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"They make a point now of not sharing the details of the models with people. That would concern you if you had any intellectual curiosity."

Well, that is bullshit of incredible intensity. Just for curiosity, who exactly told you that? You presumably won't have any injection to sharing that data with us.
In return, I will share with you this thing called Google, with which I was able quite rapidly to find:
http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/fms
http://mitgcm.org/public/sourc...
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools...
http://www.nemo-ocean.eu/About...
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/re...
http://forge.ipsl.jussieu.fr/i...
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools...
http://www.cesm.ucar.edu/model...
http://www.cesm.ucar.edu/model...
http://www.cesm.ucar.edu/model...
http://edgcm.columbia.edu/
http://www.mi.uni-hamburg.de/f...
http://www.mi.uni-hamburg.de/H...
There's more but I'm tired of cut and pasting. You would be able to find these also if you have any intellectual curiosity, but them you might have to doubt the sources of your info on how bad the climatology people are, and how they're hiding the code to conceal that out doesn't work, and that maybe the models do run and give outputs, ave before you know it the foundations of you whole world view are shaken.

I prefer polipo

The source code for quite a few models is publicly available. Here are three: one, two, three. The last one even does development in a public repository (click "browse source" in the menu bar) and features quite detailed documentation.

Ok, so here's another one. What are coral islands really? What's the carbon levels in the sea as well as atmosphere over the geological timescales corals have existed?

For God's sake, can't you look up basic facts before you ask stupid questions? The coral that makes up atolls is *young*; it doesn't last because of wave erosion. To pick a random example, Narau's surface corals date from 300,000 to 5,000,000 years old. The last time we had a major ocean acidification event was the PETM, 55.8 million years ago.

The corals are going nowhere

Coral response to pH is extremely well understood, and it's very negative. Warming of water is also extremely dangerous to corals, who live within very narrow temperature bands and are not mobile. Anyone who's ever had a reef tank is well aware of this. You can see this effect in the wild with calcium carbonate-shelled organisms living near volcanic vents.

As for "the corals are going nowhere", how profoundly ignorant of the plight of the world's corals can you be? Over half of the world's reefs have already completely disappeared or are rapidly declining. Most of this so far had been due to pollution and overexploitation, but an increasing percent is due to the warming and increasingly acidic waters, measurements of which routinely exceed what corals can withstand. They're incredibly delicate organisms. The extremely hot 2005 Gulf of Mexico waters that fueled Katrina and Rita, for example, caused such a massive die-off that they put the Elkhorn and Staghorn corals on the endangered species list.

Seriously, read about a topic before you post on it.

and no, the seas aren't going acidic either.

"Anthropogenic ocean acidication over
the twenty-rst century and its impact on calcifying organisms". Ocean pH has decreased by approximately 0.075 since the industrial revolution.

And look, this isn't the first time this has happened. The exact same thing happened 55.8 million years ago. It was devastating. It left the world such a different place that we give it a new era name. We don't want to recreate that.

This is a physical problem. There is only so much spectrum available. Once the air is saturated on the allocated frequencies, we are done. No more room, period.

Nonsense. There's plenty of ways to make wireless networks scale.

Just off the top of my head, there are physical layer techniques, such as MIMO, that change the value of Shannon's limit by dramatically improving the signal/noise ration. There are network layer techniques, such as mesh networking, that allow you to use a larger number of less powerful radios, and hence allow more sharing of bandwidth in a given space. There are application layer techniques, such as distributed caching.

And all of that is without getting the politicians involved to give us back some of the bandwidth they have been giving away to corporations.

C is more readable, though.

Even if firefox didn't have addons, all it would take is a proxy filter to remove the ads and spyscripts. The proxy can run locally on the same machine as your browser, and you tell the browser to pass all the web page requests to the proxy. For example, I use Polipo to speed up web browsing, and of course there's the old squid that's bundled with every distro.

The only reason ad blockers prefer to run as a browser add-on is because the HTML page can be accessed easily using the DOM and javascript. If an ad blocker were to run inside a proxy, it would either have to filter the raw HTML like everybody did in the old days, or the proxy program itself would eventually evolve to expose the DOM as a service to various filtering modules.

Yes. Polipo is very good for HTML proxying, and will work with anything that deals with the CONNECT method (e.g. SSL). Openssh will do SOCKS forwarding, which is also handy. Anything UDP based will be a bit trickier, probably in the realm of "exercise for the reader", particularly if the content does port skipping and the like (like you'd expect a smart P2P protocol designer to do to avoid being stepped on by rate limiters, content inspectors/recorders, and the like).

