Slashdot Mirror
Opencroquet
zymano writes "OSnews has some information about Opencroquet, a 3d operating system worked on by Alan Kay, who also is one of the inventors of Smalltalk, one of the fathers of object oriented programming, conceiver of the laptop computer, inventor of much of the modern windowing GUI. The OS is a 3D environment running through the Squeak environment on top of another operating system. It requires a supported 3D accelerator. Squeak is an interpreted language similar to Smalltalk. Could be ssslooooww. Way cool screenshot."
Summary
.
Croquet had the working name of Tea until recently. You will see many references to Tea in the system, in the code, and even in this document. Just
assume that when you see Tea, we mean Croquet.
Croquet was built to answer a simple question. If we were to create a new operating system and user interface knowing what we know today, how far
could we go. What kinds of decisions would we make that we might have been unable to even consider 20 or 30 years ago, when the current set of
operating systems were first created.
The landscape of possibilities has evolved tremendously in the last few years. Without a doubt, we can consider Moore's law and the Internet as the two
primary forces that are colliding like tectonic plates to create an enormous mountain range of possibilities. Since every existing OS was created when the
world around it was still quite flat, they were not designed to truly take advantage of the heights that we are now able to scale.
What is perhaps most remarkable about this particular question is that in answering it, we find that we are revisiting much of the work that was done in
the early sixties and seventies that ultimately led to the current successful architectures. One could say that that in reality, this question was asked long
ago, and the strength of the answer has successfully carried us for a quarter century. On the other hand, the current environments are really just the thin
veneer over what even long ago were seriously outmoded approaches to development and design. Most of the really good fundamental ideas that people
had were left on the cutting room floor.
That isn't to say that they thought of everything either. A great deal has happened in the last few decades that allows for some fundamentally new
approaches that could not have been considered at the time.
We are making a number of assumptions:
Hardware is fast - really fast, but other than for booting Windows or playing Quake no one cares - nor can they really use it. We want to take advantage
of this power curve to enable a richer experience.
3D Graphics hardware is really, really fast and getting much faster. This is great for games, but we would like to unlock the potential of this technology to
enhance the entire user experience.
Late bound languages have experienced a renaissance in both functionality and performance. Extreme late-bound systems like LISP and Smalltalk have
often been criticized as being too slow for many applications, especially those with stringent real-time demands. This is simply no longer the case, and as
Croquet demonstrates, world-class performance is quite achievable on these platforms.
Communication has become a central part of the computing experience, but it is still done through the narrowest of pipes, via email or letting someone
know that they have just been converted into chunks in Quake. We want to create a true collaboration environment, where the computer is not just a
world unto itself, but a meeting place for many people where ideas can be expressed, explored, and transferred.
Code is just another media type, and should be just as portable between systems. Late binding and component architectures allow for a valuable
encapsulation of behaviors that can be dynamically shared and exchanged.
The system should act as a virtual machine on top of any platform. We are not creating just another application that runs on top of Windows, or the
Macintosh - we are creating a Croquet Machine that is highly portable and happens to run bit-identical on Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and ultimately on
its own hardware... anywhere we have a CPU and a graphics processor. Once the virtual machine has been ported, everything else follows; even the
bugs are the same. Most attempts at true multiplatform systems have turned out to be dangerous approximations (cf. Java) rather than the bit-identical
"mathematically guaranteed" ports that are required.
There are no boundaries in the system. We are creating an environment where anything can be created; everything can be modified, all in the 3D world.
There is no separate development environment, no user environment. It is all be the same thing. We can even change and author the worlds in
collaboration with others inside them while they are operating
The existing operating systems are like the castles that were owned by their respective Lords in the Middle Ages. They were the centers of power, a way
to control the population and threaten the competition. Sometimes, a particular Lord would become overpowering, and he would get to declare himself as
King. This was great for the King. And not to bad for the rest of the nobles, but in the end - technology progressed and people started blowing holes in
the sides of the castles. The castles were abandoned. Technology does this.
summary.html
teapot.jpeg
Croquet0.1.pdf
I grabbed the summary text and screenshot as well as the Croquet user manual in anticipation of /. effect.
Thank MrHOSTBOT for the free bandwidth.
Oh, and people seemed to be labeled "karma whore" just because they post useful (mirror) links, so I guess I'll stick to A.C. in order to please the masses.
Mom, mom. My game of HalfLife is running at half the speed on this OS. ;-)
That is because the desktop is up with full 3d-acceleration, fog, per pixel lightning, stencil shadows for under the text, realtime ratracer on the taskbar reflecting the desktop at a resolution of 1600x1200.
Oh, okey!
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
I guess I'll finally have to upgrade my 486
I hope he had good birthing hips... that sounds uncomfortable.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
It doesn't look very pretty in my opinion. Just some 2D pictures and file windows floating in 3D space.
Since the article is slashdotted, this comment might come out as a RTFA comment, but anyway:
Is the 3D desktop meant to be a proof-of-concepts or a real product? If the system i slow due to this Squeak, perhaps it could be translated into somthing that compiles?
When the only tool you have is a Mallet, everything starts looking like balls.
Mine are Blue and Yellow, thanks for asking.
Maybe this is a about 3D _GUI_.
I hope Smalltalk will not be the only language you can use to write programs. I think it's cool, but there's no reason I shouldn't be able to use other programming languages I know.
a pdf containing all information inclusive screenshots
I'm dubious of any supposedly revolutionary new OS that uses Shockwave-Flash for its site navigation. Since I don't allow that crap in my browser, all I see is a bunch of grey boxes on the left, rendering the site totally useless.
The extra bandwidth required probably isn't helping it survive a slashdotting right now, either.
Money I owe, money-iy-ay
I've worked with some ppl from Cincom (shouts to Peter if you're still working there), and they do tons of Small Talk applications.
This stuff is kind of addicting once you get into it, it is very radically different and just a strange concept when thinking about what we're used to.
Squeak is like a living organism of an application. It just sort of evolves as you use it, giving it tons of capabilities and flexibility.
The whole thing is wrapped around really little messages being sent around and everything being just in time / real time.
Definately look up squeak and give it a try.
Bob
(all this praise from a Perl nut even)
Your ideas are intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
If the website load time is any indication of the OS run-time, I think I'll stick with a 2-D interface. My question is why not just a 3-D Xwindows interface? Or just a 3-D desktop environment? If the OS is 3-D, does that mean that the kernel is 3D, or just the GUI?
-ad105
Hmm, the main link was slashdotted, so I tried the OS's website http://www.opencroquet.org. Maybe they should change their main graphic to the "Way Cool screenshot" rather than the Monet looking Croquet game they have going on right now. They might garner a bit more interest.
'He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.' - Douglas Adams
Here's the screenshot
It's not too spectacular, if you ask me.
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
How is croquet worse than the name windows? One is a nice solid club you can whack people with, the other is a piece of glass that breaks easily... oh wait, maybe windows fits perfectly!
I could well be missing something here - read the site and the article though, so at least I made an effort :)
What license is this code being developed under? It's called OPENCroquet, so presumably it's some kind of Open Source, but what flavour? Is it, in fact, Open at all?
I ask cos it looks interesting and I wanna play :)
P
I think I'd rather wait til we can have genuine 3d displays for this sort of thing...then this would be okay. But I think it isn't too good looking, and I've seen other programs that simply open up over the standard windows shell, and they look about the same as far as capabilities.
Insert witty Wicket joke here.
And what happens if two Croquet machines have packet collisions? Which one gets to make the croquet shot?
