Domain: sourceforge.net
Stories and comments across the archive that link to sourceforge.net.
Comments · 31,462
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"private networks"Many people have switched to private networks open only to their friends.
Tools such as Waste make this very easy to set up.
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Re:How about a laptop
Have you tried the ndiswrapper? It's effectivly the same thing as linuxant except w/o a web GUI to set it up. Ndiswrapper comes with SuSE 9.1 pro (I can't speak for SuSE personal or Fedora) I have a Dell Latitude C840. With SuSE 9.1 everything worked perfectly, including the 3D acceleration for the GeForce 4 card on board.
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Re:Sue Themselves?
Or you could use Gaim instead of the official client and not get any ads. You'll also get support for Gaim's plugins, contact aliases, and tabbed IMs, but it doesn't support some of the AIM features like video and voice IM (they're working on it). Also, there are other unofficial clients including Miranda and Trillian. Or you could use an AIM hack like Middle Man (or one linked from their list of other AIM hacks) that remove the ads and add other features like logging.
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Re:Offtopic, but there's nowhere else to post this
You may be in luck. A forked project has already been started on Sourceforge. Unfortunatly, it's probably dead - there's no homepage, and the CVS doesn't seem to have been updated since the initial import. Several people on the Open Disscussion Forum have complained that the firmware is very buggy, and doesn't even work on the Version 1.0 router. But at least you can get the source.
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Re:Offtopic, but there's nowhere else to post this
You may be in luck. A forked project has already been started on Sourceforge. Unfortunatly, it's probably dead - there's no homepage, and the CVS doesn't seem to have been updated since the initial import. Several people on the Open Disscussion Forum have complained that the firmware is very buggy, and doesn't even work on the Version 1.0 router. But at least you can get the source.
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Re:Try Instiki
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Re:Aleph One
Again, point by point...
There is some (limited) documentation on the project, but most of it is badly out of date (as always
:)). The main site for the effort is source.bungie.org; there is also our SF project page, where you can join the developers' mailing list. That's really the best way to get involved. BTW, what sort of coding experience do you have? We need pretty much everything--engine, networking, UI, etc. Do you know anything about coding for Carbon or Cocoa? The engine is in C and C++, if that's relevant.There is a project called "Marathon|Rampancy" to port the maps/sprites to Unreal Tournament, which is probably what you were thinking of.
SDL is the Simple DirectMedia Layer, a set of multimedia libraries for sound, 2D and 3D graphics, keyboard/mouse, etc., which is used in a lot of open source programs.
The hi-res and 3D substitutes are controlled via an XML language called MML, the Marathon Markul Language, which tells the engine to replace with what.
There were builds for classic, but they haven't really been kept up. The last build is over a year and a half old, and I have no idea if the classic maintainer is still working with us.
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Wiki wiki wiki! (Re:Wishful Thinking I Fear :()My Point - Love to see it happen, but not holding my breath
Could this be A taste of things to come?
The Sustainable Development Commission is running its consultation exercise online using the open source software package PHPWiki.
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Don't forget Bittorrent!
You can get most popular shows via BitTorrent. Check out this great site for a listing. And check out Azureus if you're looking for a great client!
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Re:Stupid.
besides the pvr350 part of your setup (which has it's own quirks), did you consider checking out knoppmyth to potentially cut down on the build/install time?
*shrug* FWIW there are other "off the shelf" commercial (and free) 3rd party PVR/htpc software solutions out there... although they are on the *gasp* windows platform *ducks*... I liked SageTV... BeyondTV has been getting good reviews... and GBPVR is very full featured, FREE as in beer (not source), and is pretty cool overall. There's a lesser known HTPC solution that's open source for windoze Media Portal... I've got a growing list of PVR/HTPC links here
Also there are other linux based OSS pvr solutions besides myth/knoppmyth... like freevo, dave and dina multimedia project, and a few others I can't recall...
*shrug*
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Re:Nice, but is VB the proper model for apps?
You neglected to follow through to the "See Also" entries. From the Control Groups page linked at the bottom
I don't think the links' text make it easy to understand that I should click on them in order to read about the MVC pattern.