... no longer needing ndiswrapper

You're confused. There already are reverse engineered drivers for Broadcom chips, and they are included in the Linux kernel tree, no less (b43 and b43legacy). These drivers were not developed by Broadcom, who provide their own binary driver for 2.4 kernels (wl.o).

This is about the firmware -- the binary blob that is loaded into the chip's embedded CPU, and with which the drivers, whether binary or opensource, need to interact.

I, for one, welcome open source firmware, and am looking forward to using the firmware's idea of link quality in my mesh networking experiments.

Unfortunately, my ISP [...] is stuck in dark ages.

You don't need assistance from your ISP to get IPv6 connectivity. You can use a number of IPv6 transition mechanisms, such as 6to4, Teredo, or configured tunnelling, to reach the IPv6 Internet wherever you are.

If you happen to be using Linux, I wrote a quick HOWTO about getting IPv6 connectivity without your ISP being involved.

I wonder if this could be used to help port OpenWRT over to the atheros chipset. Currently the only routers that OpenWRT (and conversely by that DD-WRT) really work well on are the broadcom chipsets.

Just the opposite. Broadcom-based routers work, but they use a binary driver and hence they are stuck with a 2.4 kernel. Which makes them unusable for those of us trying e.g. to build IPv6 firewalls.

The Atheros-based routers, on the other hand, are rock solid under 2.6.25. I'm running 10 of those in an experimental mesh network.

They audit every line of code they ship, including the external stuff they don't write.

Bollocks.

They only audit the base install. The ports tree is almost completely unmaintained.

I am the author of some software that ships in a number of OS distributions. In September 2005, I found a serious security bug in my code. I immediately notified the project's mailing list as well as all of my downstream distributors I was aware of. Debian, SuSE, FreeBSD and others that I forget immediately released an update. OpenBSD left the old, buggy version in the ports tree for three months.

I like polipo. It's much, much easier to use for personal browsing and you can have it cache your cgi-bin stuff or whatever. You should be able to set it up to cache the youtube videos, even if they are 'Cache-Control: no-cache'.

I tried to install squid, but it brought back sendmail nightmares. Squid is just way overkill for personal browsing proxy/cache.

Two points to keep in mind:

• don't write your own license, use a well-known license that people already understand;
• don't include an advertising clause.

You may be able to convince your supervisor by citing the examples of BSD Unix and X11, which brought fame and money to their creators (the CSG at Berkeley, and project Athena at MIT) while using extremely liberal licenses -- the MIT/X11 license (which is what I use for my research) and the 4-clause BSD license, albeit with the advertising clause not being enforced.

You may also want to cite the following anegdote. Two years ago, I was compiling a Linux LiveCD for our first, second and third year undergrads. One of the pieces of software I wanted to include was a Prolog compiler from a well-known Portuguese university which we use in third-year courses.

Unfortunately, the Prolog implementation was covered by a fairly strict license that would significantly complicate our distribution process. After a few exchanges of e-mail with the copyright holders, they told us that we were welcome to do whatever we wanted, but they'd not change the license for us.

After consulting with our legal department, we decided we could not include the Prolog compiler.

(Sorry for the delay, I was busy rotating all of my ssh keys.)

Babel will handle this as required

How does babel fix this? It seems like babel is just a routing mechanism, does it modify the MAC as well? This problem arises because of channel reservation messages & collisions, so not modifying the MAC is going to give limited improvement.

In case you didn't get the joke -- please mod sxpert as +1, Sarcastic.

Babel could potentially alleviate the problem, since its one of the few routing protocols that are flexible enough to take diversity into account, and hence use different radio frequencies for neighbouring hops. But as you rightly note, there's not much more that can be done for single-radio nodes as long as we stick with CSMA.

My personal hope is that multi-radio routers will become cheap enough to be used instead of our current single-radio nodes.

I've been wanting to try doing something like this, to make a large, community intranet.

...

Personally, I'd be willing to buy a router that relays for this purpose only to extend the mesh but not actually volunteer my paid ISP bandwidth or actually hook up any computers to bridge the two networks.

We, in Paris, have been experimenting with just such a network, based on a dynamic mesh routing protocol (Babel) and an autoconfiguration protocol similar to DHCP (AHCP).

