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Slashback: Interoperability, Royalty, Fire
Pardon me, sir, are you in the market for a nice strong bridge? Aaron J. Seigo writes: "A letter from Mosfet can be found at knews.derkarl.org which clearly states the official KDE position regarding the recent "news" with regard to Gnome and KDE getting together on a common component model. Which is: It isn't happening. And for good reason.
KDE2 is in the final stages of preperation, so this is not the time to go messing with the foundations of things. Also, KParts wasn't designed on a whim. The KDE team put a lot of thought into it and came up with something that has some very real benefits to it (speed/overhead/etc). While interoperability would be nice, don't expect it on the component level just yet. Be happy with drag 'n drop and the like. For now."
Fair enough. Also on the KDE front, Joseph points you to knews.derkarl.org, which seems like a useful one for anyone looking for KDE updates.
Will a Linux PDA become their strong suit?
jsinnema writes "News on the Linux Powered Royal daVinci from Wayland Bruns, CEO/CTO/Chief Geek CompanionLink Software at PDA Buzz Royal:
'Unfortunately, development is not on the timeline originally hoped. What's shaping out is two 16MB ROM/16MB Ram units, one 4 color grayscale for a low price, the other full color for a higher price. Size and weight are about the same as a Palm III. The color unit will have a flash slot.' and
'One of the interesting aspects of the project is that this is the first time we can directly compare performance of a particular app on both PC and PDA. I'm happy to report the PDA units are surprisingly powerful, except to note that memory access is relatively slow.'"
It sure would be neat if Linux becomes the default OS for palm-top computing; will Royal's project, though, stand a chance against the flashier ones which keep peeking like Monty Python animation over the horizon?
I'm sorry, but I'll have to call you back after I set my computer on fire. rpeppe writes "those who were intrigued by the Plan 9 release but don't have the appropriate hardware, or in fact anyone interested in new languages and OS's should be interested in the following:
vita nuova has released a new edition of the Inferno OS, source code and all, under a new licence, which allows distribution of core OS source code to inferno subscribers only, but unencumbered personal and commercial use of the binaries and the rest of the source code (including a javascript capable Web browser).
inferno is a cousin to Plan 9, but includes a virtual machine and a new language, limbo, and can run hosted under linux, free bsd, windows and other OS's, as well as natively on x86, ARM, MIPS, 68000, 68020 processors. because the whole operating system is virtualised, programs written for inferno are completely portable, something it would be difficult to say about java, for instance.
the language, limbo, deserves some attention - it's C-like, and OO in the deeper sense, but avoids the inheritance pitfalls that languages like java fall into. it's a joy to write in.
in my opinion, inferno was the coolest thing ever to have come out of bell labs CSRG - and we've now got exclusive rights to it, and intend to make as much of this excellent technology as we can. i hope others will too!"
Linux on my PDA... but the OS is burned in firmware!! How does one get a damn upgrade for a Cassiopeia?!
cad-fu: kicking CAD back into shape
Ah...Plan 9, I hate thee and I do not know you. Before my current job, I worked at a food service business. I cannot say directly the name though due to the nature of my ending terms because I worked directly with the security aspects of the networks, but we were the #1 distributor of fruit, condiments, and prewarmed ground corn to Southern US hotels. (Hint - starts with an A, end with a K, and has MAR in the middle)
At Company X, I was called in at least twice a week to assist lower level techs in working with FORTE on our dying Sun IPXs. Forte is the pre-cursor of Plan 9 developed in the late 80's/early 90's by a few people at DEC in their spare time. Let me tell you, Forte should have died with Digital a few years ago.
If Plan 9 is anything like Forte, count me out. Barring a small miracle and total code rewrite, if I ever see another Forte.conf or Plan 9.conf I will kill someone. I cannot count the times Forte dissaperared from the process tables for no reason. I thought it was our hardware (Sun IPXs aren't the best things after all, even more so the model GRTS-11 we had...*shudder*) but even after trying it on an HP-UX box and some homemade x86 servers Forte still sucked.
