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"The real question, why would Apple want to show a GUI on the mac that you could use instead of it's own?"

Run it in rootless and it runs side-by-side with Aqua.

Here is why they would show it and I use it:

I can ssh into our local Math/Comp Sci cluster, load up xemacs on my laptop, and work remotely using XWindows applications.

Using OroborOSX I even get an Aqua appearance to the windows!

On the whole, lots of peripherals and expansion cards back then had ridiculous amounts of processing power. For example, the floppy drive usually used on the C64, the 1541, had a 6502 processor (a slightly older version of the 6510 used in the C64 itself). C64 facts from here. The floppy drive was connected to the machine with an insanely slow serial port, so it had to work more or less autonomously.

The silliest example of over-powerful peripherals has to be the General Sound card for the ZX Spectrum. The General Sound contains a 12 MHz Z80 and 128 K RAM, upgradable to 512. The Spectrum contains 48 or 128 K RAM (256 or 512 on some clones) and has a 3.5 MHz Z80 (7 MHz or more in some clones). In other words, the sound card (which is fully programmable) is more than 3 times as powerful as the machine it's connected to. General Sound info here.

For today, ponder the latest 3D graphics accelerator.

I know they also now have new backends for grabbing TV listings for the USA and Canada which I have quickly tried successfully.

This gentleman said nothing about Microsoft keeling over. Microsoft Windows had one of the largest codebases in the world, as does Unix and Linux. He is pointing out the natural resistance to do a complete redesign and refactor that all corporations have (simple lack of middle-management foresight). As a matter of fact Microsoft is now the exception. Halting all software development and performing a "security and bug sweep" has most corporate software managers scratching their heads thinking Bill Gates is insane. This is developer garbage collection on a grand scale. He points out in his report that if this maintenance of the core of the software is not done then a time will come when the software will collapse and be beyond all human understanding, even if stabilisation methods are used such as compartmentalisation (JavaBeans, C++ libraries and OOP) or abstraction (4GL).

Linux however has shown that the core (kernel) itself is altered almost as much as the source code of gcc and other heavy-development software. The jump to kernel 2.2 to 2.4 with increased SMP capabilities needed the kernel core to be re-examined and re-engineered. Gutting a whale and putting it back together >> gutting an amoeba and putting it back together. The low latency and kernel pre-emption patches make big changes (not algorithmically but widespread and far-reaching) than ANY Microsoft patch, even a jump from Windows 2000 to Windows XP. I mean replacing almost all OS spinlocks - WHOA! Although the growing pains are starting to show such as VM problems and Linus keeping up with patches. I remember that article that stated that Microsoft Office is 2000% oversized, and I bet that's just because they got rid of clippy. Well that is what this researcher states happens - more bloat, double the software size and all you can add is one new feature because there are so many bugs and nobody understands how your change will cascade to the rest of the program - you could have broken it, simply because the program is too damn complicated.

I am not holding my breath waiting for Microsoft to keel over into a monstrous pile of cyberwreckage any time soon

I was until Microsoft did their code audit. It was an unprecedented moment, it was like I'd heard on the news that Ford had stopped building cars for the next 10 years to cut out the unnecessary transistors from the Engine Management Unit. I always imagined some dumbass Micro$oft manager trying to insert a patch to make XML-RPC backwards compatible with DCOM screwing the company over. Damn, Billy-boy Gates is not that stupid.

A bit of self-publicity... my "nothing to hide" t-shirt was inspired by this sort of argument. Drop me an email (phr at doc.ic.ac.uk) if you want one. I might do a print run if there's enough interest.

Instead of virally spreading ability to sublicense, have the viral-propagated clause be an admission that the developer remembers copyrighted information from the 'shared source', and an acknowledgement that the developer does not have rights to use the copyrighted information.

This is a FUD that seemed to have somehow sproud here in slashdot in the past.
I advice everybody who is interested in these things to get a clue on copyrightlaw first, in the way it is legal reality, not in the way we would understand justice. (legal reality is not equal to the public legal conception. It generally should be, but it isn't...)

http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~nd/surprise_95/journal/vo l4/hml/report.html

To be exact, looking at source/plans/layouts, then laying them aside, and use the ideas for your own project _is legal_, no lawyer and not even ms can change that. To protect the ideas you need patents, best just read the article from my link, I think it's just excellent.