(which is applicable to all classes, but no one's ever asked how to do it with anything but controls before):
Events is a foundamental construct in any programming environment: it is the basis for the MVC pattern, which is the most important pattern in developing robust applications. So events are not only about controls, but for any object that wants to act as a component.
myControl = NEW ColumnView(ME) AS "myGroup"
will then cause the handlers named myGroup_Click, et al. to receive the new columnview's events.
Sweet, but what about data objects? I want my data model as a separate entity in my program, possibly reflecting my database, for example.Once again, questions like these really belong on gambas-user@lists.sourceforge.net
I don't think that something as foundamental as events should be 10 pages deep. It should be right in the front page.
an inability to spend more than 30 seconds reading documentation
What inability are you talking about? I don't see how 'see also' and 'control groups' have anything to do with the MVC pattern. I don't think anyone does.
does not make a language not buzzword-compatible.
Even in web development, the most effort of the last 4 years had gone into the MVC pattern. That's why Sun made J2EE model 2, that's why Cocoon is considered very good (separation of concerns), that's why there is EJBs, that's why there is Hibernate (and a myriad other MVC frameworks): to separate the data model from the view and the controllers. Not only the data model is gonna be separate from the view and controllers, but it also gonna be persistent and separate from all applications.
If you fail to see the importance of MVC, and if Gambas consequently fails to support it (which is the case, as far as I can see), then Gambas is not gonna go very far, at least for Enterprise-level apps. VB6 logic is previous decade.
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C++ compilers are untrustworthy
Anyone who claims with a straight face in 2004 that "C++ compilers are untrustworthy" is trolling. Sorry, rabid penguin lovers.
The fink project has recently traced crashing problems to gcc 3.3 generating incorrect output from C++ code.
As of about mid-2004. -
Exceptional programmingIf you want to optimize exception handling then choose an exception-based execution model. Most people -- particularly Perl programmers -- are familiar with the short-circuit "or" and short-circuit "and" style of programming. "and" binds more tightly than "or" so that a sequence of "and" looks like a normal execution thread with no exceptions, whereas a sequence of "or" looks like a cascade of exception handlers (if all the prior expressions in the "or" sequence fail then you take the next one as an exception handler).
When I say "thread" above I'm not just throwing around an ad hoc term -- you can use this to provide the basis for parallel execution in an OS or language.
There is an entire school of thought built around this idea called logic programming and it is based on the most widely used foundation for mathematics -- the predicate calculus.
I don't know why people spend so much time and energy optimizing things that are less powerful.
As for object oriented programming, As I've said before:
Almost all the Object Oriented stuff people layer on predicates are, at best, an ad hoc, and poor, means of optimizing execution speed.
Let me explain.
One of the principles of polymorphism is that the same method has the same abstract meaning regardless of the kind of object. A predicate considered as a method subsumes such polymorphism by simply trying the various possible implementations of the method and committing to only those that succeed. If more than one succeeds then so be it -- that's the whole idea of relations as opposed to functions.
So, one reason you want all this OO stuff is the inheritance hierarchies keep you from going through all possible interpretations of a given method when the vast majority of them will fail for a given object.
Another, related, problem is that inheritance provides defaults without requiring a lot of thinking on the part of the computer. What I mean by "thinking" here is the sort of thing that is done by statistical imputation of missing data via algorithms like expectation maximization (EM) [clusty.com] or multi-relational data mining via inductive logic programming .
So, the other reason you want all this OO stuff is so you can avoid mining a background database to provide reasonable defaults for various aspects of the data.
Some might be concerned that over-riding isn't absolute in such a system -- that you don't absolutely block, say, more generic methods when you have more specific ones present, and they're right. You don't block those methods -- you lower their priority by lowering the probability of those implementations via the statistical methods of imputation and/or induction. In a microthreading environment they most likely won't get any resources allocated to them before other higher priority implementations have succeeded. In a single threaded/depth-first environment they will be down the list of desired alternatives -- but they won't be discarded until something equivalent to a prolog cut operation kills them off.
However, and this is the important point, the work that has been expended toward OO facilities has vastly outstripped the effort that which has been put toward more parsimonious ways of optimizing predicate systems.
