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."
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?
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
plagiarism is hardly insightful.
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
It's maybe a little ironic that large portions of the OS community are generally against C# and Mono, as it is a Microsoft technology. Mono is an OS clone of a mainly proprietary technology.
...Almost like a certain Operating System
((lambda x ((x))) (lambda x ((x))))
Right here What, you don't think Windows.Forms are important?
.Net extensions without submitting it to ECMA and including patented methods. Microsoft have yet to publicly promise that this will not happen (In fact, they have been very cagey about wether this is possible).
There is also nothing to stop Microsoft from any later version or
If you trust Microsoft, you're a fool. Look at what Sun had to go through with Microsoft "Java"
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?"
>> 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"
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?
Not exactly. While RA is quite a nifty tool, all it does is index your home directory and run searches against what it finds their based on the current document in Emacs. RA doesn't have the ability to note that you're having an IM conversation with someone, and automatically show you: their email address and other FOAF contact information; their last few blog entries; when you last talked to them; their schedule; etc. That's the kind of thing Dashboard is intended to do. Dashboard integrates semantic information from many different applications, rather than just doing a smart grep against your home dir.
--
CPAN rules. - Guido van Rossum
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.
First, have they just said they would let the public use it, or have they actually licensed the patent for public use?
.NET APIs. But it doesn't make much sense to do that before the patent has actually issued.
.NET.
.NET, not as serious as those surrounding Java, but you can legitimately worry about them if you like.
.NET with Mono and C#. Even if .NET were completely off-limits to open source implementations, Mono would still be a thriving and useful project and a great platform for writing Linux applications because most of the APIs people use for writing Linux applications are not based on .NET.
They have done the same thing Sun has done with its numerous Java patents: they have stated that open source projects can use it. Can they go back on their word? Probably, just like Sun can. The real test will be for Mono to try to get something in writing from Microsoft permitting them to implement the
I doubt you have reviewed all of Microsoft's current patent holdings, so what are you basing your opinion on?
Patent "holdings" are public. I have looked through Microsoft's patents and patent applications, as have many other people; they are available at the USPTO site. Nobody has yet identified any problems.
I fail to see how you can claim there's nothing to worry about with
I didn't make any such claim. There are some minor concerns surrounding patent issues and
What you keep doing, however, is confusing