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Nat Demos Dashboard
pheared writes "Nat Friedman from Ximian gave a fairly in depth, quite hilarious (got embarrassing screensaver?), and somewhat impromptu, talk about his project "Dashboard" at OLS. From his blog: "The dashboard is a piece of software which performs a continous, automatic search of your personal information space to show you things in your life that are related to whatever you happen to be doing with your computer at the time." Neat stuff, but I don't think I will be warming up to Mono and C# any time soon."
Are you taking the PIS? Uhm... "my PIS is full. I can't find my PIS."
I think we need another term. Unfortunately my PIS seems to have crashed so I can't search for one.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
I like the idea... but do you think anyone will find much use for this?
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Is there any subject on this site that is immune to reflex bashing-of-all-things-Microsoft? Stop the snide Mono remarks already.
From the submitter:
Was this commentary really necessary? This software looks like neat stuff, just as pheared said, so why the barb? Could you at least give a reason for your statement? What, if anything, does it have to do with the article, save that the software in question was written using C# via Mono?
Editors, I know you've explained why you won't edit user submissions before, and I know it's a losing battle to suggest you change, but this is a perfect candidate for editing. That remark had no business being left on the submission, and removing it would not detract from the story one bit. If there has ever been a perfect example of why editors should take their jobs seriously, this is it. Was pheared so unsure of the quality of his submission that he needed to try to stir up debate over Mono and C#, rather than let the story stand on its own? Or worse, were there really no other submissions for this story, or did the editors purposely choose this one submission because of the added barb at the end?
A hackers dreams come true? Get a log of everything you did today or in the past, all kinds of data passwords etc. all on a golden platter ?! What are the security features in this thing?
In fact, the more knee jerk, unsubstantiated, unjustified snide throwaway comments I read about .net and C#, the more inclined I am to think that I'm seeing Ludditism writ large, and that .net is something that I should be taking a look at sooner rather than later if I want to stay employed in the tech business.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
once again, lame technologies seek to imitate what the One True Editor has been able to do for years.
next!
Reminds me of haystack which was dismissed as been-there-seen-that when it was discussed here. I think there might be a place for these things -- but where?
Sorry man. You missed the boat.
Besides one screenshot in the link, which is going slow..
Here's one using sniffed rss traffic
and here's one with geo traffic.. (cool) There's a bit more info here
-- Sib
I never said it was. I said that Microsoft allowed a developer and user base to grow around OS/2 and then pulled the rug out from under them, forcing them over to Windows. They've pulled the rug out from under users and developers before, and they'll do it again. Quite possibly with Mono and .NET
... you can read a discussion about ADHD, general lack of concentration and inability to get a job done.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Hmm, turn anything into a substance more valuable then gold. Alchemy. What I'm wondering is if this "high quality oil" is still carcinogenic
The Remembrance Agent is an Emacs add-in that does mostly what Nat's tools seems to be supposed to do : "The Remembrance Agent (RA) is a program which augments human memory by displaying a list of documents which might be relevant to the user's current context. Unlike most information retrieval systems, the RA runs continuously without user intervention. Its unobtrusive interface allows a user to pursue or ignore the RA's suggestions as desired". Nice concept, but since the original is mostly tied to Emacs, a modern implementation would sure be quite welcome.
The Luddites weren't against new technology, per se. The destruction of machinery was one of their sole means of making a stand against poor working conditions, since trade unions were illegal.
The Tolpuddle martyrs were 'transported' to Australia because they swore an oath to someone other than the King of England, namely their union, which was illegal at the time.
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This sig is inoffensive.
If the Open Source/Free Software community runs scared every time IP is vaguely mentioned then it's the community that suffers.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
...and yes, I think you will find it useful.
Seriously, there will be a signal to noise ratio to begin with... but the concept of related information - it's like if someone did "pop up videos" information blurbs for all your computing needs...
So until you can start adding extra memory units to your brain - something like this may prove itself very useful indeed.
BlackNova Traders
plagiarism is hardly insightful.
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
Does anyone have any info on this?
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Where is this acknowledgement if IPR infringement? The patents essential to implementing C# and the CLI are available on a "royalty-free and otherwise RAND" basis so the core, and most important part of Mono is safe.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
The phrase "My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster" just didn't seem right for 2003...
Google is God.
Knows everything you've ever said.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
This stuff is great for governments, consultants, legal firms and all those other people that do loads of work by pushing papers around and writing new pieces of text. I myself do this kind of work and it happens quite often that after I have written something, someone, somewhere delves up a paper written 2 years ago in another department on exactly the same subject.