One of the better predicate calculus systems out there -- more promising due to its use of tabling to avoid infinite regress on head-recursive definitions and its optimization of queries using some fairly general theorems of predicate calculus -- is XSB . It has an interface to odbc and a direct interface to Oracle, but it would be better if it had something like a
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Re:Progress
while i generally agree with you, here is a special case:
the haiku os (formerly OpenBeOS) kernel is partially written in C++, especially the BFS filesystem implementation. but there's a catch! they don't use many of the features of c++ that make it bad for just these kinds of things. no exceptions, no virtual functions, no STL, none of that other nonesense that c++ does behind your back. -
Re:No Mac version
NASA has a similar application. It's not as sleek as keyhole; on the other hand it's free.
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CuTest -
Celestia and ground level detail
This looks like an interesting product. What I would finder even better is to have Celestia be able to do something like this. That would mean you could navigate around space and then zoom into ground level detail.
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Re:Derby seemed like a step back...While I'm sure you are right, it sounds like you're trying to fit a square peg into a round hole here. Derby is a relational database (or at least a specimen of its drooling imbred cousin variety, the SQL database) and therefore designed to store relations.
The relational model supports any kind of data structure ever invented, but it's true that you sometimes want to store opaque blobs of data such as graphics or XML documents, and most databases, including Derby, supports that as well.
Perhaps you should look at an object-relational mapping layer such as Hibernate or TJDO, or a hybrid object database such as Prevayler.
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Re:Cloudscape, er Derby, is good stuff
SQLite isn't written in Java; it's C++. The code may be platform-independent, but the binaries it produces aren't.
A fairer comparison would be Hypersonic SQL, a free, open-source small (~100K) database server. -
vs HSQL?
How does Cloudscape/Derby compare with the other open source Java database engine, HSQL?
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Re:Intersting note
Yes, I can.
The Lustre service side runs under Linux, in the service partition. Much is fairly normal for it.
The compute node OS, though, is an evolution of that used on ASCI Red. It's known as catamount --
Sorry folks, it's not Linux in the compute section, just the service section.
For the compute partition, just like Red, catamount has no provision at all for I/O. Worse, we could not steal the IO architecture or infrastructure from Red. Red's IO architecture heavily leverages an SSI service section and, no, Red Storm does not have that advantage.
The solution we chose may be found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/libsysio and is an implementation of a POSIX-like VFS in user space. Underneath that, the Lustre client code was hiked out of Linux, altered to run w/o kernel services and a glue layer added so that it may be driven by the sysio library mentioned above. -
Re:Whewt, yet another!
yeah, that seems somewhat alright and everything.
the only main factor is, i don't buy music from
the iTunes Music Store. ..i perfer to
have access to my music, how i want it, not how "big buisness" wants it.
so if it isn't oog, or high-grade mp3, with non-drm,
i don't want it, nor do i buy it.
so it'd be a darn shame, if it cant do it for mp3s also.
and i'd love to see what the http://ipodlinux.sourceforge.net/ipodlinux project has in store for this one.
kind regaurds,
KingPunk -
Re:RTFA
Actually, there's an odd answer to that...
I assume you're referring to this page, which for some reason doesn't appear in my browser properly (firefox 0.9.3/lin). That is, the text is white-on-white - it found the words "release candidate" when I did a search, but I can't see it... or any of the text.
So for those who are using FF0.9.3, perhaps we'll have to rely on somebody else who posts the article text before it's readable :-). -
Re:Basic on Linux
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Re:Well...
Thank you for your comment, I really appreciate an alternative vision.
:)
I'm not picky when it comes to languages, as long as they allow for some degree of expressiveness (read sintactic sugar) and don't force the programmer to write too much "dumb"/pointless code (which is why I'm not fond of Java).
I've done a bit of work in Python, in an UO server emulator, and although it's used as a scripting language there, I did notice that most of the recent work tended to be less on the "core" (C) and more in python itself. So, outside a RAD context, I have no problem with it, on the contrary, as it enforces some good practices like propper indentation. ;)
But in a RAD context, besides a "form designer", I also really require some degree of "database access/integration". I'm talking about data-aware controls, where you just point a textfield to a (dataset,field) and it automagically shows the current record value. Or a datagrid. It's not that I wouldn't develop without those features on my own work. But I also need to setup teams to develop "braindead" software fast, and those features equal productivity (speed of development and less bugs). Many argue "that's for wimps", but I'll discard those comments as being from people who never had to write boring software for a living. :)
At the moment I'm looking at SharpDevelop/MonoDevelop, and although I'm naturally resistant to MS, they did get ir right this time on several levels, so for productive enviroments, I might get people going with Mono/.NET/P.NET. But I'd be more than willing to try alternatives. Do you (or anyone else) have any ideas for an IDE that allows form designing and a toolkit with data-aware controls implemented? -
Basic on LinuxBenoit's Gambas IDE is a very nice program indeed. Seeing it reach maturity is very satisfying indeed.