Didn't have any problems with my sex life being affected by my programming until, while in college, I learned about recursion. Everything went fine until the bed ran out of stack space and it all fell over.

As for me, I tried a lot of continuations after leaving college, but grew disenchanted because you could never be sure if they were GC'ed or if you would be interrupted at an inopportune time....

True. At Imperial College, often referred to as "Europe's answer to MIT", roughly half the workstations are Linux, about 40% dual-boot Linux with either Win2K or WinNT and the rest triple-boot into Linux, Windows and Minix. All the servers are Linux, of course.

This leads to systems like mcvax, which for much of the time, that system wasn't a Vax. Don't put ANYTHING into a hostname that might change. That means no system type, no location, no usage of the system.

I imagine that any self respecting country would have some kind of indigenous dino maker. Let's see. Germany? Nope. UK? Nope. Similar pages can be found for France. Bully for Germany and Japan for at least trying, but it looks like the US kicks ass in this field. I suppose that you can charge alot when you make something others have a hard time keeping up with.

We shall see the merits of the case.

I imagine that any self respecting country would have some kind of indigenous dino maker. Let's see. Germany? Nope. UK? Nope. Similar pages can be found for France. Bully for Germany and Japan for at least trying, but it looks like the US kicks ass in this field. I suppose that you can charge alot when you make something others have a hard time keeping up with.

We shall see the merits of the case.

(XDarwin rocks)

Check out OroborOSX for some neat improvements to XDarwin

Couldn't one create a distributed PC client that would compile the TV listings from around the world (Maybe leeching content off of TVGuide.com).

Even more interesting than that idea is that you don't need to chew on HTML to get the listings. See XMLTV.

Now that I have some free time on my hands, I think I'm going to start that home PVR project based on XMLTV. You don't need to sacrifice useability either, as there is code out there for on-screen menuing. Nice.

Here's a rather pointless patch for info.

The justification for Core Linux - that it doesn't include crap which you don't need - is weakened a bit by the existence of distros like Slackware which let you choose exactly how much stuff to install. Okay even Slackware doesn't let you go down to the _absolute_ minimum - but it is good enough for all but the crustiest hardware and most fanatical users.

I find that the limiting factor is usually disk space, followed by RAM in which to run the installer. RedHat 7.x requires lots of RAM for its installer, but 6.x is okay with twelve megs. Slackware 7.0 can manage with eight megs (with some fiddling). I currently run Slackware on one box, and a modified RH 6.1 on others. Once you're over the initial hump of installation there is no real difference between an old machine and a new one, apart from speed. I prefer to stick with mainstream distributions even at the expense of some monkeying around, rather than get diverted towards specialized GNU/Linuxes. The reason for putting Linux on the older boxes to start with is an obsession with running the same thing everywhere :-).

Even in C this can be avoided with function pointers. However, in real languages (heck, even in JavaScript!), functions are just another data type that can be freely passed around - and in really good languages, even be passed around partially applicated.

Say you have a function add(a, b) { a + b }. In a functional language supporting currying, you can say "let add_one = add 1" (or "add_one = add(1)" in C-style syntax). You can now take this newly generated function and store it in fancy data structures, call it when you feel like it, or pass it as a callback to a button. Try that with Java.

(Side note: There is a language extending Java to support functions as data - it's called Pizza. Try finding it on Goole :)

A basic interview at Imperial College, London is here.

Then again, his father invented Jif! (It's in the text of the interview.)

Funny thing is, he catapulted to fame by trying to update Darwin, not argue the theories were bollocks.

Self-promoting twat.

* A remote
What about LIRC?

* Detailed TV schedule data
XML TV

* Able to record up to 30 hours of programming
I think thats only limited by the size of the hdd.

* Easy to use UI that is usable on a TV screen
What?? You wouldn't use cron? :) Seriously, there is a link (I wish I bookmarked it) where I saw a linux app doing on-tv UI. Does anyone know the site?

* (and this is a big one) DOES NOT CRASH
I don't see how this project is anymore crash-prone than others...

The "cool" factor is there, but that's not why I'd do it.... oh who am I kidding, that's the only reason. :) You could rig up networking, so you could program the thing to record from your desktop, you could transfer recordings to your PC for burning or p2p sharing, etc.

