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Miguel de Icaza Debates Avalon with an Avalon Designer
Karma Sucks writes "In an interesting debate with a Microsoft employee, Miguel points out some crucial flaws in Microsoft's Avalon strategy. Perhaps the most shocking revelation is the absolutely horrendous inheritence hierarchy exposed by the Avalon API. Miguel himself is clearly not amused, saying 'We do not want to waste our time with dead-end APIs as we are vastly under-resourced, so we must choose carefully.'"
" I totally agree, this is a huge issue. Phishing attacks, spyware, malware, viruses, and more are out there and probably the largest problem facing computer science today. This isn't a Microsoft, Linux, or Java issue - this is a "good guys" issue. Windows XP SP2 is probably the best response to Miguel's security concerns. The integrated firewall, security center, and dozens of other security related features are really the first line of defense. After the basics are resolved there, I would say that the new enhancements to the security system in Avalon are a great step. Not only is Avalon built from the ground up to be secure, but we are enhancing the security system for better application level security, and simpler more understandable presentation of security decisions to the user (hopefully in most cases this means no decision). As to the specific issue of Phishng that Miguel brings up, that is still mostly a research level issue, which I'd love to see creative solutions to. In Windows today there is the secure desktop, but you must press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to get to it first. "
Creative Demolition
Vastly under-resourced?! This coming from a Microsoft employee too.
We do not want to waste our time with dead-end APIs as we are vastly under-resourced, so we must choose carefully..
.NET API, he shouldn't bite the hand that feeds him!
Well well well. Isn't it easy to complain about an API when we aren't the ones responsible for creating it? Considering he is the one copying the
unlike the current pixel based 2d rendering system of today.
:)
Not necessarily 3d as in "3 dimmensional" but on the other hand not necessarily restricted to what we can 2d either
The obviously didnt learn with MFC.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
New news, same story:
- Icaza insults Microsoft policies.
- Nerds rally behind Icaza, he's just so smart to stand up to Microsoft and point out things we already knew.
- Other, more cynical nerds point out flaws in what Icaza said, possibly contradictions to previous comments or connections with MS.
- Mods find this comment flamebait, mod it down.
- No one cares.
?????
- Profit!
Mod this insightful, you insensitive clod.
The Open Source way (Miguel's):
/ Se p-09.html
8 5- 10e3-48ee-a6f5-cc4b886ce668
http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/archive/2004
Date is included, name of the author, the word "archive", the "html" extensions.. easy to understand at a glance, I have a good ideae what that URL points to. It's not "perfect" (it uses American month names rather than a more generic 2004/09-09.html) but pretty good as far as URLs go.
Now check out the Microsoft dude's URL:
http://www.simplegeek.com/PermaLink.aspx/eb453f
What? I have no idea what that points to. Maybe an insightful bit of commentary, or maybe a gaping anus. Who knows. Any subtelty hidden behind a confusing GUID. Extension is "aspx" which is an add for ASP.NET rather than a meaningful extension.
Ladies and gentlemen, I rest my case.
Because you don't know what you're talking about.
1) Microsoft isn't porting anything to Linux.
2) Miguel doesn't work for Microsoft, and never has.
3) Miguel works for Ximian, a company he founded, and which is now owned by Novell.
DirectX isn't just graphics. It is also networking, realtime input, sound, etc. Have you ever tried creating a GUI with DirectX? It is hard because you don't get the standard controls. What Avalon does is bridge that gap and bring 3D to the GUI controls (eg, outside the client area). Direct3D will only render into the client area.
Btw, there is already a new graphic API, kind of a predecesor of Avalon, it's called GDI+. Notice that it is class based and supports ARGB format (like DirectX), but it can be used without having to do a bunch of DirectX setup calls. I am currently using GDI+ and it is much easier to use than the Win32 GDI functions.
That's not so weird. Everyone oohs and aahs when there's a slashdot article about OSS 3D desktops, myself included.
.
I think desktop apps flipping around in 3D and all the new ways you could work with apps would be cool.
But DirectX isn't right for the task, it's too low level. Too much DX code only works on ATi or nVidia, too many vendor specific extensions and shitty drivers. It's great for tweaking the crap out of Doom 3 so it goes as fast as it can, but it would suck if some pixel shader operation that only works on Geforces blowed up my coding session
Avalon is higher level, not trying to implement the latest hardware tweaks and gizmos, just base functionality you can count on across the board.