Finally I had to call up DEC and pull every string I had to get a tech to come here to examine. The problem? "Oh, Forte has known bugs with Ethernet. Try FDDI."
*)@E&ASDI) WTF is that! I tried to understand why Forte didn't like our Ethernet. No dice. Finally, we had to spend over $35,000 USD to rewire the server section with FDDI. Ughh.
Granted Forte did work then, but the performance left much to be desired. I hope Plan 9 fares better than Forte did (ask around, Forte was a beast). But be warned before diving headfirst into Plan 9, I got burned bad by it's original incantation.
,
faeryman
I guess this KDE/Gnome development settles my previously mentioned naming problem.
Also, it's nice to see a PDA with a large amount of ROM compared to it's RAM. Hopefully it'll power one of those tiny hardrives or be expandable enough to hold MP3's. Don't even mess around with black and white. Nothing should be in black and white nowadays.
Keeping
Back to back slashback and quickies.
This could set a record for maximum number of simultaneous /.ings
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
So, where are they? Where are those binaries? Or is this brimstoneware?
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
Is not to continue the Java idea of combining the declartion and implementation of a class in one file. Coming from C++, writing all code in what looked like the definition of the class seemed strange at first, but I've come to realize that this is simply very, very nice in many ways. I'd hate to go back. Too bad Limbo doesn't continue with this idea.
This is timothy with the fake i. See? It's that weird foreign i. He's not the real Slim Shady.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
I'm glad that KDE and gnome aren't getting together for a common one. This will at least let people have a couple good choices on which one to use.
Is the fake eye bionic?
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Slashback is a great idea : responsible journalism which makes corrections and caveats easily accessible.
The permanent banning of accounts for being modded down _6_ times strikes me as an appalling idea. All a poster has to do is to express an unpopular opinion. Have you followed the complaints on the meta-moderation and moderation threads? On /. there has always been a lot of un-informed, knee-jerk moderation.
I suppose I should just get 6 of my buddies together and we'll have a mod-fest against someone. A much better idea would be implementing user defined kill-lists. That way _I_ get to decide what I can read, not you, not some half-wit that doesn't know what the distinction between Interesting and Troll is. Thanks, keep up the good work
Crush
precisely what is meant by "inheritance pitfalls that languages like java fall into"?
:D
you can't just say something like that without at least mentioning some of these problems. I wasn't really aware of any inheritance pitfalls that Java falls into, but then again that may be because I ccode a lot of Java.
If you're looking for a Linux PDA, also keep an eye on the Compaq iPAQ. Compaq is releasing an iPAQ Linux to developers. Is anyone here not a developer?
Miguel was really stoking the flames the other night on IRC, unfortunately I wasn't logging, but I'm sure there was somebody else.. Its a very interesting read,
:) KDE and all of its components are heading down this same road. Soon you will be very very pissed off because some megacorporation with revenues in the billions will be charging you to use KDE. This .sig intentionally left blank
the gist of the message made clear that Miguel is interested in writing a _FREE_ desktop environment.. unrestricted and free of ambigious licences that the kde developers have chosen.. (Note: You have to take a very subjective and bizarre perspective on things to believe KDE and its components are truly Free)
KDE developers should hide in Shame , their decision making is naive at best. What can you expect from these guys in the future? The right thing? I dont think so, Dont expect anything better. The fact is, they aren't Interested in a Desktop environment that will be FREE for ALL. This is a VERY VERY important point to be made.
Now imagine Unisys had said years ago that lwz compression was free for all to use, they would never charge anybody to use it, it was for everybody, etc, etc... Then they started charging for it once it was common on every desktop,, You would be mad as hell , I'm sure you are
Bwahahahaa!
What's next? Free-as-in-beer VxWorks? Nahhh....