I'm surprised noone has mentioned KBasic http://www.kbasic.org/1/index.htmlyet... Also about 2 year in the making, also made by a dedicated individual.
Last week, a non-functioning preview of this Qt-based Linux/Windows IDE (later to support Mac as well) was released, unfortunately only the Windows version. Tried it at work and it looked very nice.
The main thing it has going for me is a QBasic compatibility mode. If you set VERYOLDBASIC to true, the promise is that you then have a more or less capable Qbasic emulator. The only programming I have done was in QBasic about 10 years back. I tried VB when it first came out, but all that event driven, form defining cruft got on my nerves. I'll be very happy to be able to just type 'screen 13' and have some fun again with fractals, cellular automatons and other stupid graphics hacks ( slow as hell in the time of 16Mhz 386sx but soooo much fun...)
The downer to KBasic of course is that the Bern put in SO much work that he decided to charge for it. It'll only be $30 or so, so I'll probably pony up the cash but I guess a lot of people will be p*ssed off because of this. Ah well, it's his code, he gets to decide....
HBasic http://hbasic.sourceforge.net/ also seemed nice but seems to have run in a wall sometime in the last year...
For the Basic affectionados (sans Visual), there is of course the venerable XBasic http://xbasic.sourceforge.net/ and X11-Basic http://x11-basic.sourceforge.net/ tools but these are frozen in time and not really in the same league. -
Basic on LinuxBenoit's Gambas IDE is a very nice program indeed. Seeing it reach maturity is very satisfying indeed.
I'm surprised noone has mentioned KBasic http://www.kbasic.org/1/index.htmlyet... Also about 2 year in the making, also made by a dedicated individual.
Last week, a non-functioning preview of this Qt-based Linux/Windows IDE (later to support Mac as well) was released, unfortunately only the Windows version. Tried it at work and it looked very nice.
The main thing it has going for me is a QBasic compatibility mode. If you set VERYOLDBASIC to true, the promise is that you then have a more or less capable Qbasic emulator. The only programming I have done was in QBasic about 10 years back. I tried VB when it first came out, but all that event driven, form defining cruft got on my nerves. I'll be very happy to be able to just type 'screen 13' and have some fun again with fractals, cellular automatons and other stupid graphics hacks ( slow as hell in the time of 16Mhz 386sx but soooo much fun...)
The downer to KBasic of course is that the Bern put in SO much work that he decided to charge for it. It'll only be $30 or so, so I'll probably pony up the cash but I guess a lot of people will be p*ssed off because of this. Ah well, it's his code, he gets to decide....
HBasic http://hbasic.sourceforge.net/ also seemed nice but seems to have run in a wall sometime in the last year...
For the Basic affectionados (sans Visual), there is of course the venerable XBasic http://xbasic.sourceforge.net/ and X11-Basic http://x11-basic.sourceforge.net/ tools but these are frozen in time and not really in the same league. -
Basic on LinuxBenoit's Gambas IDE is a very nice program indeed. Seeing it reach maturity is very satisfying indeed.
I'm surprised noone has mentioned KBasic http://www.kbasic.org/1/index.htmlyet... Also about 2 year in the making, also made by a dedicated individual.
Last week, a non-functioning preview of this Qt-based Linux/Windows IDE (later to support Mac as well) was released, unfortunately only the Windows version. Tried it at work and it looked very nice.
The main thing it has going for me is a QBasic compatibility mode. If you set VERYOLDBASIC to true, the promise is that you then have a more or less capable Qbasic emulator. The only programming I have done was in QBasic about 10 years back. I tried VB when it first came out, but all that event driven, form defining cruft got on my nerves. I'll be very happy to be able to just type 'screen 13' and have some fun again with fractals, cellular automatons and other stupid graphics hacks ( slow as hell in the time of 16Mhz 386sx but soooo much fun...)