As for the cheap factor, I don't know if it would be, but it sure doesn't seem so. The main things you need are a decent cpu, hard drive, and capture card. And at least you wouldn't be tied to TiVo at the hip for the schedule uptdates.

It's not a directory in the sense of "something to put files in" (that would propably be "Active Folder" in MS parlance), it is a directory service, in the sense LDAP is (and in fact, you can query it via LDAP.

It's not a directory in the sense of "something to put files in" (that would propably be "Active Folder" in MS parlance), it is a directory service, in the sense LDAP is (and in fact, you can query it via LDAP.

Pay no attention to the square brackets - slashcode thinks every http server has a three part name (some have more).

You'll also need XDarwin, of course, which should be installed before you install OroborosX.

Including the patches, which are not enabled unless you choose the option while configuring the kernel, wouldn't mess up kernel debugging, would it?

But if a user has preempt enabled and submits a bug report, that bug report becomes very difficult for kernel developers to decipher. Not to mention that hard-to-reproduce bugs may show up under preempt, then you have to build a non-preempt kernel and try for a potentially long time to reproduce the error.

I am not a kernel hacker, and I was not commenting on the code; I feel that the idea of leveraging the SMP locks is elegant.

It would be, if the locking requirements for SMP were sufficient to deal with the locking requirements for preempt. But they're not, these are really two different beasts--see my other message under this topic for a laundry list of reasons and linux-kernel topic to read.

Could you explain what "live locks" are, please? I'm not familiar with the term.

Definition of livelock

Sumner

Is THIS it?

OS X works fine. I NEVER boot into OS 9 or open Classic. I've had two crashes since August 21st and my machine has been running almost constantly (I really need a UPS...). All in all, it is the most reliable computer I've ever used - including my SuSE Linux box.

Smbclient is built-in

I've never had a chance to try to use smb printer sharing. Sorry.

Smb sharing is done just like it is under Linux.

I run Oroboros-X on XDarwin. I run X apps from my Linux box for the fun of it.

I've compiled lots of Linux and BSD software w/out any major hassles. The GNU Mac OS X Public Archive has ports available as source and binaries. In most cases, I just download and compile apps as if I were on my Linux box.

I have a home network with three PCs (2 Win9x, 1 Linux), two Macs (one is ancient, one is a G4 w/OS X), and an AppleTalk laser printer.

Here at the CPSE at Imperial College, London, I use a set of C++ class libraries called ooMILP (Tsiakis/Pantelides). They basically provide an OO wrapper between the integer/linear program solver (eg CPLEX) and your code. I find them really useful for my PhD work in process scheduling.

First, there's the XonX project, where they've developed a way to run rootless XFree86. It's kind of a pain to get working, so you need:

XDarwin, which is a nice way to get XFree86 windows run next to MacOSX's Aqua windows. However, even this has its faults, so I highly recommend:

OroborOSX, which is an X11 window manager/environment. I've been running 0.75a3 and a4 for a little while now, and it's pretty good. I haven't successfully compiled any X applications for it, but I haven't had much time over Christmas break to work seriously on it.

If you're looking for UNIX software to run on Mac OS X, try Fink, which aims to port all sorts of UNIX software to OS X. There's also the GNU Mac OS X Public Archive, which I only just found, and some Mac OS X ports on Forked.net, which I used to solve some initial XDarwin issues I was having.

Anyway, Microsoft wouldn't be able to port Office for OS X to UNIX very easily, we can move UNIX software (and even X11 software) to Mac OS X without too much difficulty.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -Ghandi

I know for a fact that Lucent tech still has some mainframe in the middle of the US that runs dos and they have a hugely complex interface layer to work with it today, since I was almost hired to work on it. Its for order placing or something.

I seriously doubt that this system was MS-DOS. More likely it was IBM's "Disk Operating System". See:

http://foldoc.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?Dis k+ Operating+System
.

Not at all. However, the article in question is using established principles in logic and mathematics to assess the complexity of software development. It has nothing to do with constraining computers or the abstractions they use; it's more like using physics to describe phenomena we observe - it may be only one possible abstraction, but it's one we don't know how to violate. So the point is simply that there is solid evidence that developing software is a tough problem, and you won't solve the problem by railing against the computer industry and claiming that you alone have the solution.