-S
We Apprentice Developers and Designers
"Way cool screenshot."
That sort of link is red rag to a bull...
Slashdotted already...
Ceci n'est pas une
The OS is a 3D environment running through the Squeak environment on top of another operating system.
OK, I didn't RTFA, but...if it runs on top of another OS, it can't really be called an OS itself, can it? I mean, win95 jokes aside, isn't it just a fancy GUI then?
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
There are apps that do this sort of thing for os X. It seems like a good idea to begin with, then, as more files are opened on the desktop (or whatever it should be called) things start getting really confusing. A 2D system is much simpler, however, I think the guy has some good ideas. Good luck.
If I am reading this correctly, they have made a 3D OS. Does anybody else here feel that, we (as a community) are putting way to much emphasis on the those two little characters 3 and D?
Couldn't we be spending our time trying to figure out how to make an easier to use, less complex OS? Something that isn't scary to people who have no idea how to use computers. Perhaps then we would see what a computer revolution would be all about.
Or maybe we could spend the time figuring out how to make computers more secure, so people wouldn't be afraid to put private info on it. Thus making it so that people are more likely to use them for everyday purposes.
But, no we decide we want to go 3D.
Makes you think, does the geek community really want computers to be used by everyone? Or do that want something only they themselves can understand?
Don't mod me down because you dissagree, if you disagree make a good argument about it.
Just my humble opinion,
SirLantos
The flying hamster of DOOM rains coconuts on your pitiful city.
Like smalltalk. Early 70s, IIRC. The problem of managing increasing software complexity, which object orientation (partly) solved, became significant only much later.
I don't think 3d enviromnents are an idea whose time has come. Slowness is only part of the problem. We really don't have the software infrastructure to scale UI complexity to those levels. Maybe for special applications, but not as a general UI design paradigm.
Certainly futuristic."Hardware is fast - really fast, but other than for booting Windows or playing Quake no one cares - nor can they really use it. We want to take advantage of this power curve to enable a richer experience."
Does anyone else here read this as 'expanding the software to fill the available space (CPU-cycles & memory bandwidth)'?
Instead of focusing on enabling 'a richer experience' let us focus first on what is wrong with the current 'solutions' we're using and realize that 'doing more with less' is more than just common sense.
Don't tell me you really think that an OS like Win2k/XP or *NIX/*BSD is the 'be all, end all' of running software on a computersystem. Heck, over 10 years we'll simply laugh at those archaic things we're using (including countless hardware devices), much like we look back at using punch cards.
In other words, nothing to see here. Wait until we realize the mistakes we've been making and start from scratch again.
Site & blog: http://www.mayaposch.com
I wonder what an incoming slashdotting would look like on a 3D operating system...my vote is for something not unlike the big "charge!" scene in Braveheart
It's cool to see Smalltalk getting noticed, but the misconceptions continue to run amok. Smalltalk is not typically interpreted - like Java, it's a JIT'ed language. The major commercial versions all use a JIT, and there's an experimental one for Squeak around - check the Squeak home page at http://www.squeak.org If you are curious about the commercial implementations - all of which have free downloads - check out this site: http://www.whysmalltalk.com
Talk Small and Carry a Big Class Library
Now we can enjoy the thrill of croquet, even on rainy days or in winter. I can't get to the website, because it's slashdotted, but it sounds almost as exciting as Championship Bass Fishing. Will there be a linux version?
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
While I've never used a 3D GUI (other than Quake), the problem I perceive from the outside looking in (so to speak) is that a 15 inch, 19 inch, or even 24 inch computer monitor is an awfully narrow window through which to view the world. My eyes can flit about the physical 3D space of my office quite quickly, but if the virtual 3D space I want to view is larger than my screen, I can't move my eyes beyond the screen edge without using my hands.
Until this problem is overcome, either with giant screens, head-mounted displays, or some bizarre gesture-controlled scrolling (like head tilts), I can't see 3D GUIs becoming more than a curiosity because they consume too much 2D screen space without giving enough virtual space back.
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
But raw execution speed isn't all that counts. Because Squeak has everything in one address space (unlike Gnome/KDE) and doesn't need to load anything on the fly (unlike Java), it's actually very responsive and uses comparatively little memory.
I don't think Squeak or anything based on it is going to replace mainstream desktops now or in the future. But it is an interesting platform for experimentation. It's also historically interesting because you can see the kinds of environments people already had available in 1980 (Smalltalk-80 is contained in Squeak).
... I have never played cricket in my entire life!!
PLEASE, what should I do with my life ??!
I was at Data General CORPORATION when they released the first true notebook. I don't remember him there, and I don't believe he did invent the notebook.
That's really all I want to know. Why? The screen shot doesn't show me any compelling reason to want a 3d desktop and I've never seen any 3d desktop's that offer anything that will help me to increase my productivity.
So again my question is, why? Why is this a good idea?
All the best,
--Bob
Of course the phrase "3d Operating System" is a non-sequitur in the first place. But then again, are they developing an OS at all?
OK, so it's not even remotely an OS - just yet another attempt at a useful 3d GUI which could conceivably one day run on specialized hardware. Just like a lisp machine (except 3d graphics somehow play into it?) Woohoo! You can hack the OS while you write a letter to grandma! No pesky memory protection, no cumbersome file permissions! I'm freeeeee! Hey, stop reading my email!Interesting idea, and I hope companies continue to test where they can go next with machine abstraction layers, but so far I'm not sold.
--madgeorge
I don't get it...
So you can "shrink" windows by increasing the "distance" to them? But you can resize windows already...
So you can layer the windows on top of each other? You can do that already -- with transparency too, if that's preferred...
Why use a 3D OS? Do you actually work faster in it, or what?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
The pdf may have a virus .. that could explain anonymity.
A window that constantly moving away from you
A window that is always behind you
A spherical window
Makes all your windows bounce off each other in a low gravity environment
Actually, these all sound kind of cool.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
You still get windows behind windows, and windows far in the distance are only useful for images, not text. Then again, I can't read the article until it is available. Must be a 3D web server.
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
Squeak is a type of Smalltalk. In fact I am fairly certain that it follows all of the standards set forth by Smalltalk/80. Sorry I don't mean to flame but I just thought that you all should know.
How, exactly, is implementing a "3D" environment on a 2D screen going to improve functionality, useability, etc?
The folks who most need further functionality on the desktop are professionals who generally use a high amount of system resources (coders, 2d/3d graphical artists, live motion rendering folks, etc).
By reducing the amount of system resources that a computer can dedicate to doing what the user WANTS, and using them to pretty up the graphical interface into nice little 3D view, are we really adding anything USEFUL?
You still will need ways to get to programs behind other programs (a task bar). You will still need to drag and drop windows. You will still need a form of right click or "quick access" menus.....
FUNCTIONALITY is the key word in any OS distribution. Adding 3D effects to an operating system does nothing for functionality. Nothing at all.
Maybe, but bearing in mind we currently have multiple gigahertz computers, most of the 3D graphics is dealt with by hardware, and interpreters are usually at worst only 20x slower (at the very worst), this means that your program will run as slow as machine code did about 4 years ago; but the graphics will go at full speed. I'll think I'll survive.
Also, Java is "interpreted" (actually it's typically a JIT, but it behaves like an interpreter), and that's currently about half the speed of optimised C or there abouts.
Also, check out dynamo, which is a machine code interpreter that interprets the same machine code as the machine it runs on somewhat faster than the microprocessor executes it (atleast about half the time anyway). It actually performs run time optimisation like code rearrangement and stuff, it's very clever.