Edith Keeler Must Die
implement Command;
include "sys.m";
include "draw.m";
sys: Sys;
Command: module
{
init: fn (ctxt: ref Draw->Context, argv: list of string);
};
# The canonical "Hello world" program, enhanced
init(ctxt: ref Draw->Context, argv: list of String)
{
sys = load Sys Sys->PATH;
sys->print("hello world\n");
for (; argv!=nil; argv = tl argv)
sys->print("%s ", hd argv);
sys->print("\n");
}
yeah, I'm sure glad limbo avoids those obvious Java pitfalls. Hello World in limbo is such a joy. I'm convinced.
Free as in "the Truth shall set you..."
Instead they seem more interested in "eye-candy" which I guess is ok, but I think DirectX support for Linux would be much more impressive. After all, how difficult can it be ? Its just an API, which Microsoft even give away on their website: DirectX 7.0 API
I guess what I'm trying to say, is that it would be almost trivial for a Linux guru to port Direct X to Linux I am just amazed nobody has thought to do it yet.
Am I the only one who thinks this ? Or am I displaying my ignorance ?
My understanding is Plan 9 (the OS) was designed to raise UNIX from the dead, echoing the plot of the awful, awful movie.
Logic ... merely enables one to be wrong with authority. -- Doctor Who
Great job!!
And mr duff (yes, probably that mr duff!) pointed out that the Plan 9 under discussion was a ground up research OS built at Bell Labs, and has nothing to do with a DEC product called Forte.
i can legally write a binary that touches glibc, and keep it in house or sell it, whatever.
can't do that with qt.
it's like over a $1K to touch qt libs, and keep the source in house.
any linux distribution shipping with kde should carry a warning label, like the cigarette label, that says something like:
**********************************************
WARNING: this product contains "trolltech" binary codes, that, depending on use, may obligate you to $1000 or more in licensing fees.
**********************************************
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
I remember that one of the big problems in Java was this terribly slow mark & sweep that is done whenever the VM runs out of space, causing temporary lockups. And in Perl, any cyclical structures leak unless you manage them yourself - what a nightmare!
The idea in inferno is that everything is simply reference count based (super fast) until it notices a circular structure, and then it puts that into the "mark and sweep" bin. Too bad Java or Perl doesn't do this.
I hope that this idea doesn't get lost...
I know slashdot is not objective all the time, but what exactly qualifies timothy to make generalizing statements about Java's portability or its alleged problems with inheritance (no idea what that is about)?! Please! You'd expect better from group who knows about prejudice concerning software. You know, Linux is hard to use, there are no applications, no support for most hardware, you cannot use it for real work etc. Java has not and never will be perfect, but it's steadily improving. And there are JDK's and JRE's from all sorts of organizations, so you can hardly say anything about Java's properties.
Few people would think it reasonable to write to the editor of a literary magazine, commenting on and expressing opinions concerning a book which they have not read, yet several contributors have no compunctions about expressing their opinions about both Plan 9 and Inferno, despite an admitted lack of familiarity with either. At the very least, posters of 'opinions' should read some of the documents freely available from Bell Labs prior to commenting.
/.
Else it's entirely possible that one might later come to regret snide comments made concerning the work of various members of the ACM, Bell Lab's Fellows, recipients of the National Medal of Technology, etc.
Contributors to the Inferno/Plan 9 project include Rob Pike, Phil Winterbottom, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and others.
I think perhaps their concept of 'peer review' for their work extends somewhat beyond the constituency of
It has been done for over a year now.
See WINE.
Your stupid computers!!! Stupid, stupid!!!!
A wealthy eccentric who marches to the beat of a different drum. But you may call me "Noodle Noggin."
Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati
Just a few thoughts on your comment.
First, even if DirectX were ported, you wouldn't be able to just install windows games straight to linux, as they depend on other win32 APIs and libraries as well (although combining WINE with the DirectX port might allow this to be achieved).