The downer to KBasic of course is that the Bern put in SO much work that he decided to charge for it. It'll only be $30 or so, so I'll probably pony up the cash but I guess a lot of people will be p*ssed off because of this. Ah well, it's his code, he gets to decide....
HBasic http://hbasic.sourceforge.net/ also seemed nice but seems to have run in a wall sometime in the last year...
For the Basic affectionados (sans Visual), there is of course the venerable XBasic http://xbasic.sourceforge.net/ and X11-Basic http://x11-basic.sourceforge.net/ tools but these are frozen in time and not really in the same league. -
Did this too...got a letter from a lawyer.
I took on the Nehe Open Source Zelda project two years ago. We made much progress (portals from overworld to underworld, most all weapons implemented, etc...) and then we got a letter from Nintendo's lawyers about the graphics. We had lifted them from an emulator (screen shots and Photoshop-action) and so we needed to scrap them.
The project could have continued but that took a significant amount of air out of my sails. I gave the code to a friend at the BaltoLUG who added SDL to it and made it work on Linux. This new project is still up but not being actively developed: Openlynks. Sadely, the level editor was made in Visual Basic 6 and so unlike the C++/OpenGL game engine, it hasn't been ported over.
The remains of the project pages are here. -
filename is still 0.99?
The most recent file, while described as a 1.0 RC1, is actually:
http://gambas.sourceforge.net/gambas-0.99.RC1.tar. bz2, perhaps a typo on the part of the author, or is the application not really at 1.0RC1? -
Re:Other good free RAD in development...
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Screenshots.HERE.
Seems to be the most popular thing about any new release, even though most claim to prefer a CLI.
.haeger -
Re:Borland cannot be trusted
Borland has recently talked about improving Kylix through an open source initiative.
http://freeclx.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=abou t/
Hopefully this will work out better than the interbase fiasco.
Delphi 8 (.net only development) doesn't work with .Net sp 1.1, but all previous versions work fine. It has nothing to do with XP.
They are at the mercy of MS for the Compact framework stuff. A legitimate complaint would be their reliance on MS for a large portion of .NET development. They will always be playing catchup.
John K's communications in the newsgroups are short and to the point. It's only rude if you assume that is his intent.
Borland C++ users have my sympathy. I agree one would be better off with Visual Studio or an open source compiler. -
Re:Battle Robots IN the Pentagon?
Robot battles are best done on your computer. Doesn't look like it's been updated in a while, though.
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Re:GUI design
Just in case... There's a Flash demo of the Zoomworld available.
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Re:I Can Only Hope......
If you're sick of TeX, give lout a look.
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Raskin on Linux UIsIt would be interesting to see him make a more modern computer interface, but he seems content to just make vague complaints nowadays.
Check out Raskin's April 2004 keynote for the Desktop Linux Summit Conference. He is especially good on the problem of inherited disadvantages in UIs that have been around for decades now. The GUI, he says, has "outlived its usefulness." Less is more, and Linux is offers an excellent opportunity to break from a troubled tradition.
Among his insights--and this is something the people working on OS X might heed, too--is the following:
"
...too many interface designers act like interior decorators rather than structural engineers. We need both, but if an interface (or a building) is to stand up, the use of pretty colors and good visual design alone is not going to hack it." -
Jef Raskin and OSX-WinXP
I've read Raskin's bitter monologues on his site as to how he was neglected by everyone from Steve Jobs to Robert Cringley. I am utterly surprised at how bitter the man is 23 years after he left Apple. I've read the human interface and his obsession with the Canon Cat (He still publishes the Canon Cat manuals on his website, as if anyone is really interested in a product that was dropped from the market 6 months after it was released, which was no wonder because the days of specialised dedicated word processors etc were almost gone by then).
His pet project, THE, a text editor has not garnered any popularity, on any platform. On CLI's, vi, joe, pico, emacs etc still are more popular.