There's no redundancy, the way I see it. Two different tools for two different tasks.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Amiga? or the "dying" BSD?
Help fight continental drift.
I've said this before, here and elsewhere: WGHIII[1] has said several times in the past (and was at conferences in the mid '90s when & where he said them): "...people do not want bug fixes - they want new features...". This is frequently borne out by the underlying architecture Microsoft presents in their products. A semi-stable underpinning, capable of supporting certain elements is put into place such that products & features can be built upon that architecture. "Patching Architectural Holes" (Security, Stability, etc.) can be fixed via patches later[2]. Unfortunately, this means users suffer frustration for a semi "feature rich", unstable product, and developers discover situations where they write "three sides around the barn" when the pieces don't fit together as the philosophy would lead one to believe.
. html
There are other companies which spend a lot of time on the architecture - almost to a fault - knowing once it is solid, they can add the users' heavily desired features without worry about the stability beneath it.
All developers know about both scenarios as they either crave and know the the outcome if they are permitted to put the architectural stability in place or they are forced to charge ahead with building on top of wet toilet paper.
[1]William Henry Gates 3rd
[2]Providing a vendor is even willing to do so. And the question begs to be answered: How unstable can an architecture be such that patches can be safely made to it (without risking screwing the pooch) to make an improvement? Remember the "three sides around the barn" development? What happens to developed code if the OS suddenly "works" correctly?
Just remember....
______________________________________
My Trunk Monkey can beat up your Trunk Monkey.
http://www.suburbanautogroup.com/ford/trunkmonkey
- Microsoft talking design and technologies out in the open with other developers who aren't Microsoft employees? Even talking with Free software advocates? Man, that's good to hear, honestly. If this were system-wide, I bet it'd be good for both sides.
- Reading Miguel mention that many APIs (Avalon, Tk, Swing, GNOME, Xview, Motif) at least gives one the impression that he might actually know what he's talking about. Let me give him the benefit of the doubt. It makes me wonder how many Microsoft employees have that much understanding of non-Microsoft APIs. Probably plenty, but the few I have encountered seem so immersed in Microsoft culture that they appear to have little understanding of what's going on outside of the Microsoft sphere.
Now, I should say that I'm no real programmer, but I've done some. The "real" programming I've done is computational code that runs in the console, with a couple of GUI front ends. So, I'm not going to claim any kind of serious perspective on this.Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
He doesn't improve their ideas anyway, he debates with M$ employees on their ideas. Also, improving the ideas of the competition is a significant part of said competition. Competitors routinely improve on another company's products to steal their customers.
Nor has Novell *recently* announced any co-operation with Microsoft, as the two right now are essentially competing in the OS wars.
Hurricane Ivan: A 17th century prison collapsed. All of the inmates escaped.
Under the hood, Avalon runs on top of DirectX. And all it's 2D rendering is actually done in 3D. So adding 3D functionality to is is no biggie. The idea is that Avalon is meant for GUI and DirectX for more low level graphics functionality.
The big benifit for at least game developers is that combining GUI with 3D graphics should be less of a pain in the butt.
"As far as I understand,"
You apparently do not understand.
"Mr. Icaza is now working for Microsoft"
Try Novell in the Ximian devision. That parent company also owns the SuSE Linux distro and tools now btw.
"and he spends his energy on porting Microsoft ideas and projects to the Linux platform"
Ya just like the blackdown project, or OpenOffice.org is doing for Sun's ideas and projects. You wrote the above as if it was a bad thing. Honestly do you want to be locked out of the potential of write one run everywhere apps? Do you feel you speak for all Linux and OSX users?
"So why he criticizes Microsoft plans in the public?"
He calls them like he sees em and even MS workers are at least paying attention to a good critic. If they did more of that, they would have less brain farts along the way. The same goes for others who can't take the heat of an honest review of their work so they just blast back.
OpenOffice was renamed OpenOffice.org to avoid a trademarked name conflict iirc.
Because have good ideas sometimes.
> Mr. Icaza is now working for Microsoft, and he
> spends his energy on porting Microsoft ideas and
> projects to the Linux platform(s)... So why he
> criticizes Microsoft plans in the public?
It's obvious, he wants to be in the payroll of Microsoft and stop working for them for free. All these years of hard work should be rewarded!
