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Just a minor point. As I recall, and have read, Joseph Campbell really didn't help Lucas craft the mythos. It was more of an after-the-fact thing that Campbell recognized and Lucas then picked up and ran with to inflate his own 'artistry' and level.

It's not a vast work of high art. However, it's the early cinema serials taken to the pinacle. Just spend a weekend watching the old Buster Crabbe serials, then watch Episode IV. From the settings (the common desert-type area), to the music to the cuts, wipes and dissolves, it's clearly a loving tribute to Flash Gordon.

Even more than pulp sci-fi (which I loved as a Jr. High student, E.E. 'Doc' Smith and all), Star Wars is the direct evolution of Flash Gordon. Remember, those old 30's serials hit TV in the early fifties, right about when Lucas would have been around 10 years old (wich is around how old I was when Star Wars came out and I watched it). So one could easily see his childhood wonder and awe come through there.

It looks like a product marketed almost solely at the technical community just can't succeed in economic conditions like those at present, if ever.

Even industry heavyweights with large technical communities are in trouble (Psion - who invented the handheld computer - are pulling out and there are continuing rumours about the future of Palm), so what hope is there for a newcomer to the market? (Sharp take note! :-) )

The analogy is broken. The bombings are a minor issue compared to the full horror of the sanctions. And Iraq is not a person. It consists of many people, many of them innocent human beings like you or I. It simply defies all humanity to sit by and let 5,000 children per month die for want of adequate food and medical supplies (such as aneasthetics, spare parts for hospital equipment and ambulances, medical journals, and much, more more). Dennis Halliday, former humanitarian co-ordinator for Iraq, said it best: We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that. It is illegal and immoral."

The industry is working on this problem. Citroën for example uses a special Partical Filter on their latest models.

I mean to say that 10 years ago, such technology as to make a palm would be many times larger, but also very delicate likely.

Well, 10 years ago Psion launched the Series 3, the first of a long and successfull range of PDAs. The basic design was kept through the later 3a, 3c and 3mx models, the last appearing in 1998.

The Series 3 was a PDA with keyboard, equipped with lots of software, such as word processing, spreadsheet and programming. The Series 3a (1993) was a much improved model, and was almost unchanged until the 3mx of 1998.

In 1997, Psion launched the Series 5; a bit larger, but much more modern. In 1999, the Revo appeared, which again resembles the original Series 3. An overview of the history of the Psion PDAs can be seen at http://3lib.ukonline.co.uk/historyofpsion.htm.

Psion's story shows that making things smaller isn't necessarily a goal. PDAs today aren't any smaller than the PDAs of 1991, and that's because they would get almost unusable.

Have a look at the Organiser models at the same page - this is what a PDA looked like in the 80's.

(Unfortunately, Psion never really gained a foothold in the American market. They've got a large market share in Europe.)

i got my ZX81 in 1982 i think, in kit, my father helped me to built it, i was 12 y/o :), and since i'm into computer...
you can still buy the kit, but last year it was something like 29.95 iirc, now it's 99.95 ish!
then i have had an Amstrad CPC6128, remember? it's the computer that "killed" the C=64... then a PC... 386SX16, SX33, DX4/100, P166MMX, PII300, etc
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BeDevId 15453 - Download BeOS R5 Lite free!

I am by no means familiar (aside from reading occasional user documentation) with distributed programing frameworks, but i am fairly familiar with C/C++. one thing i think should be noted is that while C/C++ syntax and semantics are well standaradized, as operating systems and architectures differ vastly, they are apt to have different implimentations of certain system calls (eg network sockets, file system calls (beyond things like open/close), etc). afaik, interpretted languages like java and perl should be able to avoid this problem since its all handled by the interpreter.
Hmm. While not directly relating to the original question (as far as I know, there is no Corba support or similar) there is an attempt to make a "common" Cross-Platform C++ Library at the WxWindows Project Which may be of interest.
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The 'metatoolkit' wxWindows is trying to make this possible. Unfortunately the Qt toolkit is not yet supported. The main idea behind wxWindows is using the native toolkit on each supported platform. This means a native look and feel on each platform. On Win systems the GUI parts of wxWindows are implemented using MFC and on Unixes one can choose between GTK and Motif/Lesstif. A Mac version is in beta stage. BeOS and OS/2 port are worked on. The Qt port has been discussed lately on the wx-devel mailing list but I don't know if anybody is working on it. There is a simple 'stubs port' so creating a new port should not be too tough.