I certainly don't think that users of computers should have to learn anything at all about computer science. However, you seem to be attempting to go beyond what users usually do, creating an apparently ambitious software framework. As such, you're no longer simply a user, whether you admit it or not; and as such, if you ignore other efforts in similar areas, you're simply making your own life more difficult and not doing anything to diminish your chances of failure.

Along those lines, you've repeatedly indicated that you consider your VIC to be some kind of absolute truth - "natural logic", "cannot avoid using", etc. Yet you seem to understand that no abstraction is all-encompassing - you alluded to that when you said "Math is a subset from the spectrum of available abstractions." Don't fall into the trap of thinking that VIC is the only way of looking at the problem you've chosen to explore. In fact, as a flexibility exercise, I'd suggest starting from scratch and coming up with a completely different way of looking at the problem. If you can't do it, it may mean that you're stuck in a rut. If you can do it, you're likely to find that your original model will be strengthened by the experience.

You've objected to the idea that you need to learn about computer science; how far do you extend that approach? For example, another field of study I can recommend, outside computer science but certainly relevant to it, is that of philosophy of science. It's worth learning and understanding how scientific theories are developed and how they evolve. Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" makes a good starting point. What applies to scientific theories applies equally to almost any abstract model. Formal thinking about such things can help avoid unproductive blind alleys.

But in all of these programming lanuguages, the list of programming concepts is by far, a great deal smaller

Although probably not as small as you think, based on your limited experience of programming languages and computer science. In a sense, programming encompasses the whole of mathematics, and functional programming exploits this fact. In another sense, programming is mathematics - as demonstrated by the lambda calculus, and by the Church-Turing thesis - notably, a postulate of mathematical logic rather than computer science as such.

The article on /. today about evolution and the Linux kernel (quite relevant to the discussion we've been having) included an interesting quote by Alan Cox on the linux-kernel mailing list, to the effect that engineering doesn't need science, that brick walls were being built before we understood how concrete worked. But as one of the /. postings pointed out, that led to problems, a famous example being that of the perceived need at one time for enormous "flying buttresses" to stop large cathedrals from falling apart.

There are plenty of equivalents to flying buttresses in existing computer systems; but to avoid them, and learn how to do things that don't need them, things that allow you to scale to higher levels of abstraction, you really need to learn about the fundamentals of the field. If you don't, well, again, I can only wish you the best of luck...

I real basic terms, to glob is to expand a wildcard character to mean one or more characters. Like if you say something like "sudo rm -rf /*" that asterisk is expanded to mean "zero or more of any character". You might have also seen the question mark used. It means one single character. The Foldoc web site has a much better explanation.

Oh, and while smarter people than I are explaining...the quote at the bottom (the one I see)...what is a Vegemite? Ever since that Men at Work song, I've wondered.

Vegemite is a nasty product made of yeast extract. It's a brownish paste-like stuff which is spread on bread and the like. An Aussie could probably explain better. I tasted it just once (on a cracker), and that was enough for me.

-B

--Mid

Actually, FreeBSD was based on BSD 4.4-lite, so calling Slackware ``BSD-lite'' could be a little bit confusing to some people.

The original poster says part of what's prompting this consideration of IDE's is a desire for greater productivity. Do you buy that assumption? As soon as someone starts thinking a tool will make developers code faster, I start thinking of various chapters in The Mythical Man-Month. There ain't no silver bullet!

I've gone from being IDE-dependent to IDE-free, largely as a result of moving from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X. On 9, without a command line, an IDE was a practical neccessity -- for a project of several hundred source files, I'm not sure that the drag-and-drop javac (or jikes) would even work, since you needed the IDE to manage all those files and their dependencies. I started with the late, beloved Roaster, then moved on to CodeWarrior.

I changed jobs (bad move, but beside the point) and went to more of a Unix shop right around the time Mac OS X Public Beta was released. I coded on a Linux box until OS X was final, and have now gone Mac-only. As you'd expect in a unix shop, everything is done with makefiles, so you don't need the IDE to manage your dependencies. In a case like this, if your makefile is doing fancy stuff like building distribution jars, zips, or wars, making rmi stubs/skels, etc., the IDE actually will slow you down because you have to jump out of it and go to a command line to use make.