The results are mixed. On the one hand, a lot of geeky types turn out to be willing to volunteer their (paid-for) ADSL line and even to buy a router with their own pennies. On the other hand, normal users are not willing to install software they don't understand -- they just want to use a normal AP, and don't understand why they need to install extra software just to use the Internet.

some people will have to set up tunnels to bridge the gaps between the mesh areas.

Yes, that's exactly what we are doing. Unfortunately, setting up tunnels (VPNs) is complicated and error-prone, and existing VPN software are designed with static routing in mind. We're actually thinking of designing our own VPN implementation that is convenient to use with dynamic routing protocols.

I've been wanting to try doing something like this, to make a large, community intranet.

...

Personally, I'd be willing to buy a router that relays for this purpose only to extend the mesh but not actually volunteer my paid ISP bandwidth or actually hook up any computers to bridge the two networks.

We, in Paris, have been experimenting with just such a network, based on a dynamic mesh routing protocol (Babel) and an autoconfiguration protocol similar to DHCP (AHCP).

The results are mixed. On the one hand, a lot of geeky types turn out to be willing to volunteer their (paid-for) ADSL line and even to buy a router with their own pennies. On the other hand, normal users are not willing to install software they don't understand -- they just want to use a normal AP, and don't understand why they need to install extra software just to use the Internet.

some people will have to set up tunnels to bridge the gaps between the mesh areas.

Yes, that's exactly what we are doing. Unfortunately, setting up tunnels (VPNs) is complicated and error-prone, and existing VPN software are designed with static routing in mind. We're actually thinking of designing our own VPN implementation that is convenient to use with dynamic routing protocols.

I've been wanting to try doing something like this, to make a large, community intranet.

...

Personally, I'd be willing to buy a router that relays for this purpose only to extend the mesh but not actually volunteer my paid ISP bandwidth or actually hook up any computers to bridge the two networks.

We, in Paris, have been experimenting with just such a network, based on a dynamic mesh routing protocol (Babel) and an autoconfiguration protocol similar to DHCP (AHCP).

The results are mixed. On the one hand, a lot of geeky types turn out to be willing to volunteer their (paid-for) ADSL line and even to buy a router with their own pennies. On the other hand, normal users are not willing to install software they don't understand -- they just want to use a normal AP, and don't understand why they need to install extra software just to use the Internet.

some people will have to set up tunnels to bridge the gaps between the mesh areas.

Yes, that's exactly what we are doing. Unfortunately, setting up tunnels (VPNs) is complicated and error-prone, and existing VPN software are designed with static routing in mind. We're actually thinking of designing our own VPN implementation that is convenient to use with dynamic routing protocols.

• CBQ and other hierarchical queing disciplines (HTB, WRED, etc.);
• Stochastic Fair Queuing;
• Stochastic Fair Blue (Linux implementation).
• ...and many others.

While approximately fair is not quite as good as fair, avoiding hard state makes for a cheaper and more reliable network, which allows you to more easily over-provision your link capacity. Unless, of course, you're in the business of selling routers that implement hard state...

A lot of people think they need their ISP's help to get IPv6 connectivity. That's not the case. If you're running Windows Vista, or if you use an Apple Airport router, you should get connectivity to the IPv6 Internet out of the box. If you're running Linux, I've writtent a short HOWTO about IPv6 under Linux.

Linux' QoS supports RED, but neglected BLUE, GREEN, BLACK, WHITE and PURPLE the last time I looked.

There are at least two implementation of Blue for Linux,
Blue
Stochastic Fair Blue

DSDV
OLSR
AODV
Babel.

You're right. Unfortunately it will take tens of thousands of years.

See:

http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~archer/reprints/archer.2005.fate_co2.pdf
http://www.ipsl.jussieu.fr/~jomce/acidification/paper/Caldeira_Wickett_2005_JGR.pdf

And yes, of course, as always, these studies are under debate.

There's a growing trend in math (and maybe other disciplines, for all I know) away from non-free publishing.

Prominent mathematicians have been complaining for years (more links here) about overpriced journals, and entire editorial boards of some journals have resigned in protest (see a list of mass resignations and similar changes here). There are now plenty of entirely free journals in combinatorics, topology, and other fields, and pretty much everything that gets published these days is either available on the author's website or on the arXiv.