Anyway, interpreters are not always slow; and they are usually plenty fast enough in practice.
I think quite a lot of FPS games have interpreters in them anyway to run the game code.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"I waited and waited for the screenshot to load and finally it did. I guess I expected more than transparancy tricks in the window borders. It's great that it compiles on a good number of platforms, but I don't think it's quite enough to make the masses switch.
Honestly, it reminds me of the windows alternate shell, LiteStep which also plays transparancy tricks and lives on top of another os, giving a customizable look and feel not available with the host OS. Honestly I'm surprised nobody's made this point yet.
-= Why can't I add 'Anonymous Coward' to my list of Foes? =-
would be karma whore.
When you put a high resolution screenshot on a server named "Minnow" you should expect nothing less
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
Since the screenshot is slashdotted,the image on the left I presume is the screenshot (although a little small and hard to see) Small google cache of screen shot
There is a cross-plaform vector-based (3D) network aware GUI project underway, written in C and C++ and using OpenGL called Fresco. It's still in early development, but it has a couple of demos you can run.
Stick Men
Holy shit, he must be the most hated man in the whole of computing! If I was him I'd be laying low.
As far as I see it, it's very simple: 2D screen, 2D pointer = 2D interface. That's the best construct as this is hardware-limited.
Likewise, 3D interface = 3D display + 3D pointer. It's no good doing a 2.5D interface.
I keep an avid watch on new interface developments, but I note with some alarm these screenshots that pop up. Alan Kay is a genius, safe to say, as is Jef Raskin. However, having a look at a screenshot for Croquet, or worse, THE, is a distinctly underwhelming sensation. THE in particular looks particularly un-humane. I understand all the theory - it just doesn't seem to pan out on first impressions.
The ideal future interface will be a successful blending of the old-school methods with some radical rethinking. We can't toss things like toolbars just yet, as there is a whole world of commerical apps that will need to be at least a little similar in operation.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Ripped straight off the side bar :
Will 3D user interfaces ever take off? With ever-growing 3D processing capabilities available on standard PC hardware, it seems only natural to pursue UI directions that take advantage of this awesome power. Moreover, the generation of users now emerging has had access to video games for as long as they could remember. As the line between video games and PCs becomes blurrier, the time may have come to think about how to apply 3D visualization techniques for more day-to-day computing tasks.
Here are links to some of the 3DUIs that are available today:
- FSN (pronounced "fusion") produces a cyberspace rendering of a file system. This was the original 3D file system navigator shown in Jurassic Park ("Hey, this is UNIX. I know this!").
[Screenshot] | [Download] (IRIX)
- FSV is modelled after FSN, but runs on Linux. FSV lays out files and directories in 3D, geometrically representing the file system hierarchy to allow visual overview and analysis.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Linux)
- Xcruise lets you fly through a filesystem in 3D as if it were interplanetary space. Directories are represented as galaxies, files are represented as planets (whose mass is determined by the file size), and symbolic links are represented as wormholes.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Linux)
- TDFSB is a 3D filesystem browser for Linux. Take a walk through your filesystem!
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Linux)
- Visual File System is a 3D file system visualizer for Windows. The tool scans a drive selected by the user, and then models the contents of the drive in 3D, based on the directories that are selected in a tree browser on the side of the display.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Windows)
- 3Dtop is an extension for Windows that represents desktop icons in 3D, letting you to fly around your desktop. You can create coloured spotlights, background and floor textures, "paintings" (bitmaps), clocks, and "flags" that represent shortcuts.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Windows)
- ROOMS turns a Windows desktop into a 3D world. You can see the world either through a first person perspective or with a map view, and you can populate the world with sounds, animated images, and 3D icons.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Windows)
- CubicEye organizes windows into a navigable cube. Cubes can be arranged by thematic or functional subject matter, and can be explored either individually or collectively as part of a more comprehensive structure of multiple cubes representing various areas of interest.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Windows)
- Vizible WorldViewer distributes windows across the exterior and interior surfaces of spheres, providing the means to visualize and navigate large numbers of web pages and data sources simultaneously.
[Screenshot]
So what we have here is simply an system that uses '3D graphics' - ie 2D graphics that look like it has 3 dimensions. Oh, and some things about portability and object oriented programming...
The penalty we have to pay for using such a system is of course that we need faster HW and lots of it. IMHO this is only a toy, and calling this an OS is like when MS called Win3 an OS.
I like the idea of this but what they say worried me;
"There are no boundaries in the system. We are creating an environment where anything can be created; everything can be modified, all in the 3D world. There is no separate development environment, no user environment. It is all be the same thing. We can even change and author the worlds in collaboration with others inside them while they are operating"
You damn well better have your security architecture sorted or Outlook would look robust by comparison. Imagine what a virus could do in a system like this.
-he who laughs last, is a bit slow.
journal
I tried this when it was announced on nooface.com a few months ago... at that time when I tried to run it the Squeak window came up but the app itself bombed. I tried and tried and couldn't even get the shell to run. I think this project has a long ways to go before it's even at the "experimental" stage. I think 3dwm is farther along at least in try-ability, but good luck to them.
Swedish radio sent an interview with Alan Kay today. The interviewer tells him that he could have been Bill Gates and Kay responds with "But Bill Gates doesn't know anything important about computers so who'd want to be him?".
Link to real audio clip (click on "Lyssna" and go to the end of the file). The interview is about what he did at Xerox.
Squeak is an interpreted language similar to Smalltalk. Could be ssslooooww
Good grief, we just don't know what to do with all the cycles we have these days. We really don't. Windows runs at the same speed at 500MHz as it does at 3GHz. The video hardware is doing more work than the processor. Smalltalk being slow is a red herring. There will always be someone, when we have 500GHz processors, saying that all Perl scripts should be rewritten in C to make them faster.
What we have here is a failure to communicate /.) /.) Sort of like a one eyed smiling guy in a beret, like the French poets wear : I guess it can mean 'Oui mon dieu, my server surrenders!'
... be able to close it down when you needed to do some number crunching ... that would be sweet.
... but you forgot the most important one (pr0n).
Hmmm - I made a new emoticon
Anyways, if I had to vote (and no, they didn't call me to ask my opinion) I would vote to have my actual processes run faster and my UI be uglier, than to have a virtual C.Zeta Jones walking around on the other side of the glass bringing me the files I requested, drop one halfway back from the 'library' and bend over at the waist to pick it up, then lean over when handing them to me to give a good look down her blouse.
Hmmm. Scratch that. How about we get to pick at boot time : CUI interface when we need raw computational power, and the Metaverse / Library UI when we are doing regular work. Maybe be able to start the GUI processing by typing StartX at the command line
Pretty cool idea, combines most of the important things that have been the driving forces behind generations of advancements in software / hardware
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
In all non-trolling seriousness, this kind of thing puts all the didling "innovation" in desktop environments, and all the bickering between KDE and Gnome, into sharp perspective. Gotta give Mr. Kay credit for being focused on action and not just talking himself up.
Ok, so Java is hated by the CS researchers because it isn't mathimatically perfect. It's hated by the Linux/Slashdot community because it does things they can't so they complain that it's slooowwwwww. And to top everything off, our much vaunted CS researchers tell us that System Engineers don't truly exist. Pyramids, now *that's* engineering! Let's ignore that some of us have to design systems to handle hundreds of millions of transactions per day and that the world today *runs* on these architectures. Nope, nowhere close to some stacked stones. Geez.