As far as OpenGL vs. DirectX, I tend to lean towards OpenGL. It's an open standard, and there are (mostly) compatible implementations offered by SGI, Microsoft, and a host of others (including the open-source MESA). OpenGL was designed with portability in mind, whereas DirectX was created to one-up Apple when quicktime was the hot multimedia format. DirectX is just barely portable to other versions of windows besides 9X (they had to redesign NT's hardware interface layer to make it work in Win2K), let alone UNIX/X11.
OpenGL does default to much higher precision than DirectX, which makes it theoretically slower, but in practice it bests the other API considerably when weilded by a good 3D programmer. Also, let's not forget that OpenGL was originally concieved by SGI, and the feature-sets of SGI chips tend to be a few years ahead of everybody else's. Therefore, "new" features like hardware T&L are already supported by OpenGL and used by all existing GL applications, whereas DirectX has to catch up to the hardware. In fact, even when upgrading to a new version of DirectX, old apps don't benefit from new hardware features.
I've had my current debian installation for more than a year, and I've never had to upgrade MESA. Windows folks haven't needed a GL upgrade since it was first included by default in a service release to Win95, whereas someone with the same version of windows has probably been through at least 4 upgrades to DirectX.
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
Andy Grove: "Not Much."
(I do OO dev since 1991. I love this, and I pretty know what I am talking about).
Inheritance lead to problems because it is easily messed and very difficult to undo.
There is a design time inheritance (ie: B is-a A), and implementation time inheritance (ie: we are going to reuse the implementation of A to build B).
Pitfall of inheritance is that it is very inflexible. During the life of a system, requirements change slowly, design mistake have to be corrected, implementation improve. When things get so wrong, that the implemented inheritance is bad, splitting the classes, changing hierarchy, etc, etc, have a deep impact on what is already produced. (In one word, evolution is easy, until you hit the wall-of-brick of the choosed hierarchy and the pain starts).
The fragile-base-class (in general sense, not in C++ only sense) is also a problem. It means that changing superclass implementation can have vast impacts to subclasses. This often lead to frozen superclasses (ie: don't change it, too much people rely on its particular quirks)
Another problem with inheritance is that it is unknown how far to go with it. Grab any textbook on OO, read the example, and try to understand if the hierarchy is really good. This depends on the problem at hand, which sometimes is not known. But OO proponents like to ignore those issues and present things have if there was single true way.
Stupid example:
Shape -> Polygon -> Square
-> Triangle
-> Line
-> Polygon
-> Circle
-> Point
Is this right ? Wrong ? Isn't Point a zero radius circle ? Line and Point have no surface, so maybe there should be closed/non-closed shapes somewere ?
The answer is that there is no right/wrong. It depends on how it will be used. There is no a single *right* inheritance. But a choosen inheritance somewhat constraint the way we see things.
Java's interfaces is a try to get rid of those problem, but is IMHO a short shoot.
Dynamic langages are less sensitives to those problems. Check Objective-C, Smalltalk or TOM http://www.gerbil.org for more insight on this.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like nails.
When all you have is inheritance, every design is a hierarchy.
For fun design failures, take a look at Swing/AWT integration. When you start to grasp the mess (Graphics/Graphics2D, paint() overload, and casts), it is really funny to see the nightmare coming on the road.
Cheers,
--fred
Not to mention the fact that Plan 9 is PLANIX.. coincidence? :)
(I do OO dev since 1991. I love this, and I pretty know what I am talking about).
...
Inheritance lead to problems because it is easily messed and very difficult to undo.
Brilliant analysis! (*saves article*). Moderators, did you see it?
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
depends whether you like C or pascal. limbo is C-like; oberon is pascal-like.
The Psion Series % has had linus running on it now for about 18 months. Pop over to Calcaria to see progress information, and some screenshots.