So modern research tends to be free, but what about all the books you need to read before you understand this research? Sure, a copy of Rudin may be expensive and there's not much we can do about that, but maybe you can learn from the free analysis course notes at MIT's OCW site. You complain that EGA is out of print, but basically everything Grothendieck wrote is available for free, and you can even get them along with tons of other old French publications through NUMDAM. (There's even a project to transcribe SGA into LaTeX.) Lots of other books are free to download legally (and this is by no means a complete list), even though many are commercially published as well.

Finally, you can complain all you want about university tuition, but I really doubt that free tuition is going to open up mathematics to the masses. Ultimately the very top students who can't afford it are getting scholarships and grants to cover their education (and I do know some people who got free rides at Princeton because they couldn't afford it -- that school is definitely more generous than most), and since most other people couldn't get into Princeton anyway the tuition is never even an issue for them. The best way to make mathematics more accessible is to give everyone access to free textbooks and current research, and the "marxist university professors" you deride have been gradually moving in that direction for years now.

By the way, what do you think has been done to damage the Princeton math department's reputation? Whatever you think Shapiro and Tilghman have done to the university, nobody in their right mind would deny that it's one of the top few in the world and I doubt most people would openly proclaim any one department to be the best anyway.

Where are you?

In North America, I'd recommend ftp://carroll.cac.psu.edu/pub/linux/distributions/ mandrivalinux/devel/iso/2008.0/ . In South America, ftp://ftp.c3sl.ufpr.br/MandrivaLinux/devel/iso/200 8.0/ . In Europe, ftp://distrib-coffee.ipsl.jussieu.fr/pub/linux/Man drivaLinux/devel/iso/2008.0/ , or ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/os/Linux/distr/Mandrakelinu x/devel/iso/2008.0/ if that one's slow.

We don't do torrents for beta releases as the demand is not usually high enough to warrant it - the FTP mirrors usually cope with the demand easily.

Before elections, there was quite a strong movement against the electronic voting in France among CS academic community. See the webpage of this guy: http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~dicosmo/E-Vote/ Sadly, the French love for automatization won again this time.

For a start, you don't understand what 'source' is. The binary RPMs that make up the distribution you get on ISOs are not 'source', and that's what you're moaning about. The 'source' is all this stuff:

ftp://distrib-coffee.ipsl.jussieu.fr/pub/linux/Man drivaLinux/official/2007.1/SRPMS/main/release/

How long would it take someone who hasn't paid for Club access to find them?

Well, for a start, I don't see what paying for Club access has to do with anything. 'A mirror list' is not among the privileges of Club membership. So I don't know where you get that argument from. Second, when you Google for 'Mandriva Mirrors', the CookerMirrors page on the wiki is result #4, the 2007.0 mirror list on api.mandriva.com is #10, and the Club mirror finder (which works for non-Club members) is #6. So the answer to that would be 'not very long', I think.

The GPL has precisely nothing at all to do with the provision of security updates. That's clearly an absurd argument. You can release a product under GPL (or any other software license) and never update it. Notwithstanding, mirrors that carry the /old tree where old releases go to die have all the old updates available. http://ftp.sh.cvut.cz/MIRRORS/mandriva/old/updates / has updates back to 7.2. (In case you're wondering, I found that by Googling for mandriva-old : it was the first result).

You are also badly misreading it in terms of where the source code is to be made available. The paragraph you quote is not compelling the source to be made available in the same place as the binaries. It's saying that if you, say, sell a GPL-covered product as a time-limited download, then it's OK to provide the source in the same place; you don't have to make it available permanently as a non-time-limited download, and if the buyer doesn't download the source at the same time as they download the binaries, hard cheese. In other words, it's entirely irrelevant to the situation we are discussing.

I'm sorry, but it's getting to the point where it's hard to assume good faith on your part. And your understanding of the GPL is clearly sorely lacking.

"X is large, slow, inefficient, obsolete, memory-hungry, and difficult to use"

Really?

TinyX: http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/kdrive.htm l is designed to run in embedded systems. In fact where I worked previously, we developed embedded Linux based systems for video on demand applications that used TinyX (kdrive) and Mozilla (0.8). The systems were designed for 16MB flash drives and run on 200MHz systems. The systems were not slow. In fact, they could do MPEG2 decompression full resolution.

X is not difficult to use. It may require more than a beginner to configure it, but how is it difficult to use? The Gnome / KDE desktop may be difficult to use, XFCE may be difficult to use, TWM may be difficult to use... But an end user "uses" X as much as a Windows end user "uses" the Windows GDI.