Honestly, I think that one of these days, someone needs to tap one of these guys on the shoulder and yell "WE LIVE IN THE REAL WORLD!". They don't hate Java because it's "imperfect". They hate it because it's pragmatic. It takes some of the best concepts that have been developed in computer science and throws away the parts that just aren't practical for the world we live in. CS Researchers see this as a "bastardization" of their beautiful work. Maybe someday, these guys will climb down from their ivory towers and realize that their current threads of research are going nowhere.
As they said, it's all been hashed out before. More powerful hardware will mean that we can apply more of the theories that were developed in the sixties. Unfortuntely, we are beginning to reach critical mass/saturation on the current computer designs. They are understood far too well and most attempts to create something groundbreaking either fail, produce something impractical, or result in only minor improvements.
So where do I think we should be devoting research? Better ways of making computers more transparent to our daily lives. Instead of trying to "perfect" the desktop (which is inherently flawed anyway, it just works better than the alternatives), or go all cyborg, we should be looking to interfacing with computers/networks/remote people more easily and naturally. How are we going to do this? I have no idea! That's why it's research!
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
There are a few things that seem wrong with this system from looking at the acrobat... Perhaps the designers should take some tips from the 3D game worlds that exist today as experiments in navigation / segmentation. First off, STRAFING is much easier than TURNING when in tight situations. I'm very surprised that it isn't the default action for moving the mouse, but the acrobat lists no modifier key for strafing at all. Without strafing, you're steering, not walking. Second, a built-up landscape would allow for both very natural and very memorable placements. Photos could go in an art gallery space, players could spawn on a pedastal, MP3's in the downstairs den, etc. This would also allow for very natural access control metaphors. The Root user very literally could have the key to the power shed. Third, the program is not really 3D yet. The maps displayed are all 2D+, ala Wolfenstein. It would be easier from a human perspective to have multiple "floors" for various purposes, such as a work floor, a relaxation floor, a dusty old storage floor, etc.
It does appear that some of the above is being worked on. However, the current space metaphor owes a lot more to, well, wolfenstein than Descent (which offered full, true 3D movement).
One final observation... As the window was built up from the command line, so too is the world space being built up from the window.
I can't wait until this is good enough for Microsoft to steal.
The ______ Agenda
It seems to be impossible, or at least very difficult, to embed content in Flash.
:)
That is the conclusion I have reluctantly reached after careful observation of thousands of pages using Flash. I suspect that this isn't what Macromedia had in mind, but it seems to be the unfortunate case.
As such, I can only conclude that there is something wrong with Flash -- surely all the people who develop pages that use it aren't alergic to generating actual content.
scottwimer
-- Intrusion prevention for Linux servers. www.cylant.com
A lot of people are extrapolating from the statement about speed sans a 3D accelerator that Squeak itself is slow. Not the case. Squeak isn't interpreted, it's bytecode compiled, and the VM is quite well done. I regularily run Squeak on machines which, by today's standards are pretty slow- 75 MHz MIPS, 206 MHz StrongARM, and a 350 MHz K6-2. To me, these machines are still pretty fast and useful, Squeak making them even more so.
Squeak has two different GUI systems which you can use- Morphic and MVC. MVC is the "original WIMP," the first ever GUI system. It has deviated a bit from what came out of Xerox almost 30 years ago, but it has the same API and most of the same source code. It has Mac-like window decorations instead of the BeOS-like tabs now a days. MVC is a lot faster than Morphic for a number of reasons. It is what I will use on the slowest of the machines I use for Squeak (75 MHz). A number of GUI APIs have been modeled after MVC over the years, including Swing (MVC is much faster, don't get me wrong!) and Cocoa AppKit.
Morphic is what most folks use when they are running Squeak. It has a really cool programming model- applications can be built programmatically, with a GUI builder, or by directly manipulating the Morphs (graphical objects). A common example is the Rolodex- you can make on in Squeak without writing a line of code, just drag some Morphs around, make a few menu decisions, and there you go.
Morphic is slower than MVC, but you get what you pay for (computationally!). It is still quite usably fast on a 350 MHz K6-2 (~300 MHz PII), however.
I have not tried Croquet yet. There has been a lot of talk on the Squeak list about it, but in all honesty, 3D worlds aren't really my thing. People have been talking about the 90 MB download- most of that is media. A standard Squeak download is around 10-15 MB for the latest version, including a lot of useful classes and applications. Out-of-box memory footprint is 20 MB or so, but if you trim what you don't need, you can easily end up with a 1-3 MB image and a 2-4 MB memory footprint. This ain't Java, folks.
I am a bit of an oddity, even within the Squeak community. I use Squeak *as* my OS, my computing environment. One could think of it rather like Emacs- a lot of applications [1] are written for it, and it is readily modifiable, so that the environment works like you want it to. Don't like the way Squeak manages windows? Make a couple small changes to a few small methods. I was once a Linux user trying to do just this to my environment, making tweaks to the WM, and it was way more work than it should be. You can imagine how excited I was when I came across Squeak- the entire system is written in Smalltalk, making changes pretty easy, no matter what part of the system they affect.
[1] There are a number of applications written in Squeak. Most new apps are written for Morphic (rather than the older MVC). These apps include: two different forms of handwriting/gesture recognition, a simple web browser, a pretty good email client (although POP only), a couple IRC clients, a bunch of games, an vt100 terminal for use as an xterm or telnet client, all of the programming tools for writing Smalltalk, and more.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
A croquet is a snack here in the Netherlands.(in old official spelling, nowadays it's spelled kroket)
;)
Tasty indeed
Beware of Programmers who carry screwdrivers. -- Leonard Brandwein
It is a good idea, but I think that instead of creating a whole new way to interact with the computer in 3 dimensions, we should instead spend our time and efforts on creating a 2d user interface which is more advanced. We need to start from scratch with a new 2d gui, not a 3d gui. Besides, the stuff in Minority Report was cool. When can we get to that stage?
End it.
Microsoft Bob?
It sounded really nice in the description, but when I RTFA (or at least looked at the pretty pictures) I had horrible flashbacks of MS Bob.
The interface of this "OS" (It's not really an Operating System, it's more of a graphical environment) can only be kludgy. Imagine actually trying to navigate in this 3d environment. In order to get to different things you have navigate through "portals" and such like that.
I'm sorry, but this will never be practical for anything. Everyone's just going to just keep the current gui system because navigating it is a lot easier than trying to navigate a 3d environment. (I can already see the thousands of geeks frantically running about crying, "now where did I put my pr0n again?")
Download the pdf, look at the pretty pictures (saying "ooooo" and "ahhh" where appropriate) and move on.
Director's Lingo is interpreted from a token stream, From what I understand, a lot of Java is as well. These languagesw have been "fast enough" for years now.
On today's computers, I'm sure this language will be fast enough.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
My friends, notice the url for the screenshot:
http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/2901
Now compare with abstract thought in mind:
"Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale,
a tale of a fateful trip.
That started from this tropic port,
aboard this tiny ship.
The mate was a mighty sailin' man,
the skipper brave and sure.
Five passengers set sail that day,
for a three hour tour, a three hour tour.........
The weather started getting rough,
the tiny ship was tossed.
If not for the courage of the fearless crew,
the Minnow would be lost; the Minnow would be lost.
The ship took ground on the shore of this uncharted desert isle,
with Gilligan, the Skipper too,
the Millionaire, and his Wife,
the Movie Star, the Professor and Mary Ann,
here on Gilligan's Isle." (Gilligan's Isle Theme Song)
I have to wonder if this is the foreshadowing of another doomed OS? Time will tell.
