when ATT put in the new infastructure they allowed for easy branching of the cable cells to allow for growth. I pay $40 per month, no extra charge for a DNS hookup or having to choose "Deluxe" service.
Qwest is having their lunch taken by ATT right now. I have not heard a single complaint from Bouder users about ATT@Home, whereas the number of people who are discontent with their ADSL service seems to grow monthly. I suspect that in order to compete with ATT that Qwest will bump up the speeds of the basic connection again. I must say, competition can be great when it exists.
Even if I did believe in God, I wouldn't thank Stalin for his contribution to WWII.
It has been said that only two men from the Bolshevik party could have suceeded in stopping the German war machine on the Soviet front, one being Stalin the other being Trotsky. Many of the ideas for the modernization of the Soviet Union that Stalin used were actually Trotsky's ideas. Trotsky saw that there was an abundance of minerals at the Ural mountains and that they needed to move factories there to prevent the destruction Soviet industry in case of attack from Europe. Trotsky was the one who came up with the 5 year plans. Trotsky was also a great general, if you have studied the revolution you would know that he lead the Red Army. But it was shown that Trotsky had more compassion for the Soviet people than Stalin. Stalin stole the leadership of the Soviet Union and murdered tens of millions of people, whether it be from lack of safety in his 5 year plans, or the GULag, or what he did in WWII.
Stalin threw divisions of soldiers who did not have guns at the Germans. If a general retreated for any reason what-so-ever and survived, he was executed. The only reason why Stalin did as well as he did during WWII was not because he was a military genius but because he cared so little about the Soviet people that he was willing to sacrifice every last one of them in order to defeat Germany.
The Allies would have eventually defeated the Nazis. The Russians sped the processes up dramatically, but by the end of the war all of factories in Europe could not compete with the production of the United States. That is a KNOW FACT! There were factories in Detroit that were producing a B-29 EVERY DAY! No factory in the Luftwafa had that capability.
I refuse to thank a person who is responsible for the deaths of more than 40 million people, and that number continues to grow as more records are uncovered. Stalin should never be praised, anything he did that might be considered "good" came from him standing on the dead bodies of giants. It sickens me to think that someone would praise Stalin, who I consider the most evil man of the 20th century.
And yes, I have studied the differences between Stalinism and Leninism. I have studied Russian and Soviet history, and I have quite a few good friends who are Russian who I talk to about their culture's history.
The proposal for the detector said that it would have a luminosity of 2 fb-1 (inverse femto-barns for those who don't know the units) but the techs at Fermilabs have a reputation of getting better then predicted luminosity. It is probably too early to tell, but does someone know if they have once again done better then expected? Talking with my advisor 2 fb-1 isn't good enough to get reliable information on the existance of the Higgs, and considering I am doing some research in Supersymmetry I am very interested the potential discovery of a "low" energy higgs.
The moon may become useful for planetary exploration. There are two approaches for going to Mars, there is Dr. Zubrin's Mars Direct approach, and there is the stepping stone approach. The first is to just go to Mars, do not go to the moon, do not build a station there. The second approach is to first go to the moon, and get some experience building in a low-g enivronment. From there use the moon station as a stepping stone to other planets like mars.
Personally I think that the Mars direct approach is what is needed right now, and then we should come back to build the stepping stone. I feel this way because I have little faith in the American people to keep interest in going to Mars while we sit on the moon. After the public becomes interested in space exploration again, after going to Mars, convince them that building the stepping stone on the moon is necessary. Build factories on the moon and then launch larger vehicles from the moon and its smaller gravity well. etc...