I personally think that Jef would be better off to realise that the way things were cannot be changed and the way things are will only change for the better if the majority of the millions of computer users accept the changes. Slagging off the user interfaces mainly paints him as that which he is: an embittered old man whose only claim to fame is that he was on the Macintosh team for a while in the early 80's. -
Re:Health care open source?
Also look at openemr , an open source medical record management system. (Also on sourceforge
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Re:The man who would be Steve Jobs
Unfortunately, Gary isnt happy about the current state of affairs because he died in 1994. At least Jef is still around and working on new ideas. Check out: http://humane.sourceforge.net/the/ Kind of cool if you can overlook his fascination with LEAPing...
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Re:I fear that Raskin has made himself irrelevant
Nah, vi is modal, Raskin hates that (THE is pseudo-modal). In addition, THE commands are English words, not (generally) esoteric control-sequences.
I believe Raskin's approach also differs in that once the command pseudo-mode is entered, a list of available operations is presented, a feature I can't say vi would be worse off to implement. (I might be wrong about this, I don't have Classic installed right now to run THE and apparently he isn't offering it for download anymore...?)
I admit that I wish someone like Raskin could get funding from some entity like Apple (or Google?) to develop a truly revolutionary, next-generation operating system. But I've used THE, and it really doesn't seem like that is it. I couldn't get any real work done with it; I found its behavior very esoteric and unpredictable at times (the dual cursors were tricky, as was the behavior of selections).
It also doesn't seem to me that THE would be very amenable to extension to more common modern computer tasks than text-editing and running snippets of Python. Imagine trying to cut a home video or organize 30 gigs of music or build sophisticated bitmap and vector art with shift-space and a small library of universal commands.
Monotonous and limited interfaces like THE, it seems, are good for monotnous, mostly single-purpose devices (the Canon Cat, the iPod, to some extent the original Mac). But it seems impossible, to me, to build a system that has the power to do everything that a modern computer does without getting a little unwelcome complexity and inconsistency. Of course, I disagree with Raskin that OSX is just as bad as Windows in this respect--why he would say something like that really is beyond me. -
Re:GUI design
If this is so, Raskin should go out and create his OS of choice.
He has. -
Re:GUI design
If this is so, Raskin should go out and create his OS of choice.
He is! Well, not an OS yet but check out The Humane Environment project. -
Re:GUI design
That's bullshit. Try reading about Raskin's opinions on user interfaces before critizising him. A guy who invented the Mac interface deserves at least that.
My impression is that he would prefer an entirely different machine that may perhaps be radically different than what we have now. If this is so, Raskin should go out and create his OS of choice.
He is doing it. It's called The Humane Interface, and you can download it from sourceforge and give it a try.
Given that some strengths of this interface are the same which make the CLI a good tool for advanced users, you should at ponder about it for a while.
If you believe that the current GUIs is "quite efficient" for intermediate users then you have not seen many of then doing something even a little bit complex. This quote from the interview perfectly resumes the real situation:
" There has been immense progress, primarily in the richness of applications. But all this power is lost on many people, and impedes the utility of it for the rest, because of the unnecessary complexity of using computers. "
You have to bear in mind that the human brain is a processor with limited power, it's main bottleneck being it's small short-term memory. Also the Input/Output protocols are constrained by perceptive capabilities. A guy who promotes design ing software optimized for this restrictions is worthy of some respect, moreover given that he is able to provide some actual solutions. -
Re:works for us
well, not exactly our experience here. We have been trying to develop a system using XUL and JavaScript but we ran in multiple problems, that required almost always some kind of work around.
Don't get me wrong, I do think there's a LOT of potential in XUL. Specially, XBL has been wonderful to develop some data binded components that saved us a lot of time in the long run, and they were quite easy to develop.
However, theres a lack of maturity in some of it features that make them look as it they were an after thought, or just not really well designed. Templates have a lot of limitations, remote XUL just doesnt work right (or at least the docs that explain how to sign components are just too outdated), many errors result in segfaults (agree, the problem was in how we were using some components, but you shouldn't segfault in any case!!), theres no clear separation between components and services (I really don't understand why they don't share a common interface!), XBL lacks of obvious things (like a script tag, please). And honestly, javascript sucks to structure your code... we had to implement an include () directive to import other
.js, there should be a way to do that in the language. And, there should be support for other datasources besides RDF.And the worst part is that there are not many apps developed in XUL, so documentation (specially about XPCOM components) is really scarce. The reference is OK (most of the time), but you dont have a single example for most of the XPCOM components. A search in google usually returns C/IDL headers from the mozilla implementation or the reference at xulplanet
;).I really hope XUL development speeds up. Its really a good platform, and the separation between presentation/data/logic really shows up. But as it is, its darn difficult, and slow, to develop for it (at least till you know most of the work arounds).