I'm not a huge fan of traditional multidesktop environments because they're too geographically distinct -- I have to "switch" between them, and that involves an annoying redraw penalty as well as a mental "reset" to refamiliarize myself with that environment.
I'm not sure get the 3D UI completely, but what would make sense to me would be putting the user inside of a many-sided polygon container. Each interior face of the sphere would be a typical desktop. The controls for the GUI would enable zooming out to see multiple faces/desktops simultaneously, as well as the ability to pan over desktops, in addition to being able to "lock" onto a desktop. Windows could be moved between desktops all-at-once, or dragged if you were panned over them.
It would have interesting multimonitor potential, as well -- the monitors could be assigned as geographically adjacent so that they showed adjacent polygonal surfaces/desktops, the polygonal surface could be sized to the combined monitor resolution or the monitors could be 'detatched' so that they showed different views (perhaps one zoomed out, one locked).
I don't think this would be that hard to implement, either (disclaimer: not a developer), since it wouldn't involve changes in the base GUI, just in the way that desktops as a whole are presented and navigated.
A 3D desktop environment could change the paradigm of human-computer interaction, and it is a worthy concept to be researched. However, I would like to see more research put into the actual devices with which I communicate to my computer.
The mouse is a wonderful device for a simple 2D environment, where all I want to do is select objects and move objects horizontally or vertically. Beyond that, it is crap.
Voice recognition might one day get to the point where I rarely use my keyboard, except when in a cubicle environment or when programming.
But I haven't seen the next generation of human interaction devices, and I don't even know exactly what I think they should be. I just know that the mouse will eventually be inadequate. The only truly exciting device I've seen recently was a force-feedback glove that let me select objects (round basket-ball type things) in very, very simple 3D environment.
How much information can the human mind handle before the datum become just noise?
I recall reading or seeing on TV once interviews with fighter jet pilots from the Korean War, and they were complaning to the engineers that there were too many audio alerts that were distracting them from doing their job, and could they put an off switch somewhere for those alerts?
I can see the same thing with the interface- how much data do we need to bombard ourselves with? The human mind can only subdivid our attention to so many tasks at once (I think the limit is 4 or 5).
I certainly can see places where moving into the 3rd dimention would help, but I see those as specialized tasks, not writing a letter or reading email.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
I did have one problem with an inefficiency with Squeak dictionary (i.e., hash table) objects, but that is independent of the compiler. (VisualWorks Smalltalk, BTW, does not have this problem with dictionaries.) Anyway, since the source code to all of Squeak is available inside the Squeak programming environment, individual problems can be fixed.
Squeak is a great open source platform, with a license that lets you use it for just about any purpose. Check out www.squeak.org.
-Mark
First poster says Smalltalk is no longer slow and that Java is "dangerous", but fairly recent testing showed the truth:
Math: 20x-300x slower than C or Java.
Method calls: 5x slower.
Overall overhead from OO is at least 10x for Smalltalk over C++ (there are a LOT more messages/method calls and almost none are inlined). Also since everything is a 'live' object when people screw up their desktop they have to do the moral equivalent of reinstalling the OS.
this is just a change on how we present the information to the user, but what I would like to see is more work on how to improve (probably somplete redesign) we way we work with computers.
I get the feeling we still use the same methods we have for the last 20 years. The only improvment is the GUI.
What about getting the computers to do what we need them to do?
How is information stored/indexed/searched?
Wht the complexity to the user?
Why the featurebloat in almost every software?
Why not more modular design of software and OS?`
What progress are being made in these areas?
who shot the cat in the hat to experiment is insane
Good lord, does this look terrible. That screenshot makes me want to run and hide.
i ty-Sucks thing, just like early Linux distros.
Why? Because it slows any kind of navigation to a screeching halt.
Because it doesn't make sense that you will have to "walk around" or "fly" in some fashion inside a 3d space just because you want to open a web browser, open a spreadsheet, or do basically anything with any sort of timeliness.
Sure it's got that cool Minority Report feel. But inside a 17" or 15" screen? Sure we have 19"+, but mainstream America is still using 15"-ers by and large. This is a problem with this "solution."
3D Desktops just are not usable right now. This guy is way ahead of his time. I'll give him that. I respect all of his prior work. And the groundings for this system have to start somewhere.
But until it gets practical, until our desktop expands away from the flatscreen and the CRT (whether it be a wall-projection or cool goggles, who knows), this will be one of those I'm-Running-This-Because-It's-Cool-But-The-Usabil
Remember those early WM's? Take a look at Redhat 5.2 sometime and prepare to cringe.
That's the exact same effect this will bring in about 5 years.
If anyone wants to look at another "3D operating system" (okay, platform) then take a look at Muse. Shared virtual, media rich (movies, web, audio) environments coupled with an extensive SDK and developer community that allows users to create their own "worlds" and 3D applications. Way cooler :) screen shots here and here.
Translation: He's one of the guys who innovates. Not to be confused with one of the mega-corporations that gets rich from his ideas.
I mean, he may make a good living, but he's certainly not in Bill Gates' territory, financially, and yet he is one of the true innovators. Sad.
www.jestertek.com
they have a 3D pointer/navigation system just waiting for a GUI to use it with.
I went to battle MC Escher but drew a blank
A 3D navigatable desktop? I thought VRML died for a reason?
The screenshot is officailly Slashdotted. Anyone have a mirror of it to link up?
There's a typo in the report. You spelt "completely shit" as "Way cool".
Two dimensions should be enough for anybody.
it's slashdotted into oblivion
I already posted, so I can not mod the parent post up myself.
Thanks,
Mark
I wonder if Mac OSX could be easily modified to support a 3d GUI (or at least add some useful 3d effects to the GUI)... After all, Quartz Extreme does use OpenGL for most of the rendering of the desktop, which is responsible to the speed of the OSX gui.
I wonder if we could see usability improvements by using 3d toolbars stacked on top of each other using alpha blending which could be moved by mouse gestures... very cool... Unfortunately, most of the 3d GUIs to date have only decreased usability, and been overly cumbersome.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
This has gotten me thinking and I'm rather excited my the potential of the topic.In fact I think that all of us shouldbe quite excited by the prospect of a "fresh"approach tomost of the computing concepts we've grown accustomed to.I just wish that I didn't have a real job so that I could commit years of my life to pursuing these ideas as an open source contributor, or in post/graduate studies (or maybe both).
... but it's actually a "link" which is actually a file located in ...some folder... which contains information pointing to another file, which is an executable, which is, actually the "game""... whew!
So here goes:
Although I am not a "technical" person, the idea of using a 3D environment to communicate concepts such as network elements, directory structures, files, file dependencies, processes, devices, etc. is truly exciting. A variety of things such as size, complexity, interdependence, hierarchy become much more obvious to people once they are "experienced." I have a much easier time telling my aunt ( new computer user) that the "playing cards are inside the cigar box over the coffee table in the kitchen" rather than "the shortcut to solitaire is in the games sub-menu of the accessories program launcher (start menu)
The point of the above is that I think that typical computer use has already grown beyond what the 2-dimensional "desktop" analogies can provide, so it is necessary to look at, and attempt to implement new ideas.I think this 3d-os stuff is very closely related to Microsoft's "database-File System" initiatives, both are attempts to provide a much more flexible way for users to manage the now-immense amounts of information we routinely deal with. Furthermore, I think that the implementation that will win, and basically revolutionize things over again will be the cleanest, most "obvious" one.