Find funky gifts
you didn't miss it. we haven't put the binaries out yet. we're going to do so very soon. as with all these things, we're up against a very tight schedule, and have been spending most of the last couple of months writing the manuals... blah blah blah, i hate doing documentation! still, it's almost all done now (and online) and we're going to make the binaries available any time soon.
not forgetting that it's only the core VM source that is part of the "subscriber" arrangement and binary only if you haven't paid your $300; everything else in the system is Open Source, including the web browser, all the apps (over 200000 lines of code), and the build tools.
...of people who've obviously never used Java for any amount of time slamming it for things like not being portable. Not portable? WTF are you talking about?? Are you using Microsoft's VM or something? And what exactly are the "inherent pitfalls that languages like java fall into"? I find it a complete joy to write code in java. Is this just a matter of opinion (and thus not worth a lot) or do you have anything specific to critique the language on?
Jesus, every new (or at least newly released) language/environment these days takes a shot at Java for one thing or another. Why not just release your product, tout its strengths and let the developers decide what tool they need to use without all this bullshit hype/FUD?
Then one of my friends said he would be doing Java instead... because there were no books available for Inferno or Limbo.
I wrote it off after that. It was still fun to come up with TV commercials, though. There's just so much potential!
My favorite was a young couple fleeing from the Microsoft building, with zombies close behind ("Brains! Brains!" One should look like Bill). The ditzy girl, in true horror-movie style, cries, "What do they want from us?" The shotgun-toting hero replies, "They want our intelligent operating system!" as we cut to a close-up of the Inferno box the girl is carrying. After the announcer finishes his spiel, we see the couple cornered in an alley, zombies close and threatening. The hero points his shotgun at the camera, we fade to white, two shots ring out, and blood drips on the screen in the form of the Lucent "brown ring of quality." It bursts into flame and the text "Inferno" is added as the announcer proclaims, "Inferno: Welcome to HELL!" Fade to black.
Whew! End Creativity. Anyway, if they can just get some books out, maybe they'll have a go at it.
Judebert
For geek dads: Contraction Timer
Well, yes, inheritance when misused, or overused, is a Bad Thing. However, the solution to this is NOT to remove inheritance (can you say, "throwing the baby out with the bathwater"?).
Inheritance is a powerful tool that can actually increase code readability and maintainability if used correctly. Consider how you would implement an "is-a" relationship in the problem domain with a language that doesn't have inheritance...
I guess the big question is: Do you want a language which prevents you from doing something in all instances simply because *sometimes* doing that thing is the wrong thing? If that were the case, we should rid ourselves of gotos as well.
The fact is, poor developers can write bad code in *any* language.
Bravo!!!
;-( )
Totally agree.. (Begine a non-oop kinda guy, who happens to occaisionally whip out oop code.)
As far as I can tell, Objective C is really better than C++ for large scale development because of this. Compare and contrast Taligent and NeXT. Boom.
But then again, I still think C was given to K&R by God himself.
Not to say that C++ isn't a fantastic language. But I think Objective C is better when larger.
( I've never even gotten to touch a NeXT box.
Ofcourse I don't have alot of concrete examples like the wonderful post above. It's just what I think.
(Strapping on asbestos suite, flipping on cooling switch).
Happy Hacking,
Pan
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
i'm not sure that "is-a" is something inherent to many problems. it is a way of looking at certain problems, sure, but i don't think it's an inevitable, or even a necessary concept.
the way i think of it is that when you're writing a piece of code that uses object A, you are aware exactly of the interface that A provides (or you should be) and the compiler should be able to make absolutely sure that you don't go outside that interface.
moreover, if i'm implementing object A, i know exactly what interface i want to present. it shouldn't matter in the slightest which objects i choose to use internally in order to implement that interface.
the main payoff to avoiding inheritance comes at the software maintenance stage. with an inheritance hierarchy, when inspecting some code that uses an object a of type A, there's no way of knowing which code is being invoked when something calls a method on a. it could be a subclass of A, which might or might not invoke its superclass method. i can't tell by reading the documentation for A what's going to happen, because A's idea of reality can be subtly subverted by a subclass. these problems can become really nasty when dealing with a large class hierarchy and a large program.
