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."

Comments

Making life easy for a hacker

[indiancowboy]

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?

Re:Making life easy for a hacker

[JanneM]

The apps choose what to send cluepackets about. I doubt any app writer would be dumb enough to send out an entered password as a cluepacket, anymore than they would print it in clear text on the screen.

It's a neat idea.

I'm warming up fast to .net

[Rogerborg]

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.

Re:Unnecessary commentary?

[IamTheRealMike]

Agreed, especially true because the full Dashboard system is written in a range of languages - the plugins/backends tend to use whatever languages are best for integration with the software. It's certainly not a pure .NET app, not by any stretch.

I was at the demo...

[Ron Harwood]

...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.

Re:Nice to see the sideswipe at .NET (not)

[Anonymous Coward]

As always, if you think something doesn't suck then prove it.

Actually, whenever you think you have a point (wether something sucks or not - it works both way you know), you have to make it, not just state it. You merely gave your opinion on the .NET technology, you didn't make a point about it. Same for the story poster, and so you both deserve critisism for that.

That said, you're right on the story editing. If the story is worth to be posted, so be it, but it's good question to ask wether this story, as it is stated, should have been accepted.
Oh well, this is Slashdot after all.

Re:Unnecessary commentary?

[plasticmillion]

I don't have any problem with inflammatory comments, but I am curious to know what exactly motivated the author's statement besides sheer bloodymindedness vis-a-vis Microsoft.

I currently have two machines sitting in front of me, one of which runs my "Microsoft" development environment (Visual Studio.NET, C++, C#) and the other my Java development environment (Eclipse). I use all three languages more or less on a daily basis, and I don't think I have any latent bias other than what actually works for me. From this perspective (pun intended) I would make the following observations:

• Eclipse is totally awesome. No other Java IDE comes close (and I've used a bunch). Not only is it a pleasure to use, but it has had a major influence on my view of software architectures in general by virtue of its elegant plugin architecture.
• C++ sucks. I've been a C++ programmer for 10 odd years, but after using Java and C# there's no turning back. I understand memory management, pointers and the like, but they are a major cramp on productivity and I'd rather do without them.
• C# and .NET look very cool as a replacement for venerable C++. C# has all of the obvious advantages of Java, and equally important, the .NET libraries are finally a worthy equivalent to all the J2SE foundation class that should have been in C++ but aren't (and don't get me started about STL). Ever try to, say, check whether a directory exists in C++ and, if not, to create it? I spent at least 20 minutes surfing through MSDN and ended up with 10-15 lines of code. I'm very much still learning C#, but I wrote:

  if (!Directory.Exists(str)) Directory.CreateDirectory(str);

  ...and it worked first time.

So what exactly is wrong with .NET? If you need to work on the Windows platform it's a godsend!

Re:why would you not support mono?

[deadlinegrunt]

"...shun all things .net - just because it has nothing to do with microsoft?"

Basically this sums it up for quiet a few people. You see the simple truth is you can only be burned by something so many times before you learn. You obviously have not, but I am sure you will get there if this does not do it to you when everything is said and done. Agreements, standards, rationale, etc - none of these things mean anything when dealing with Microsoft. Look at how many companies have teamed up with MS and look what happens to them - by the way, it's not limited to companies; look at their customers too...

The only thing demonstrated by MS is that they will do what ever it takes to hinder/reduce/eliminate competition which in and of itself is not a bad thing, but when it is done illegally they rob you of things you obviously haven't begun to understand yet.