All we need is some skilled Qt programmers with strong interest in cross-platform work.

Yours
Jere Kahanpää

The trick is to find an API that works across toolkits. Check out wxWindows at:

http://web.ukonline.co.uk/julian.smart /wxwin

It currently supports several OS's -- Windows, Linux/GTK, BeOS, with ports to Mac, Linux/QT coming along. There are plans for a RAD application designer in the works, as well.

-- Ken

I personally like wxWindows, which works for Unix, Win, and Mac (although the mac port seems to be a bit behind).

There's a list of many cross-platform toolkits here.

"I guess we are about 15-20 years (maybe sooner) away from having a few problems with machines making unauthorized (by any human) decisions that could go against humans in general. At the rate things are changing, I would feel that in 30-40 years time things will be out of our hands."

kinda scary if, in fact, "war is quickly becoming a game only machines can play". Then again, if "artificial" intelligence is a belittling name for it, and we find ourselves blocking its progress, then maybe it'll subjugate us and serve its real host with a favor in kind. Here we haggle over our "intellect" as "property", while we actually manage our "property" (as in coastal real estate) with so little intelligence*. Or maybe trading more ideas we'll dump less industrial filth, and we'll get smart enough to leapfrog over the *pending antarctic melt down. Who the hell knows?

It is very difficulty to classify the intelligence of Deep Blue. Its main advantage appeared to be that it could process information at a much faster rate than Kasparov. Also, unlike Kasparov, it did not whine and grumble when it lost.

My beef with the in-awed worship of "machine intelligence" (as in the age of"spiritual machines") is that the two bits gurus rarely refer to "emotional intelligence", (which may represent a healthy portion of the 90% of our "brain" we don't use. Other human cultural traditions, such as the Tibetan Buddhist, have copious libraries full of recorded learning about states of feeling, compassion, awareness and consciousness which the analytic Western tradition seems to ignore if not repress. Will "intelligence" outsmart us in a few short years with simple yes or no answers? Maybe or maybe not:)

On that note, apparently Deep Dark Blue is still kinda dumb when playing more binary and ancient human bored games like Korean shogi or Chinese go. "Deep Blue beat Kasparov by plotting 14 moves ahead, but a good shogi program would require a computer to read at least 20 moves ahead - professional shogi players can think 30 - 40 moves ahead.. Another lure for programmers is the ancient Chinese game of go, which is even harder for computers than shogi.." - latimes 990819A ..

Sure, just a couple more exponential steps up mount moore's law, but until we let eugenetic engineers hardwire quantum wetware into our loved ones, how will digital decisionmakers get *meaningful* information from human feelings, intuitions, subtle verbal and subtler non-verbal communications, etc.?

Qt is nice but not the only solution. If you need to do cross-platform Linux/Windows development without having to suffer too much here are some pointers based on my experience:

I'd personally recommend FLTK: http://www.fltk.org for a nice, easy to use C++ toolkit that works flawlessly between many Unices, Linux and windows, and of course wxWindows which is now well-proven (http://web.ukonline.co.uk/julian.smar t/wxwin/).

FLTK is very simple and fast but has its own look and feel (on the plus side Unix and Windows application look exactly the same). WxWindows is a wrapper on top of win32 and GTK+ or Motif (your choice) so is a bit slower, but the toolkit itself is a bit richer.

You can use the cygwin or the mingw32 compilers to work with FLTK on windows, which makes it really totally free, not quite as good a development environment as Linux, but close enough. WxWindows requires VC++ I believe (I'm not sure, I use the python bindings with a pre-compiled version. Very fast development cycle: http://alldunn.com/wxPython/).

Why don't you look at wxWindows at http://web.ukonline.co.uk/julian.smar t/wxwin. It's a cross-platform C++ library that is fairly mature, and really usable. It is currently available on GTK+, Motif, and Windows. A MacOS port is currently in progress, and a Qt port is also in the works. I am even working on porting it to the BeOS. This gives you access to all of the major OS's out there (Mac, Windows, Linux (via GTK+ or even Motif) and major UNIX variants (through Motif, or GTK+ as well.) In addition, a Python language port is a available for those who don't like C++.

Ken Crandall
crandall@computer.org