Also, only an idiot would think that any human has ever experienced anything more than a millionth of a second of time dilation, even from orbiting the earth.

You are wrong.

See this figure from this journal article. The ISS is in a circular orbit with an altitude of about 360 km, hence a radius of about 6750 km. So clock aboard the ISS runs slower than it would on the surface of the earth by a factor of (1 - 300 * 10^-12). This comes out to about one millionth of a second per hour.

If you know the orbital speed of the ISS, you can estimate this yourself. Time dilation described by special relativity goes like gamma = sqrt(1-v^2/c^2) which is about (1 - 0.5 * v^2 / c^2) plus terms of order O(v^4/c^4). So we find that the fractional difference in rates due to time dilation is about about 330 * 10^-12.

This does not include the effects of gravity, which is not described by special relativity. That's why the previous answer was different. But you can also estimate this yourself, without really needing to know general relativity:

The frequency of a photon constitutes a clock. The energy of a photon is proportional to its frequency. A photon of energy E at radius 6750 km which travels downward to radius 6400 km will have suffered a loss in potential energy proportional to (1/r). So it's reasonable to guess that the energy of the photon at the earth's surface will have increased (a.k.a. gravitational blueshift) by an amount of about (1 + 306* 10^-12) So we recover (330 - 36) * 10^-12 = 294 * 10^-12 as the effective rate of time dilation for an astronaut on the ISS.

In fact, the gravitational redshift or blueshift predicted by general relativity is slightly different from the expression above, but for a small shift, this is a valid approximation.

These effects are real and have been observed. In fact, it is necessary to take them into account to design a working satellite GPS system. This article has more details.

Err, yeah. Meant Oregon. That's the problem with being a visual thinker as opposed to verbal: I actually pictured a map in my head when I was trying to remember which state this was in. Ahh... and after a little research, it appears that it's not so much a job creating measure as a safety measure. Oregon (along with New Jersey) implemented the law because they only wanted professionals pumping this possibly dangerous fluid into your car. Makes a little more sense to me, although I really can't recall hearing of any accidents accidentally caused by someone pumping their own gas. I suppose it will also lead to less incidents like this.

Waaaay offtopic, but found this odd little site examining how spaghetti breaks while trying to find the video clip. (Not like I was ontopic anyways, talking about pumping gas in a barcode topic.)

It is not that people don't care about bitmap fonts anymore, it is just the bdf/pcf formats. See here for a brief discussion.

Those are some interesting new features, quite innovative actually. However, I would be much more interested in hearing how X is being made smaller and faster. Xserver seems to be a nice continuation of Kdrive since the fork, but it is still lagging behind a full Xorg installation. Most X users are not serving up desktops to thin clients, and only need a full install for things like hardware acceleration and multihead support. I would think a small and fast X would greatly benefit desktop adoption, and if any of you have tried Kdrive on modern equipment, it more than feels snappier, it is.

Curiously, there was something similar idea the Europeans had called NETLANDER, which would have landed a network of 4 geophysical stations on the surface of mars. Unfortunately, the project was cancelled in 2003.

Links:

http://smsc.cnes.fr/NETLANDER/
http://ganymede.ipgp.jussieu.fr/GB/projets/netland er/

I can think of plenty of counterexamples, but [...]"

You live in a different world than most people. You are not normal! That's not a bad thing -- if you like doing what you do, more power to you -- but realize that you can't draw sweeping generalizations based on that.

A server-side app running on J2EE 1.2 on Websphere 4 on Windows, that hits Oracle, DB2, Teradata, and LDAP is *not* a typical Java program.

Try writing a simple (desktop) application in Java. Even simple things like "what order the buttons go in" (Cancel,OK, or OK,Cancel?) you have to do yourself. (Interestingly, the next version of wxWidgets has a solution for this.) Heck, that's just the tip of the iceberg: lots of layout guidelines vary between platforms. (I used to code on my Mac simply because when things look wrong on a Mac they look *really* wrong, but Windows is already so inconsistent nobody cares.)

I haven't done Java development in 2 years, so maybe some of these things have solutions now. But I wouldn't bet on it. If you have to write code that runs on more than one platform, you have to be testing on all target platforms as you go.

Back in 1990, people said that it was possible to write C "portably" -- whatever that meant. I think Linus and friends are probably about as good at anybody these days at writing portable code, but you can still look at the Linux changelogs and see dozens of places each release where they fixed driver X for platform Y.