It is not that I don't check the usual sources for input on these subjects, but in an organisation of over 4000 people, 5 directorates, 6 staff departments, and over 40 sub-divisions below that level and a filetree organised by department as a filing system, I don't expect myself to ever find everything. A system that would do that automagically for you based on the texts that you're writing. That would be just great.
Real world anecdote to complement this: Fokker, the now bankrupt airplane manufacturer, was said to have a huge archive all the kinds of research it had done or funded in the past. Problem was that those designing new things would hardly look at it, since searching it was an enormous pain in the ass. The problem was everything was organised by the main subject it was dealing with.... But that didn't mean it didn't have relevancy at other places.
Use Adsense for Charity
destruction of machinery was one of their sole means of making a stand
One of their sole means. I don't even make sense to myself sometimes...
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This sig is inoffensive.
>One of their sole means
Well, sabotage is a sole method of protest, if not the sole one.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Microsoft fully supports Mono through their own "shared code" initiative. Did you really think they would get this far without Microsoft's support?
When you said "Pop up video" information blurbs, I could help but think of good ol' Clippy (though on my Mac he looks like a walking Mac+).
I have to say that I find it rather useless, though I do like the real text question format, but others may well find it useful. Or, rather, they will find it comforting.
All we need for this to become a reality, is for computer programs to get *more* efficient for one three-year cycle, instead of slower, bulkier, buggier.
Until then, well, let me just say that I used Clippy for about two days. Then I turned it off.
I could have done quite as well with a well-written manual.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Erm, if you're going to accuse someone of plagarism, at least BACK UP your claim.
s .pl?sid=726 06&cid=6549290
The "link" you provided:
http://developers.slashdot.org/comment
is bogus... it is not "prior art" of the PIS comment.
If you used Preview and followed your OWN link, you would see that. You linked to some Mono C# debate comments.
Have a good day.
I think you are highly confused about Shared Source. Maybe you should go re-read the Shared Source Licence, and read up on what The GNU Projects position is on Shared Source.
Firstly nothing there states that the Windows.Forms implementation knowingly violates any IPR. It merely states the procedure for dealing with a situation where IP claims are made.
.Net extensions.
Secondly C# and the CLI are valuable and useful to Open Source/Free Software regardless of Windows.Forms or any current or future MS patented
A Windows.Forms implementation is certainly useful and valuable. But Mono's worth is not tied to it. Take the software in this story for example, Dashboard does not depend on Windows.Forms.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
microsoft is finally supporting a community effort to port their technology to the open source community; if only by not suing, though most likely unwillingly.
.Net sites and services to switch over to better linux solutions.
.net languages). it's removal of pointer juggling is an applaudable feature for a language that doesn't cough up much speed at all compared to pure compiled c.
.net - just because it has nothing to do with microsoft?
but why would you not throw everything you have behind mono? if anything, it will make a java-style write-once, run-anywhere implimentation no longer language specific, and no-longer a mess of cross-compatibility problems.
with mono running, you could more easily make the case to business who run
and here's the big one: Businesses could distribute a single code package and customers could install it on whatever system (MS or OSS) that they like.
this could easily bridge the desktop application gap. if support for linux systems is that easy, a real operating system war can begin - one based purely on technical merits, security and stability.
and c# isn't that bad: it's not too different from c++, it's more java-like, and has a more unified set of system apis (unified as in unified across
or should we just blindly support java, and shun all things
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Emacs can do pretty much anything. Which is why it gets all the bashing for bloat.
I find Emacs tools to be generally bug free, documented, customizable and easy to use.
Keyboard shortcuts for many things, tab completion and a decent help system.
I happily use Emacs for many editing tasks, and vim for the others.
OK, inquiring minds want to know - what is this "Embarassing Screensaver"?
We Want Screenshots, download URLs, and descriptions!
www.eFax.com are spammers
>> As always, if you think something doesn't suck then prove it.
.NET has looked retarded...
..and, therefore, anything and everything associated with Microsoft is beneath contempt, by definition.
Says who? You?
>> Everything I've seen of
Oh, there's the proof.
>> I don't like most things Microsoft...
Have you ever considered the possiblity that you might, sometimes, be wrong?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Somebody must have nothing better to do... I think I've seen this exact flame maybe 10 or 15 times, attached to completely different posts, in the last 2 weeks!
Mouse, Mice. Goose, Geese. Moose... Moose?
You're absolutely correct, of course, but I suspect the remark was deliberately left in.
It is clear that Slashdot no longer cares about the quality of the discussions it provokes. Presumably, it does care about the number of page views and ad impressions. Tossing the daily Microsoft bone to its audience is the Slashdot equivalent of some talk radio troll annoucing "Today, we're gonna talk about why your taxes are too high". Pointless dribble that exists only to elicit more pointless dribble. The entire point is to boost ad revenue.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
For amusement though, you could always add driftnet into the mix and see what other people in your subnet are looking at.