This is a great opportunity for the Open Source community, instead of bickering about how to clone Microsoft and apple's newest desktop-tweaks we should be pushing ahead, actually not "ahead" but in dozens of different directions, all cross-competing, communications, sharing ideas, concepts and maybe even components. This KDE/Gnome thing is a joke, same with all of the other miscellaneous stupid desktop managers. There are allot of other utterly fascinating aspects of the topic that I am going to restrain myself from mention in this single post, but let me say that this shit has to be taken seriously by all of us, and this is one way that we can all "help things."
OK, I'm overreaching, but this is slashdot, right?
I assume that the language in question uses references instead of pointers and that the bytecode doesn't allow them to be set to arbitrary values. A person would be limited to modifying objects that they own. In the case of the root user, they could presumably look up and modify any object using introspection. Combine that with ACL's to make an effective security system.
Since this is a research project there may be no implemented security system, or they may have a different one in mind. There is a simple and convincing story to cover security, though, so I am not worried about that.
When he came to work at Apple, and did NO WORK other than re-invent Smalltalk, I didn't speak up because Apple had money to burn, and he did little harm.
When he came to work at Disney, and did NO WORK, other then re-invent Smalltalk as "Squeak", I didn't speak up, because Disney had money to burn, and he did little harm
Now, in this awful economy, he's come to HP, and is reinventing Smalltalk, AN THERE'S NOBODY LEFT TO SPEAK UP.
Best Buy can have you arrested
Yes. And one time in ten the teapot.jpeg sends you to goatse.cx (on average. It looks like it's closer to one time in five if you use IE, and down to once in twenty if you use mozilla). If you value your eyesight, beware!
It wouldn't be too difficult to write an "OS" that represented objects in an n-torus, projected onto 2-space (this 3d "OS" ends up projecting everything onto 2-space in order to display on your monitor). However, this wouldn't be superior to the current 2d systems for most people. The current 2d systems are pretty fast for navigation and are visually simple. 3d isn't inherently faster. Sure, you can get higher visual density, but how does it affect navicability and eye strain? Current systems of virtual desktops and layered windows provide users with "2.5 dimensional" navigation, and this seems pretty optimal. It's the same way you desk is organized, with a large stackable 2d surface with auxilary stackable 2d surfaces (drawers = virtual desktops) . Why isn't you desk a stack of clear plastic cubes? Wouldn't a 3d desk be better than current 2.5d desks? I don't see a compelling reason why this would be the case. Maybe 3d really is a panacea, and up until now 3d file browsers have just been poor implementations of an amazing idea. However, my experience so far has reminded me of WinAmp visualizations and other eye candy for 1d file browsers.
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
Then no doubt you'll be rushing off to install it then.
Man, I wish there was a way to revise posts...
I have a problem when they FORCE you to use it just to navigate or see ANYTHING....
Make it optional, and they would get almost zero complaints..
Some of us just don't want to open ourselves up to more risks, or resource usage...
If you cant push your product via words and simple images, then you have no product worth pushing...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Of course it's slow compared to C. But that is completely irrelevant.
To judge if a UI is "too slow" or not, you should compare it to human perception. You would have a good point if the inefficiency of a high-level language caused something that should take 500 milliseconds, to end up taking 5 seconds. But if something is virtually instantaneous, then it's not "slow" -- even if a benchmark timer says that it took 50 milliseconds to do a job that could have been done in 5 milliseconds.
If a job gets done without the user having to wait, then it's not too slow.
I know this is a bit off, but myself and a friend of mine really sat down and tried to explore what would make a "good" 3d interface. IE why would it be "better" to go 3d over 2d. The real answer we came to is... there is no good reason to switch to 3d space...
What you say!
The biggest question you have to ask yourself is "How does the 3rd dimension help, and how can it be used to enrich the interface experience, and save time" the problem is we could not answer that question satisfactorily!
Take a look at what Croquet here shows us. We have system with 3d images in 2d space. We already have that, its called a computer monitor, it is in 3d space, this is already done. Making the monitor its own 3d space does not help the issue of interface, and making a BETTER interface.
When you take a look at the croquet PDF file, you see basically a 3d translated world, translated to 2d. You have depth, the difference is you can "rotate" around objects, but they are still basically 2d functions, you dont actually gain any kind of usability by rotating around the picture, except to possibly confuse the user when he tries to retrieve the picture.
Also, they do fall back to the nav bar concept, where there is a 2d navigation bar at the bottom, now this isnt bad in of itself, but it accomplishes NOTHING from the usability standpoint. Again the question is "How does the 3rd dimension help, and how can it be used to enrich the interface experience, and save time" this interface does not enrich the graphical user space in any REAL fasion, it moves a 2d plain into a 3d plain, without taking any real benefit from the fact that there is a 3d plain existing.
The usability benefits of the group function, where mutliple users can get into each others space and "look" around into others space, and meet with each other, is really in of itself not a value adding attribute of the program. This can be done, and done effectively, with video confrencing, each user does not have to "look" at another user, they can represent all users on a 2d space just as easily, or incoporate some psuedo 3d elements such as bring forward or push back (IE just scaling the size) and this can be easily done in the 2d arena, its a simple matter of scaling a picture and overlaying another over or placing it behind the picture.
I think it is a great endeavor, but it still hasnt answered the question of what the 3rd dimention can be used for that isnt already adequately done.
3d is good for games, because in games you want to "move around" in the environment, and by moving around you learn things about how the environment is shaped.
The other 3d interfaces that use file folders as "rooms" and each room as a size based on its file size, doesnt actually "help" in the sense of a user interface perspective, since it just re-represents size, you dont gain any real perspective into any NEW information that could not be gleaned from a sorting algorithim. IE if I wanted to locate on my machine what parts of the disk were "larger" than another part of the disk, I would not need to represent it in a 3d space, just instead sort by the size in whatever byte measuremenat im using, and easily determine which is holding more space by where it sits in the sorted list, and can even use 2d visual cues such as bars, and colors to make distinctions.
So the real question, is can you find a good use for the extra dimention when it comes to user interface with the computer? one that would make it worth persueing? Or can you explain to me why croquet is using the 3rd dimention i a way that cannot be adequeately, and more easily done in a 2d space already?
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
Maybe you meant "vitiate," in the "to make ineffective; to invalidate" sense?
I'm no Java expert, and so am wondering what was meant by the comment in the summary at the opencroquet site, calling Java a "dangerous approxmiation" of a true multiplatform system? I'm not interested in a language zealots' flame-war, or a "my language is better than your language rant." Just curious what it means.
Anonymous Cowards suck.
If you're interested in hearing someone talk about the project, David Smith is giving an invited talk on the subject at Smalltalk Solutions in Toronto, July 14-16. See http://www.smalltalksolutions.com/speakers/keynote .htm
The greatest invention of Smalltalk is hype: co-opting and taking credit for other people's inventions.
Simula 67 was the first object-oriented language, and all practical/successful OO languages follow from it: C++, Java, C#, Eiffel, etc. But even Smalltalk experts mistakenly believe that Smalltalk invented OO. Smalltalk isn't even OO as we know it.
Similarly, the mouse was invented by Doug Englebart (movie evidence - ) along with the idea of the word processor and many other things we take for granted now. And the GUI was invented by Ivan Sutherland in Sketchpad: pop-up menus, drag and drop, etc (used a light pen).
Pixellation, polygons, and the world's worst gay-pr0n gallery are "way cool?"
Someone needs to get out on the net more.
bruhahahaha, that cat is EVIL
Free as in mason.