Java may make some things easier -- no more worrying about if sizeof(int)==sizeof(void*) -- but it doesn't magically make Windows programs into Mac programs into Linux programs.

It really isnt hard to find information like this(deg. C increase over 100 years) from computer modelling done around the world.
The fact that these maps all look fairly similar would indicate there is some accuracy to the prediction of substantial global warming, in particular around the polar regions.

I still find it sad that many people here take the attitude that until there is some 100% concrete evidence that man is a factor in this, that we should just ignore it and not do anything about it (until it's too late?)

WTF!? I thought this was KDrive. No wonder I was confused earlier in the thread. "What the hell does an X server have to do with Grouper?", I thought.

"We know that humans have slightly increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere, but hard evidence linking that to temperature rises is minimal."

This is insightful?
There's hardly any argument in this statement.

As a climatologist researching on global climate models, I can say, with the risk of losing my job, that global warming due to CO2 gases are definitly happening.

And almost all the climate models in the world will agree with me. Take a look at the Climate model inter-comparison project overview, especially Figure 20. That's a simulation for both the present state of the climate AND the future.

Given the limitations of computer models, the numbers may not be accurate yet, but we are very much sure that this trend is happening RIGHT NOW.

Oh, and lest I forget there's also the matter of F# which provides a subset of the Objective Caml language with interoperability with .NET. There's also OCamlIL which aims at being a more faithful implementation of Objective Caml for the CLR.

Since DSL only uses FB and VESA you are probably better off using kdrive . It is designed to be small and lightweight.

Of course, it's actually a $100,000 mic, but hey, that's pretty close to $0.25 in space dollars. :-)

On Linux, you would have to implement every one of those things yourself

This tiny version of X is called "KDrive" and it ships with XFree86. Read more about it here and here.

And stop talking about "choice" when you don't even know what choices X offers.

Two years ago I was looking for a fine cross-platform toolkit, and I came across wxWindows.

It's very strange that this toolkit gets so little publicity, as it has a very rich API and lots of nice features - such as a sweet sizer-based XML resource system that makes creating GUI a breeze. It also has wxConfig classes which allow one to easily store configuration settings without worrying about the underlying system (registry on windows, files on UNIX). Its HTML help classes provide an easy, cross-platform way write help. wxWindows supports XPM files under all systems to spare the programmer from having to convert one's icons to the appropriate system format on every system. It's all in the API Reference

Disclaimer:
I can't say I've done any very serious applications with wxWindows, just a light AOL Instant Messenger - it fits on a floppy and requires no install. I've seen enough to know it's a great toolkit, though.

Well, this isn't exactly getting rid of X but it would silence all the people who screaming about X's supposed bloat.

I just stumbled across Kdrive (not related to KDE) which is a _TINY_ X server written by well know X hacker Keith Packard.

Here's a listing of top from the RULE (another cool minimal Linux project) web site running Kdrive and Moz. Kind of a funny contrast really. :-)

792 mfratoni 15 0 22756 22M 12384 S 15.3 59.8 1:19 mozilla-bin
720 root 15 0 7192 3600 1148 S 10.0 9.5 0:27 X

Awww... look at the little X server. He's so cute!

Here's a pic
of kdrive running the Gimp, Xfce (svelt file manager), some random apps and some pagers. That's just very cool to have all those apps running in such a mimimalistic environment.

While I'm a big fan of Qt, I'm also a fan of wxWindows, and I'd like to point out that wxWindows does all of the things you mentioned.

Qt is simply the single best designed piece of software I have -ever- seen. While it sets out for a huge task, being a completely self-sufficient C++ framework, a multiplatform one at that (and it can indeed easily replace the entire MFC), the class hierarchy [trolltech.com] is extremely clean, and it's very easy to get the hang of it. Actually, the entire documentation [trolltech.com] is absolutely excellent, clear and very well cross-referenced. I've never stayed stuck while looking for some info in there (quite unlike the MSDN documentation!). Go take a peek, someday.

The wxWindows documentation is online here. Go take a peek - it's remarkably complete and detailed.

One of the nice things with Qt is, if you need to do some basic task, Qt makes it trivial. Reading a file line by line is an example I was confronted to just today: using the MFC's idea of files, it's tedious at best -- gotta do the nitty gritty job manually. Wasted time. Using Qt, it's, well, trivial [trolltech.com].

wxWindows provides a few ways of doing this:
you can either use a wxTextFile or a wxTextInputStream.
Both give you a ReadLine method or equivalent.