And no, I have no idea whether this was actually the embarrassing screensaver. Just a word to the wise is all...
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Is it just with software that it's ok to "look a gift horse in the mouth?"
It's pretty easy to avoid software you don't like and it's pretty rude to bad-mouth someone whose putting thousands of man-hours into something they release under the GPL.
I'd like nothing better than a small, fast Debian installation that includes only the stuff I run so, since everything else is all crap anyway, so I'm going to complain in a public forum about how bloated Debian has become until someone listens to me and ditches emacs since vim is clearly a better editor and until someone throws all these new-fangled wms in the "trash-bin" since twm was my first wm love. And what the hell is /bin/tcsh...Jeez O'Mickey, did we lose a war or something????
Do you see how silly you all sound?
...was commercial software from at least 3 years ago that attempted to be exactly what 'dashboard' is supposed to be.
It was... intensely useful to some people. You can still download it from enfish.com if you're on Windows.
Noooo! Not C#! NIH! NIH!
Use the best tool for the job... as long as we thought of it!
Get over yourself. C#/.NET is, honestly, the next big thing.
Looks like Nat's page is just forwarding to slashdot now. Nice trick.
The "blog" link from the article is redirecting back to /. /Me thinks Nat didn't care for the bandwidth spike...
+ G to tha Izzo, A to tha Tizee, Talking Giz-oat, Ya'll Bettah Feel Me... +
But then, /. and snippy MS comments remind me that a wise man once observed that if you could find a way to clean up all the air pollution in the entire US at a total cost of $2 per state, someone would still object. I honestly don't know how good .Net or Mono are or will be, but from what I've seen C# is a huge improvement over the hack-a-thon that is C++...
So what exactly is wrong with .NET? If you need to work on the Windows platform it's a godsend!
.NET thing.
.NET ECMA stuff (to my knowledge, only C# has been submitted), then I just can't see how m$ will stay away from shutting Mono down.
Precisely. And that's where it will stay - on a Win platform. At least until Win is made much smaller (think Novell) and the platform becomes less important compared to the app and development technologies.
Anyway, I have to say that I'm a huge Ximian fan. I think they've contributed a great desktop. So my hat's off to them.
However, as someone who has done some hacking on dotGNU, I am pessimistic about the whole
Besides domination, what is m$'s ultimate goal: lock in. This has been documented and has hit people over the head for years so I don't need to go into a lengthy discussion about it.
Coupled with the fact that even from a clean room implementation standpoint, m$ will pull ip claims. No question about it. Especially when GNU/Linux starts making more and more inroads. I mean, if it's (.NET) supported on *nix, why go with costly m$?
Like I said, I think Nat, Miguel and co. have done an excellent job. They're doing great things. But unless there is some strict, free, licensing agreement submitted along with the
Also, while I think Mono is cool, I still have a problem supporting a language/platform that was created by a company such as m$ for the reasons they did. It still feels tainted and dirty to me. m$ has not become the largest software company in the world by being 'compatible'. There's a documented history that goes back well over a decade that proves this.
Good luck guys! The dashboard looks reall cool, btw.
You bore me. When's your next shift at TacoBell so I can bitch slap you in person?
While I personally couldn't give a stuff if something is implemented in C#, C++, C, Java or Brainfuck, if I was an OSS developer I would at least have used some of my grey cells to think about what the real meaning of the SCO FUD and Bill Gate's yakking on about Microsoft patents being in OSS. If Mono ever get's to the point that it or applications built with it threaten any part of Microsoft's server or client market you can be sure that MS will start, at the very least, a FUD campaign warning of MS patent's being used in those applications, thereby torpedoing the market by frightening PHB's into submission.
> The phrase "My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster" just didn't seem right for 2003...
Maybe you need to get out of the States more often and see computing in the rest of the world...
"FACT: Most of Dotnet is patented and not standardized. Anyone still resorting to the assertion that Dotnet is open because the C Sharp language is standardized is either hopelessly out of touch or being deliberately deceptive." if by most you mean "a small fraction"... come on, read the faq, this isnt complex: http://go-mono.com/faq.html#patents
ignorance.. he's blindly toting the slashdot raving lunatic anti MS party line without doing even the slightest bit of research.
"How is Mono going to be a complete .Net implementation if you don't implement Windows.Forms? How will you implement Windows.Forms without steping on Microsofts toes?"