Some of my fellow team members are using IntelliJ just for the styled-text editing, but at this point, I'm using emacs in XFree86 with the wonderful OroborOSX window manager.

On the other hand, we're still using println's for debugging. I'm the only one here who understands jdb, and I rarely use it, so maybe that's an area where an IDE would help. Whether your IDE supports servlet debugging is another matter.

If your boss wants you to be more efficient, tell her to give you more weeks up front for design, and use it. Better designed code always pays off.

At the risk of sounding pedantic, I suggest that people working on new distributions or new enhancement to Gnome/KDE-like desktop environments look at what Apple has done with the user interface of Mac OS X.

On top of what is basically BSD, they have created a wonderful system. What looks and feels like a regular old Mac cranked up to 11, with semitransparent windows and buttons, trilinearly-interpolated stuff flying all around, antialiased fonts and lines everywhere, OpenGL and PDF widgets, has all of the UNIX-like underpinnings. I can open up a terminal window, run my zsh, fire up ssh, launch emacs, and compile stuff with gcc. X11 runs seamlessly with the rest of the windows using OroborOSX, and that's just for the geeks. The people like my wife still have GUIs for all of the "other stuff" that people want to deal with: preference settings, launching commonly-used apps, network diagnostics, heck, even the files in /etc are modifiable through a really nice GUI system (Netinfo Manager).

So check it out for inspiration!

I started using MS-DOS with version 3.3, where edlin was the only editor available. But it was so yucky I never learned to use it, preferring 'copy con filename' to create a file and 'copy con +filename' to append. I think I used the editor built into XTree for other stuff.

Then last year I wanted an automated way to reboot some NT machines into Linux, by changing NT's boot menu. This is a text file boot.ini which you edit. How can this be done automatically?

Well you can guess the answer: good old edlin is still included with NT to this day (though I expect it's a 32-bit rewrite rather than the DOS assembler version). So I dug out an IBM manual for MS-DOS 2.0 and worked out how to change the boot.ini file using the One True Editor. For extra perversity, I wasn't running it myself but rather writing a Perl script which uses the Expect module to telnet to an NT box, run edlin and then reboot it.

So I never needed to learn edlin for MS-DOS, but it still comes in handy for Windows systems two decades later...

Don't forget Mel!

What's more, the service is emminently hackable so if they really did go down it wouldn't be hard to build a listings service that kept the unit functionality going in spite of a company closure. Several people have claimed to hack this already, though code is not readily available last I checked (for obvious reasons). Either way, I've got my daily calls going over my ethernet network, so it wouldn't be hard to sniff out the necessary bits or put some work into documenting the MFS partition formats and inserting it directly from a source like XMLTV.

So, for a fun project and damn useful toy, grab yourself a 20 hour Tivo cheap (see AVS TiVo Forums for pointers to cheap deals at Wal-Mart, Target, etc.), a big harddrive (most any 5400 rpm will do), and a hard drive bracket and ethernet adapter (here's a good tutorial). Then have fun with a device that's both well suited to the task (stable, nice tv based user interface, very sharp picture) and gives you a chance to sink your teeth into some fun hacks.

FWIW, I've been spending a lot of time hacking up my own media-box project of late and I really think that it isn't yet a viable option. Dual booting Debian/WinME with a AIW Radeon and SB Live Platinum 5.1 gives you the ability to do everything a TiVo can and more, but the interface, stability, and interoperability leave a lot to be desired. On the up side, its great to be able to play DivX, MP3, Emulators, etc. in the living room A/V system. Wonderful as a system oriented towards archived playback, music, and games, but don't buy one thinking its going to be nearly as useful in place of a TiVo.

... rjs

1. PVR - record TV to hard drive, pause live TV etc.
2. basic local programming guide
3. advanced local programming guide (recommendations, sophisticated search etc.)
4. modular component fits well into home AV system

1. monthly fee
2. some tracking of user activity

1. find a way to get TV listings for your locality
2. find some PVR software (if it didn't already come with your video hardware)

Shades of the whole 486SX debacle?

