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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
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?
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
... 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
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.
--
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
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?"
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"
...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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.