.NET like windows.forms, its still a win for linux. applications like Dashboard DONT USE the patented sections of mono. so in the future if MS starts adding unacceptable terms to their patented stuff, Ximian simply stops distributing it, big deal. so they loose the ease of porting from windows to linux, BUT THAT ISNT THE POINT OF MONO. it is much much more.
aparently you dont read very carefullly, ximian clearly outline their strategy. they've made it abundantly clear, that even if mono had to be utterly purged of ALL patent encumbered parts of
tasty electronic music vittles
pathetic if you cant see how much bigger and more impressive dashboard is than the remembrance agent (which we ALL already knew about, jackass).
it looks like the entire domain is being redirected back to ./
I was really interested in seeing this in action. Is there a mirror up somewhere?
Fear Breeds Knowledge
Its unobtrusive interface allows a user to pursue or ignore the RA's suggestions as desired.
Sounds exactly like Clippy!
I guess Linux and Java are the same thing for him.
I couldn't get to the article, so.... I was wondering how similar this is to something Microsoft pushed out a couple of years ago: Digital Dashboards. Basically, the digital dashboard stuff is an engine that used XML definitions of "web parts" that describe what the content is, where it is, how to render it, etc. The idea was that the dashboard showed you an integrated view of data from various sources on a single page. Users could even drag-and-drop web parts around to configure their customized dashboards.
.NET, I might reconsider it. Cool idea nonetheless.
The only problem was, it was built on top of Active Server Pages using VBScript plus a couple of COM components for the XML processing and client-side event handling. In my experience, it was slow and difficult to program for. Sharepoint Portal Server still uses it I think, but other than that it seems to be pretty much defunct now - Microsoft has even removed most references to it from their site.
Now, if they whipped up a version built on
Read my keyboard review.
I don't know... but the way he scrambled to make sure it didn't show would lead you to believe it was nasty...
;)
He did say it was embarassing...
BlackNova Traders
It's a desktop environment. Everything you can find in KDE or GNOME also exists within Emacs: web browsers, email and newsgroup readers, IM and IRC chat clients, etc. Emacs brings it's users the best of all worlds. It combines the manic complexity of KDE with the rugged good looks of Motif, the committed (or should be committed, maybe!) fan base of Amiga and MacOS and the intuitive ease-of-use of a 4-manual pipe organ! What's there not to love?
Back on the topic, Dashboard looks like a neat peice of code.
0 1 - just my two bits
Someone moderated the parent a troll, but I don't see why this is a trollish question- can it work without Mono? Lots of programs are written in several languages, but depend on one for their core functionality. The question isn't "is it all written in Mono", it's "can it work without mono."
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Man, don't use "FACT" (big caps because I'm a big man) when you don't know the facts. The Common Language Specification (CLS) and the Common Type System (CTS), were fast-tracked through ECMA, just like the C# language itself. This means Mono is free and clear of any infringement claims strictly on that tip.
Furthermore, there is the existence of the Rotor source code. This is basically a partial "behind-the-scenes" of Microsoft's implementation of the CLI. And they're giving that away...
I know that every group needs a sworn enemy, but it also doesn't need zealots that spout untruths.
Take your "FACT"s and go home.
You are mistaken about Microsoft and OS/2. Microsoft really believed that OS/2 was the future. I worked at Microsoft in the early 1990's and everything was all OS/2, OS/2, OS/2; developers all had OS/2 computers for development work, the computers in the library ran OS/2, all Microsoft applications had OS/2 versions available, etc.
Customers voted with their dollars, and they voted for Windows rather than OS/2. I believe this was due mainly to the fact that Windows had a much easier migration path: if you had several DOS apps that you needed, you could run them all in Windows, versus running one at a time in the compatibility box under OS/2 and possibly crashing your computer. (Yes, later OS/2 versions were better, but that was after Windows had already won and Microsoft was already gone.) Other issues were that Windows ran much better on the computers that people had back then, and that Windows cost less than OS/2.
So, once Microsoft figured out that the customers wanted Windows and didn't want OS/2, Microsoft made the famous deal with IBM where IBM got OS/2 and Microsoft kept Windows. Microsoft didn't betray any OS/2 users, because IBM was there to support those OS/2 users.
In summary, Microsoft didn't have some cynical bait-and-switch plan, because internally Microsoft was pushing OS/2 right up until the famous "divorce" from IBM. And Microsoft didn't "pull the rug out" because IBM was fully supporting OS/2. It's not Microsoft's fault if IBM wasn't able to take over the world with OS/2.
Microsoft does have some things to answer for, but this really isn't one of them.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Mono is always going to be on shaky ground legally [...] Think before you endorse C#.