There are already lots of so called '3D OS'. Some samplers
Microsoft Task Gallery
3DTop
3Dwm
Win3D
I was really hoping that everyone's favorite 19th century lawn game/summer courting activity had made it to the big time of 3d comptuer gameplay. Dibs on the black ball.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
3th dimension is a dimension of depth. our screens can't show depth at all. it is just a flat screen with a flat picture on it.
:)
so everything we are talking about here is just presentation. it is about objects looking smaller and bigger to our eyes. it is about some objects covering other objects.
3d is not the same thing as "moving around freely".
why is it that every time I see a 3d application they have to include this "just walk around" paradigm?
who really wants that? if everybody would want a larger workspace than they can view at a time they could use virtual desktop much bigger than their screen and just pan around with the mouse. now how many people do you see doing that?
we already have a much better option which is called a "workspace". sadly most windows users don't even know what it is.
depth itself is not as braindead idea for a gui as "move freely" is. what i would like to see on a gui from the "3d-world" would be a dynamic resizing and overlaping of responsive workspaces controlled by key shortcuts or mouse gestures.
enlightenment has a slow, static and nonresponsive version of the idea which is nice - but it is slow and static..
i'm talking about realtime performance scaled down workspaces which I can stack four in a screen and still operate in any of them with a keyboard and mouse, press shift-alt-1 and make my workspace 1 full screen with the others aligning like dockapps on the side and still press alt-2 to transfer focus to workspace 2 and write to it while it is scaled to a docapp size.
that would be 3d fr me.
now one of you geek guys go implement it! hush!
Yeah that makes a lot of sense. Post a virus to a website that is probably registered in your name, and protect your anonymity by checking "Post Anonymously" on slashdot??
Because it doesn't make sense that you will have to "walk around" or "fly" in some fashion inside a 3d space just because you want to open a web browser, open a spreadsheet, or do basically anything with any sort of timeliness
So you would keep your browser in your "pocket" so that you don't have to hunt it down before using it.
3D Desktops just are not usable right now.
This is not a 3D Desktop. "Desktop" was Kay's metaphor in the 70's, when Xerox wanted a better way to deal with paper. Think bigger. It's all about people collaborating. Think of this as:
- Neil Stephenson's "Multiverse", or Vernor Vinge's "Other Plane"
- A multiuser "Morrowind", where everyone can create their own place in the world
- A way for you to do real time voice communication with distant friends
- An encrypted world-wide end-to-end peer-to-peer media distribution system
- A world wide web of active objects, not just text or lame applets
- A programming environment simple enough for anyone to get started, but deep enough to stick with
I've played around with an early version of Croquet, and it's much cooler than the screen shot implies. Those pictures are portals to other spaces. When you enable them, you see a new world happening in the portal. If you walk though the portal, you enter the world. You see other networked people as avatars, which by default look suspiciously like Tux the penguin. You can easily create new 3D objects, and script them to give them life.
This guy is way ahead of his time.
The version I tried had a long way to go, but if even half of it pans out, it will change everything.
The n-torus you mention is a good example of the work that IMHO is 'ready to be done' in the realm of 3DUI. It's been apparent for perhaps 10 years that the present "WIMP" paradigm (invented, or at least made popular/practical, btw, by this same Alan Kay) is insufficient and not-that-good. But we really don't know what will work best in 3D. I believe that a commonly available, fully 3D workspace environment will cause a lot of great experimentation to be done, and in 3-5 years we'll really start to know what works best.
The clue will be the appearance of UI paradigms we haven't imagined yet, based on or inspired by the new environment. Think of how Instant Messaging appeared from nowhere, or how the NeXTstep 2D GUI inspired Berners-Lee to develop the WWW, or indeed how the WIMP paradigm came to be in a period where most computer input was still based on cards or "key-to-disk". In each case most-or-all the necessary ideas were there, but it took someone using the new system to really put it all together.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Check this out.
"Honestly, I think that one of these days, someone needs to tap one of these guys on the shoulder and yell "WE LIVE IN THE REAL WORLD!". They don't hate Java because it's "imperfect". They hate it because it's pragmatic. It takes some of the best concepts that have been developed in computer science and throws away the parts that just aren't practical for the world we live in."
// guess what it returns - hint its not true - go on try it!
Yeah - how practical is this:
new Long(5).equals(new Integer(5))
Real pragmatic.
super-smartguy alan kay names another useless product after himself. way to go.
Actually, I have no idea; I just thought this would be funny to say.
One of the systems often used in physics for 3D is Hamiltons notation. This has 4 vectors with hasis {1,i,j,k}
ij = k= -ji, jk = i = -kj, ki = j = -ik; etc... i^2 = -1 so you will pick up the more general complex numbers.
The screenshot seems to bear a lot of similarity to the operating environment that Ed from Cowboy Bebop used to surf around in ...
James
I love croquettes. My favorites are Gemini croquettes.
One time, I won a dream trip for two to Fhloston Paradise from them.
It was fun.
I second this
"This is a Unix system ... I know this!"
(girl from Jurassic Park)
XeoMage
see here
I want 2D games back.
Teabagging is amazing, don't you think?"
WTF? Yes, I know about the former name. But still... WTF?
Don't blame me, I get all my opinions from my Ouija board.
Alan Kay, who also is one of the inventors of Smalltalk, one of the fathers of object oriented programming, conceiver of the laptop computer, inventor of much of the modern windowing GUI ...holder of the sacred chalice of reeks, heir to the holy rings of...
Am I the only one who heard Roxette to sing "I'm gonna get blitzed for some sex"?
Either this guy has a discusting sense of humor, or his site http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/2901 was cracked.
does the development staff really like what the site says they do? Just curious...
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
If you go to a restaurant you have a lovely 2D interface to the food called a menu. All the pertinent information about the food is there, and you can pick very quickly between items as well as easily point them out to your date.
Now imagine the wonderful next generation 3D menu:
1. Place your table on a large lazy susan
2. Get 30 waiters to stand in a circle just outside the radius of the lazy susan.
3. Give each waiter a placard with one dish listed on it
4. Now use a joystick or something to rotate the table so you can look at each waiter in turn
Voila! Super 3D restaurant user interface.
I'll take the menu.
Syntax error: loose != lose, affect != effect, then!=than
Actually I'm surprised that someone hasn't made Squeak AN OS. A VM sitting on top of the hardware. Or a Squeak CPU for that matter. The nice thing about now is that all those ideas that were impractical all those decades ago, suddenly become practical. We simply have years of built-up inertia to overcome.
Also, the history of Microsoft proves, that some OS can be designed so bad that it cannot function properly (or at all) without one or more GUI components. Theoretically, if you will take 3dWM, Berlin/Fresco (or other post-X11 3D GUI) and embed it to the OS kernel (don't ask me, I don't know why, ask Microsoft - they know) than you will get 3D OS.
Now, forget GUI. But I still think 3D OS is possible. OLAP is typically based on multi-dimensional data mining. So, if (and somehow) OS kernel is functioning based on 3D data mining, then it's 3D OS :)
Most of moderns OS kernels do not need dimensions. Dimensions are needed to classify or to measure something (like to measure the position in case of GUI-based presentation). Modern OSes do not classify anything and they measure nothing. What if some future OS will start to classify or to measure something? Let's say, to measure the overload of nodes in order to schedule tasks in the distributed computing grid, huh?
Wait a minute, how about grids? The grid can be 3-dimensional, right? Than the OS controlling the grid is 3D OS!
So, OS can be 3D by one (or more) of the following three (or more) criteria:
Less is more !
why does it ask if ilike gay sex on the screen shot page? i do not like gay sex. it hurts my butt.