The other thing about Qt is, if you need to do something complex, Qt makes it very straightforward. For instance, yesterday, our VB programmer was trying to make a custom widget that lets you stack frames vertically, each under its own tab, and showing only one at a time. After hours of work, he got to work a simple version of it that couldn't resize, among other shortcomings. Well, it took me much less time to rapidly put together the same thing in Qt, only it worked right away without those shortcomings, could accept any kind of subwidget, and, oh, of course, could resize at will and would work right away on any platform. Keep in mind that this guy is very experienced with his tools, while I'm a relative beginner with Qt.

Also easy with wxWindows. Their Sizer classes are by far the best method I've ever seen for laying out automatically resizable dialogs.

There are countless useful features in Qt. For instance, it doesn't duplicate data when duplication is not either required or specifically requested by the programmer. Copy a QString or a QPixmap ten times, and Qt will keep only one copy of the data in memory for all the instances. Modify one of the ten instances, and Qt will then replicate its data to modify it without touching the nine other instances.


wxWindows also reference-counts strings, bitmaps, and many other common data types.

And those guys actually license their boon of a tool under the GPL. That's almost too good to be true.

Unless you want the Windows version - that costs an arm and a leg. wxWindows is GPL for all platforms (and it currently supports more platforms than Qt).

Anyway, enough rambling. If you're a programmer, do yourself a favor, and check out Qt. Even if you don't end up using it, you will likely learn quite a lot about how powerful object orientation can be when used by people who know what they are doing.

Agreed. Check out both, though. Honestly, if I had a large budget to create a commercial cross-platform application, there's a good chance I'd choose Qt. But wxWindows has its advantages. For a free cross-platform software project, there's no contest: wxWindows is free on all platforms, with a very comparable feature set.

While I'm a big fan of Qt, I'm also a fan of wxWindows, and I'd like to point out that wxWindows does all of the things you mentioned.

Qt is simply the single best designed piece of software I have -ever- seen. While it sets out for a huge task, being a completely self-sufficient C++ framework, a multiplatform one at that (and it can indeed easily replace the entire MFC), the class hierarchy [trolltech.com] is extremely clean, and it's very easy to get the hang of it. Actually, the entire documentation [trolltech.com] is absolutely excellent, clear and very well cross-referenced. I've never stayed stuck while looking for some info in there (quite unlike the MSDN documentation!). Go take a peek, someday.

The wxWindows documentation is online here. Go take a peek - it's remarkably complete and detailed.

One of the nice things with Qt is, if you need to do some basic task, Qt makes it trivial. Reading a file line by line is an example I was confronted to just today: using the MFC's idea of files, it's tedious at best -- gotta do the nitty gritty job manually. Wasted time. Using Qt, it's, well, trivial [trolltech.com].

wxWindows provides a few ways of doing this:
you can either use a wxTextFile or a wxTextInputStream.
Both give you a ReadLine method or equivalent.

The other thing about Qt is, if you need to do something complex, Qt makes it very straightforward. For instance, yesterday, our VB programmer was trying to make a custom widget that lets you stack frames vertically, each under its own tab, and showing only one at a time. After hours of work, he got to work a simple version of it that couldn't resize, among other shortcomings. Well, it took me much less time to rapidly put together the same thing in Qt, only it worked right away without those shortcomings, could accept any kind of subwidget, and, oh, of course, could resize at will and would work right away on any platform. Keep in mind that this guy is very experienced with his tools, while I'm a relative beginner with Qt.

Also easy with wxWindows. Their Sizer classes are by far the best method I've ever seen for laying out automatically resizable dialogs.

There are countless useful features in Qt. For instance, it doesn't duplicate data when duplication is not either required or specifically requested by the programmer. Copy a QString or a QPixmap ten times, and Qt will keep only one copy of the data in memory for all the instances. Modify one of the ten instances, and Qt will then replicate its data to modify it without touching the nine other instances.


wxWindows also reference-counts strings, bitmaps, and many other common data types.

And those guys actually license their boon of a tool under the GPL. That's almost too good to be true.

Unless you want the Windows version - that costs an arm and a leg. wxWindows is GPL for all platforms (and it currently supports more platforms than Qt).

Anyway, enough rambling. If you're a programmer, do yourself a favor, and check out Qt. Even if you don't end up using it, you will likely learn quite a lot about how powerful object orientation can be when used by people who know what they are doing.