if an object is required to implement its entire interface, then these problems melt away. i am guaranteed that the module implementing the interface is responsible for all the bahaviour it exhibits. so you don't tend to get bugs created by the subtle interaction of subclass with superclass invariants. in fact, it's the invariants that are probably the most important thing. if i write some code like:
x := 0;
function1()
{function2();}
function2()
{ x += 2; }
where function1 and function2 are part of an object's interface, i would like to be absolutely sure when looking at the code that x is 2 more after calling function1 than before. in a language like java (or objective-C, for that matter), i don't have that guarantee. this invariant, carefully maintained by the writer of the class, can be broken by someone carelessly overriding function2 and neglecting to call the superclass method.
I guess the big question is: Do you want a language which prevents you from doing something in all instances simply because *sometimes* doing that thing is the wrong thing? If that were the case, we should rid ourselves of gotos as well.
any high level language is a trade-off between safety and power. java (and limbo) chose to give up the safety of C-like pointers for the guarantee that arbitrary bits of memory couldn't be corrupted. but i don't think you'd find many people that would say that the power of the language has declined drastically because of that. on the contrary, the additional checking that the compiler can now do gives you more freedom to concentrate on the real meat of the program.
it's the same with inheritance. inheritance gives you the ability to implement some things conveniently (GUI widgets being the canonical example), but doing away with it means that code is vastly more readable, because you can see exactly what a piece of code is doing; there is no need to know your class hierarchy before you can see what the control flow is doing, because control flow is determined locally.
the same sort of thing applies to local variables in C. consider the code: :-]); it has no side effects; assigning to i cannot change anything else in the program. that's the power of local variables: they provide a cast iron guarantee that the state of the variable is local.
{
int i;
i = 99;
}
any C programmer can tell by looking at that code that it does absolutely nothing (cpp munging aside
when looking for bugs, this sort of guarantee is invaluable. who hasn't spent hours looking for a bug, only to discover it somewhere that it "couldn't" be!? the more possibilities you can rule out based on a quick glance at the code, the more productive your bug hunting will be.
that's why i like limbo so much. when it gives a guarantee, the guarantee is absolute. and the guarantee that a the meaning of a name depends on the local code, not global state, is an excellent guarantee to be able to give.
The fact is, poor developers can write bad code in *any* language.
i completely agree. i've seen some pretty appalling code in Limbo too. but inevitably you're one day going to be asked "go and fix that bug!" in some of that code. that's the day that you bless the language design, because no matter how bad the author of the code, they can't break the guarantees of the language.
one can write (i think!) good code in any language too. if you're aware of the pitfalls, and write stylised code that avoids them. but inheritance *is* a pitfall (look, even the inventors of the language fell into it - doesn't that say something?!) and IMHO the more pitfalls a language can avoid, without compromising on the power of the language, the better the language.
PS. limbo got rid of goto too. :-)
Got rid of goto - oh man, now how am I going to get through those if statements?
10 goto 20
15 rem why did the first line do that?
20 ? "Hello World"
30 goto 10
oh, wait... head screwed on backwards, thinking in Commodore Basic again (hey, I was 6 at the time...)
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
localman wrote:
I would argue that you can't judge the merits of a language on it's "Hello World"
My response:
I agree, my post was more about the "Obvious Java pitfalls " that limbo avoided. In hello world it doesn't avoid any "obvious Java pitfalls".
I was hoping people would point out the obvious things that I was missing. With real code examples, not just genral statements. Also limbo has been a bit of a sore point as I've been hearing about how it was going to kill Java since 95 (as part of inferno), so I might have been a bit harsh.
Didn't mean to slam limbo as a whole, was hoping to get some discustion at the level of actual code.
-Peace
Dave
Free as in "the Truth shall set you..."