That the screenshot site seemed to be defaced?
"Do you like gay sex?
Indeed i do! What's your phone number?
212 596 7765
Thanks to Ryan, Jacob, Fisheye & Bill for their hard work!"
It's kewl. It's a 3D app launcher, file system and media player. It's commercial and Windows, but hey, like's like that sometimes. http://download.com.com/3000-2346-10188001.html?ta g=lst-0-1
Either I'm high and don't know it or the website that the screenshot link leads to has this written on it...
Do you like gay sex?
Indeed i do! What's your phone number?
212 596 7765
Thanks to Ryan, Jacob, Fisheye & Bill for their hard work!
What??
No sig for you!!
A really big deal is made about this project's ability to "unlock the potential of this technology to enhance the entire user experience" and such as well as acknowledging the importance of communication through out the few pages with any info. It's just a shame that none of their "assumptions" are adhered to in the design of their own website.
As for stating that "it is our full intention to make Croquet into as high a quality a product as you will find anywhere, commercial or not.[snip] This isn't just a promise; it's just what we do.", maybe the same intentions should be directed towards the presentation of their communication.
I'm not going to get started on the documentation only being available in .PDF!
"The big question in our lives is how to be at the same time a hedonist and in a hurry" - Alain Ducasse (?)
Exists. There's an IR unit that you can purchase and sit on your desk, then put a little sticky thing on your forehead and wire it to a hatswitch, dunno the name nad I think it was windows only
Banaaaana!
I agree. I can't help but think the collaborative/scriptable aspect being its strongest selling point when it's ready for primeime. I see it as an extension of the ol' MOOs. Sure you can potter about with text files and email, but you could also script funky objects on the fly and invite people over to check them out, modify clones of other people's objects from public repositories a la MOOs, and just generally invent and populate whatever weird-ass environment you happen to like.
It's not going to be spreadsheet users that take to this - it's going to be people that want to carry a portable black hole in their pocket that expands on request and creates a door to their own private universe - EverCrack for scripters. A bit like what VRML promised but never quite delivered. Ok - maybe that's a bad example - but this, or something much like it, will play a pretty big role in the very near future.
Of course it's going off the rails. How else is it ever going to fly?
Put simply, it's because Flash makes Web sites harder to use. For most sites, it's superfluous, over-complicated and annoying. Furthermore, because Flash breaks a lot of Web conventions (Back, font sizes, accessibility), it's unintuitive.
While I still agree that advertising is the worst thing about Flash - just ahead of the Macromedia site so longer working in Opera - I generally hate sites that use Flash at all, because things just take so much longer. Of course, there are a few shining examples.
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
one of the many things that folk will complain about MS is their implementations of such numerous layers of crap to finally get to your library's guts. I am reminded of this when thinking how the Xwindow system is on *nix boxes and the attempts of 3D GUI for such systems. Any real hope for an alternative to the current Xwindow framework?
The problem is that you're using a 3D interface on a 2D monitor. 3D's only good for games or data analysis. Now If one had a table top with some type of holographic projector and one could manipulate everything with their hands, then it would work.
I wonder what Jef Raskin would say about this...
- Danny
I swear this is what I found on the web site at 19:50 EST:
.
Croquet
Croquet is a next generation virtual OS written in Squeak - a modern variant of Smalltalk. Squeak runs mathematically identical on all machines, and has been ported to 32 different platforms.
Do you like gay sex?
Indeed i do! What's your phone number?
212 596 7765
Thanks to Ryan, Jacob, Fisheye & Bill for their hard work!
There is only two things to say . .
Ha ha . . .
I'd rather hear stories about some of the off-the-wall projects Alan Kay worked at during his tenure as chief scientist at Atari myself...getting a budget of $100 million in 1981 (or 82?) for example...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
Squeak is an interpreted language similar to Smalltalk. Could be ssslooooww.
Judge for yourself, but I found Squeak to be an astonishingly swift, and absolutely compelling, programming environment. Squeak isn't "similar to" Smalltalk, it is a direct, but quite modern, decendant (including bits from the image) of Smalltalk-80. It runs swiftly enough, and far faster than some well-regarded programming systems, with all of the virtues of a full GC, purely dynamic late-binding OO programming.
To each their own as programming goes, but I simply never "got it" about OO programming until I did it in pure Smalltalk -- Squeak is worth a careful and detailed look by anyone who considers themselves a programmer.
What universe do you live in? All the academic publications I read (ACM and IEEE) have lots of articles about Java. Just look at SigArch or SigPlan, and either they talk about implementing Java or using Java. I even saw an article in one of the ACM supercomputing conference publications about high performance Java. Your comment isn't about Java, it's about the chip on your sholder and the vacuum in your head.
Here is a mov file of Croquet for those of you uninterested in installing it: sumim.no-ip.com:8000
"...I'll need guns" --Chow Yun-Fat in 'Replacement Killers'
-Carter
Yes, I think we have a confirmed slashack.. Someone hacks a slashdotted site so that a zillion people see their hack.
Remember, don't feed the trolls.
Looks like it might be...at least that's how I'm choosing to interpret the following quote:
Do you like gay sex?
Indeed i do! What's your phone number?
212 596 7765
-JT
What happened? Someone crack it or something?
The OSS community never copies new and innovative desktop experiences, mindlessly or otherwise.
They mindlessly copy Microsoft.
...unless this text on the screenshot link in the main story above is supposed to have this text in it. Maybe they should focus on securing their webserver before they create a new OS... "Croquet is a next generation virtual OS written in Squeak - a modern variant of Smalltalk. Squeak runs mathematically identical on all machines, and has been ported to 32 different platforms. Do you like gay sex? Indeed i do! What's your phone number? 212 596 7765 Thanks to Ryan, Jacob, Fisheye & Bill for their hard work!"
Have they been hacked by some asshole with a dangerous sense of humour, or are the authors flagrantly bent?
Anyone know why I can't "View Source" on that webpage, either by right-clicking or using the menus? I'm using Mozilla 1.3b. I don't have Flash installed....
Jouster
I know WTF it *does* numbnuts. But any language that insists that "5 is not equal to 5" is correct behavior is SHIT. Just because some idiot intern coded it wrong 5 years ago doesn't mean its right.
// returns true - both lists have the same elements in the same order even though they are of different internal representations.
YTF should I give a flying fuck whether my 5 sits in a 4 byte box or an 8 byte box, or a box with pink paper and ribbons?
FWIW, every other OO language ever invented would get this right. In you knew more than one pathetic little OO wannabe language you might have a chance at bidding for a clue.
HINT (why I bother I'll never know) - this problem is properly solved in REAL OO languages using double dispatch (or the visitor pattern to you pikers). Go look it up. Because the currnent behavior is clearly WRONG. (Or, if you insist that its right - then the collections classes are wrong because this:
ArrayList a = new ArrayList();
LinkedList b = new LinkedList();
a.add("one"); a.add("two"); a.add("three");
b.add("one"); b.add("two"); b.add("three");
a.equals(b)
Help, I'm surrounded by J-headed idiots. Say "moo" for me you sorry fuzzy headedd herd animal.
the difference between abstract information and its concrete representation do you?
I can tell.
Since when is 5 != 5 the right answer just because one 5 was painted with blue and the other with red ink?
If you want to know what a croquet really is, ask the Dutch. Or take a look here: Van Dobben Croquetten
The idea that an arbitrary naive human should be able to properly use a given
tool without training or understanding is even more wrong for computing than
it is for other tools (e.g. automobiles, airplanes, guns, power saws).
-- Doug Gwyn
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