By the way, has anyone developed both in Luxor and mozilla XUL and have some insights in their pros and cons? (besides what the luxor page says, which of course I wont believe until I try it
:P). -
Re:A few questions.
First off, no USA on this device. Like the SL-CXXX series (I own an 860 myself), they will not be brought to America, though if you want one, you can import them from companies like Dynamism. Since it is essentially the same as the other Zaurus' hardware, I'm sure any of the kernels/ROMS currently available for it, but they are all Linux and all pretty good.
As for educational discounts, only in your dreams... or if you lived in Japan. Dynamism wants a cool $899 for it (I paid $850 for my SL-C860, and I think it's worth it).
Lastly, there are current VoIP for the Zaurus (KPhone comes to mind), so it should work with this model. The 4GB drive will come most in handy for the numerous emulators available (there are emulators for just about every pre-playstation console, and even a SCUMM emulator to play those classic LucasArts games [and rumors of a PS1 emulator abound]).
But you have to ask yourself if $900 is worth it for a PDA with very little support over here in the US. For most, it will be a "no," but for the true Linux-loving uber-geek, there is nothing better. Alternately, you can try the Zaurus SL-6000L (with full support here in the US). It's only $499 now at Amazon. Sure, it doesn't have the 4GB drive, but it works pretty much the same, except it lacks the cool clamshell design. -
Re:Probably in sealed documents...
Since when was NTFS support for Linux a big ticket item? The existing project (actually moving forward these days) can't even find someone to maintain their website! Help out: http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/
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Involving students with open source codeIn my course Software Comprehension and Maintenance I ask students to contribute to an open-source project, by adding a new feature or fixing an important bug. The course's grade is entirely determined by their performance on this project.
The course is an elective, and was offered for the first time last year; not many students decided to take it. Those who did, got hooked; some commented that it was the course where they really understood what it meant to program.
The following projects were completed last year:
- Support for PDF actions in PDFBox.
- Improvements to the GUI interface of the ZGRViewer
- The addition of a new question type in the ETH Lecture Communicator
This year the course will be taught in English and will be offered to students across Europe through the EU's Erasmus student mobility programme. I hope to be able to report on new exciting results through slashdot next year.
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Involving students with open source codeIn my course Software Comprehension and Maintenance I ask students to contribute to an open-source project, by adding a new feature or fixing an important bug. The course's grade is entirely determined by their performance on this project.
The course is an elective, and was offered for the first time last year; not many students decided to take it. Those who did, got hooked; some commented that it was the course where they really understood what it meant to program.
The following projects were completed last year:
- Support for PDF actions in PDFBox.
- Improvements to the GUI interface of the ZGRViewer
- The addition of a new question type in the ETH Lecture Communicator
This year the course will be taught in English and will be offered to students across Europe through the EU's Erasmus student mobility programme. I hope to be able to report on new exciting results through slashdot next year.
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Re:Voice QualityTechnically, it appears that Skype only uses a third party to facilitate a direct connection between the two NATed hosts. I've heard this described as NAT Punching and I'm still a bit fuzzy on how it works.
According to this article, Skype licensed a proprietary codec from Global IP Sound.
As for spyware, a little research into the history of the Kazaa client would reveal that the people who introduced the spyware did so after they bought the technology from the developers. The Skype people are the original developers and had nothing to do with the spyware included in the install. Remember for a time you could download the Morpheus client and participate on the same P2P network as Kazaa without spyware. It wasn't until Morpheus and Kazaa had a falling out and Morpheus no longer worked on the Kazaa network that you saw the spyware free KazaaLite clients coming out.
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Re:Why no 'simple' computers like this today?
Windows still has QBasic. It's good enough for simple file and text i/o. For both Windows and Linux, wxBASIC looks pretty neat.