.NET APIs and what that means. But for most of Mono, that doesn't matter because most applications in Mono are probably going to be written using the open ECMA C# core, Gtk#, and other bindings to native Linux libraries.
Maybe you should do some background research before you post. C# is an open, unencumbered language. The only thing that is at issue is whether Microsoft gets a patent on the totality of the
but it will let people begin their critical application development on Linux before deciding that for safety they need to move to Windows. If they wrote their application for Java instead,
If they wrote their applications in Java instead, they'd be killing Linux. Unlike C#, even the Java core APIs are encumbered by Sun patents, and there exists no open source implementation of the Java 2 platform (only very incomplete, partial implementations). Furthermore, Sun's Java implementation integrates poorly with Linux desktops. And Sun is as much of an enemy of Linux as Microsoft, as Sun's recent FUD about Linux and SCO reminds us of again. Sun would like to insert their proprietary APIs between open source applications and open source kernels in order to get some control back again.
If you are concerned about Mono's legal status, don't use it--there are plenty of alternatives. But Java isn't one of them. Java is a greater threat to open source software than Mono, both legally and practically. Whatever you do, don't use Java for writing open source software.
Now let's see a program which can do all this without requiring the overhead of GNOME, Mono, or whatever the buzzword of the month happens to be. I have yet to hear a good reason to install all of those dependencies. Don't say "install it for this application", since that's the wrong way to look at things.
Unless I've grossly misunderstood this thing, it seems to be closely linked to this "desktop environment" concept that's going around. That basically forces you to buy-in on all of this stuff in order to get the things that run on top.
What ever happened to having faceless "engines" that do the grunt work and then offering various frontends? One frontend could be integrated with your resource-intensive shiny interface, but another could use standard X libraries for the rest of us.
I saw a good quote right here on Slashdot about "chasing a moving wall in order to bash your head against it." It seems more accurate every day.
Yes indeed.
/. Obviously somebody's marketing is very effective...
Unfortunately for your argument, C Sharp plus the CLS and the CLR do not equate to Dotnet. In fact, together they constitute are about 1/10th of the Dotnet APIs (120 out of 1250 classes and counting).
Rotor is only available for academic use and is highly restrictedm unlike, say Kaffe. And, of course, Rotor isn't not Dotnet - it's the CLR again.
Don't worry, this is a common mistake. I should know - this is approximately the 50th posting I've made correcting this on
Google cache to the rescue.
And a little screenshot: here
Small start-up I worked for that is now gone (sorry, no links) that gave you a contextual map of data in your enterprise (both structured and unstructured) and the reacted to whatever you were working on. If you got an email that contained a customer company and name and mentioned other topics, the LensBar woudl react and let you know you had content of revelance in various back end sources. You could also drill down back into the backend system and go straight to relevant content. Neat software but not enough runway. The software did not focus on your personal information space but rather the enterprise information space you had access to.
he's talking about the VH-1 show PopUp Video which had little bits of weird information related to stuff on the screen, or the story behing the artists or the making of the video. dashboard has NOTHING to do with clippy, and thank god :)
tasty electronic music vittles
Fucking GNU hippies.
Ha ha... you sir are still a liar, if not a humorous one. :-)
The sad fact is that Nat is one of only a handful of people in the world who can actually get his Dashboard demo, or any other Windows.Forms application working. Why? Because Mono's Windows.Forms implementation requires an obscure patch to a two-month old version of Wine. IOW, Mono has become "write once, run on Miguel's computer".
There are two things they could do to fix this:
Obviously Microsoft is getting exactly what they want from Mono: a tool that lets developers stay with Linux (which they really want to do and isn't a big market anyway) while forcing customers to use Windows. Oh well, is anybody really surprised?
I used to live in Vietnam, which has made great economic progress but is still one of the world's poorest countries, and I never saw anything less than a Pentium II there, and even those were rare. Most of the used machines were mid-range PIIIs. New stuff is all P4 and Celeron.
The odd part was that AMD is a total non-player, in what is without doubt the most price-sensitive market I've seen (I made less money as a sysadmin/net eng/sales eng there than I would have working at McDonald's here, and I was making *way* more than any Vietnamese admins or programmers I knew). There were a couple of shops in the Ho Chi Minh City computer district that had Durons on their price lists, and one or two motherboards to match. No one sold Athlons or a motherboard capable of taking any Athlon.
Those same shops also listed Adaptec 2940UW on their price list, but if you asked them if they had one or could order one, the answer was always "no." Makes me wonder if they really had Durons, either.
There are still a few 486 boxes out there serving as routers or print servers even in G-7 countries, but by and large even the rest of the world doesn't use that stuff any more.