Agreed. Check out both, though. Honestly, if I had a large budget to create a commercial cross-platform application, there's a good chance I'd choose Qt. But wxWindows has its advantages. For a free cross-platform software project, there's no contest: wxWindows is free on all platforms, with a very comparable feature set.

While I'm a big fan of Qt, I'm also a fan of wxWindows, and I'd like to point out that wxWindows does all of the things you mentioned.

Qt is simply the single best designed piece of software I have -ever- seen. While it sets out for a huge task, being a completely self-sufficient C++ framework, a multiplatform one at that (and it can indeed easily replace the entire MFC), the class hierarchy [trolltech.com] is extremely clean, and it's very easy to get the hang of it. Actually, the entire documentation [trolltech.com] is absolutely excellent, clear and very well cross-referenced. I've never stayed stuck while looking for some info in there (quite unlike the MSDN documentation!). Go take a peek, someday.

The wxWindows documentation is online here. Go take a peek - it's remarkably complete and detailed.

One of the nice things with Qt is, if you need to do some basic task, Qt makes it trivial. Reading a file line by line is an example I was confronted to just today: using the MFC's idea of files, it's tedious at best -- gotta do the nitty gritty job manually. Wasted time. Using Qt, it's, well, trivial [trolltech.com].

wxWindows provides a few ways of doing this:
you can either use a wxTextFile or a wxTextInputStream.
Both give you a ReadLine method or equivalent.

The other thing about Qt is, if you need to do something complex, Qt makes it very straightforward. For instance, yesterday, our VB programmer was trying to make a custom widget that lets you stack frames vertically, each under its own tab, and showing only one at a time. After hours of work, he got to work a simple version of it that couldn't resize, among other shortcomings. Well, it took me much less time to rapidly put together the same thing in Qt, only it worked right away without those shortcomings, could accept any kind of subwidget, and, oh, of course, could resize at will and would work right away on any platform. Keep in mind that this guy is very experienced with his tools, while I'm a relative beginner with Qt.

Also easy with wxWindows. Their Sizer classes are by far the best method I've ever seen for laying out automatically resizable dialogs.

There are countless useful features in Qt. For instance, it doesn't duplicate data when duplication is not either required or specifically requested by the programmer. Copy a QString or a QPixmap ten times, and Qt will keep only one copy of the data in memory for all the instances. Modify one of the ten instances, and Qt will then replicate its data to modify it without touching the nine other instances.


wxWindows also reference-counts strings, bitmaps, and many other common data types.

And those guys actually license their boon of a tool under the GPL. That's almost too good to be true.

Unless you want the Windows version - that costs an arm and a leg. wxWindows is GPL for all platforms (and it currently supports more platforms than Qt).

Anyway, enough rambling. If you're a programmer, do yourself a favor, and check out Qt. Even if you don't end up using it, you will likely learn quite a lot about how powerful object orientation can be when used by people who know what they are doing.

Agreed. Check out both, though. Honestly, if I had a large budget to create a commercial cross-platform application, there's a good chance I'd choose Qt. But wxWindows has its advantages. For a free cross-platform software project, there's no contest: wxWindows is free on all platforms, with a very comparable feature set.

Urmphf, last I checked, at Sorbonne you study humanities, not computer science. Maybe you're thinking of Jussieu or Orsay?

Actually the link I gave in my above post discussed the LNT model a great deal. Here it is if you missed it the first time. Moreover, your whyfiles had a number of large errors--such as the analysis of the thyroid cancer rate in the Ukraine. And a couple of short quotes about LNT at the end do not a "lack of understanding" make.

The LNT isn't just conservative--it's overwhelmingly, crushingly, conservative. It's like making your little kid put on a football helmet before going to his piano lesson. We have come an incredibly long way since the 1950's.

This would have been nice to know about before Christmas...

Very cool. One feature I'd like to see in the next version of this watch is some sort of hook-up to a computer that would let you record good data on long-term exposure. Still, I want one of these.

As far as measuring your total dosage goes, I might as well take this opportunity to inform everyone that government mandated radiation standards are mostly erroneous. By orders of magnitude even. We now know that low-level radiation is simply far less harmful (and far better understood) than we thought it was in the 1950's. Major reason is that the 1950's model is simply a straight line extrapolation from the known lethal dosage. Back then, that was a reasonable guess considering the knowledge of genetics at the time. Needless to say, our current understanding is quite different.