Got you covered, check this out:
http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~epa98/work/apps/xmltv/

Next problem?
--

I wrote a small utility that lets you say: amount cp /mnt/floppy/*.txt somewhere. It mounts whatever's needed before running the command, and unmounts it afterwards.

I think everyone here needs to go back and review what they forgot from CS 101.

"(OS) The low-level software which handles the interface to peripheral hardware, schedules tasks, allocates storage, and presents a default interface to the user when no application program is running."

Your nitpicking is especially silly in this context, because the only place "AI" is used the way you're using it is in Science Fiction. In the real world, "Artificial Intelligence" refers to a area of scientific investigation, not to a kind of postmodern robot. And this area includes expert systems!

Also, few serious thinkers accept the Turing Test as an objective benchmark of anything. Turing himself never called it that. He called a "game" and used it to demonstrate that people relied on some silly preconceptions when they evaluate "intelligence".

__

Your nitpicking is especially silly in this context, because the only place "AI" is used the way you're using it is in Science Fiction. In the real world, "Artificial Intelligence" refers to a area of scientific investigation, not to a kind of postmodern robot. And this area includes expert systems!

Also, few serious thinkers accept the Turing Test as an objective benchmark of anything. Turing himself never called it that. He called a "game" and used it to demonstrate that people relied on some silly preconceptions when they evaluate "intelligence".

__

This is NOT an AI. This is an expert system.

I would refer you to the FOLDOC definition of expert system:

"An expert system is an artificial intelligence application that uses a knowledge base of human expertise to aid in solving problems."

It is not the case that .org is "for non-profits". While it may be an appropriate superdomain for a non-profit organization, it was intended as a miscellaneous category for organizations that do not fit any other top-level domain. The difference may be subtle, but with "non profit organization" having a very specific legal meaning (at least in the US), I think it is an important one.

I look through photo.net to find random images for websites. Although most of the photos on there are not free (in the GNU sense), they do store copyright permissions for each image so you can check. (I haven't yet found a way to filter searches so only free images show up.)

There's a simple patch you can make to OpenSSH to enable the cipher 'none' (no encryption). I did that to let my PS/2 Model 55SX work reasonably for remote X applications, while keeping the familiar ssh interface.

If you want a 'pure' X terminal with no disk at all, you might as well send the X protocol straight over the network, no ssh involved. But if you have a mixed-use system with some local and some remote stuff, and you have a trusted network that isn't going to be eavesdropped, 'ssh -c none' is pretty neat. You can always go back to Blowfish or 3DES for connecting to stuff outside your local network.

There's a simple patch you can make to OpenSSH to enable the cipher 'none' (no encryption). I did that to let my PS/2 Model 55SX work reasonably for remote X applications, while keeping the familiar ssh interface.

If you want a 'pure' X terminal with no disk at all, you might as well send the X protocol straight over the network, no ssh involved. But if you have a mixed-use system with some local and some remote stuff, and you have a trusted network that isn't going to be eavesdropped, 'ssh -c none' is pretty neat. You can always go back to Blowfish or 3DES for connecting to stuff outside your local network.

Learning to be a good programmer is about learning and understanding fundamentals (conditionals, loops, functions ... ) and about learning to solve problems. People on introductory programming courses should be using a language that lets them think clearly about these things without having to worry about syntax or complex issues. This is where teaching languages are important.

However, teaching languages are not used in the "real world". The language which will get you a job at the moment is Java (in my experience), so students want to learn Java. Writing the Hello World program in Java shows why it doesn't make a good language for beginners. What's a pulbic static void main? the students cry. Beginners shouldn't have to know about things like this.

For my masters thesis I have been designing a language called Kenya. Kenya shares syntax with Java where appropriate but presents a procedural language which (and here's the good bit) can be automatically translated into the Java code which would be written to solve the same problem. This means students can easily move on to Java when they've learned the basics.

For more on Kenya see http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rbc97/Project

I don't need TiVo's 'intelligence' - I wrote XMLTV to grab listings in advance and semi-automatically pick what to watch. I still have to program the VCR for tomorrow's programmes, but that takes only five minutes. I'd much rather have some Perl code and an open file format (whether or not I wrote it myself) than rely on a subscription to some black-box consumer electronics. </plug>

(BTW - have a look at my TV preferences if you're curious - though this does include some shows I record for my younger brother. Honest...)