A number of my peers like to bitch about how "Swing is hard to learn" and I get called an elitist for laughing at them. Of course, unlike most of them I have tried to learn other toolkits and have come to the conclusion that Swing's design really is the de facto gold standard for how a GUI toolkit should be arranged for practical development. It is fast, extremely logically structured and the documentation is really straight to the point for when you need to look stuff up.
I could never get used to Windows Forms. It still amazes me that the layout manager concept isn't considered a standard part of the UI toolkit design process now. Developers shouldn't have to automatically manage most GUI layouts.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Since when were 3 commentless blog posts considered a debate?
Because OpenOffice had to change its name to Openoffice.org due to some name legality issue. So OO becomes OOorg.
Chris Anderson replied with the following in regard to ignoring standards.
Interestingly enough, we never "ignored" standards. We spent a huge amount of time understanding and evaluating the existing standards. SVG and CSS both were passed on because they weren't adaquate to meet our needs. WinFX is a platform for the next decade or longer - we can't start with a base that doesn't meet our needs.
What a load of shit. That mentality is where the "embrace and extend" came from. It might not meet Microsoft's needs, but CSS and SVG are the bloody standards that people are using! What do they know about the coming decade that we don't?
What Chris said pretty much flies in the face of the entire paragraph that Miguel wrote! Look:
I understand why someone would invent their own version of SVG or their own version of CSS: those standards can be difficult to implement, and growing your own version is a lot simpler than having to adapt an existing model to a new model.
I would have probably done the same if I had been in their position: its easy. But I would think that Microsoft has a higher responsibility towards the developer base that must create tools that interop with third party components: creating a new standard for graphics just because its `easy' is not really a good answer.
Implementing SVG might have problems and limitations, but the advantages outweight these problems: there are plenty of tools today to produce and consume it and it fits better with the rest of the industry. A benefit that Avalon users will not have and will just partition the industry again for a fairly poor reason.
Standards are there for a reason. If Microsoft doesn't like them they can see figure 1. I have a feeling that Microsoft may not dislike the standards themselves, they just don't like the fact that they're not their standards.
-kidlinux.
This is a call to arm, sent out to all sensible /.ers. PLEASE, DO NOT embed senseless links within your story submission. It goes against the ethics of every data purist out there to have to mouse over words like "interesting" and "debate", carefully examining the status bar URL, to find out WTF that link points to. Enough already.
Not only that, but Avalon's 3D methods are probably just wrappers for DirectX. Which means less code redundancy, too.
DirectX isn't just graphics. It is also networking, realtime input, sound, etc. Have you ever tried creating a GUI with DirectX? It is hard because you don't get the standard controls. What Avalon does is bridge that gap and bring 3D to the GUI controls (eg, outside the client area). Direct3D will only render into the client area.
Qt4 will also fill this gap - any QT widget can be drawn on top of an OpenGL canvas, and it will be OpenGL accelerated.
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
You mis-spelt arms. You typed "arm" when it should be "arms."
1. embrace & extend svg & xul by anouncing avalon/xaml vaporware
2. sit on hands as svg & xul die
3. profit
Before adopting WHATWG, read the moonlight.NET EULA [http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/moonlight.mspx]
"Hard core" means "death march."
No, it doesn't! It means things done right. It means things done so that a definitive API with expandability for the furure may be developed that doesn't have to be scrapped and started over because everyone working on the project was brain-dead and so desperate for a quick solution to meet looming deadlines that a poor implementation was chosen over no implementation at all.
Microsoft... where do you want to go today? To hell!
"But DirectX isn't right for the task, it's too low level. Too much DX code only works on ATi or nVidia, too many vendor specific extensions and shitty drivers. It's great for tweaking the crap out of Doom 3 so it goes as fast as it can, but it would suck if some pixel shader operation that only works on Geforces blowed up my coding session."
;0
Perhaps you refer to OpenGL. DirectX is an opaque MS API. There are not extensions. In fact, DirectX has a standard shader language, which are converted to the native shader language of the respective GPU by the DirectX drivers provided with the GPU.
Doom 3 also does not use Direct X. It uses OpenGL. All id games use OpenGL. That's what makes them special.
"Mr. Icaza is now working for Microsoft"
Try Novell in the Ximian devision. That parent company also owns the SuSE Linux distro and tools now btw.
umm i think the parent said that Miguel DOESN'T work for MS.
At any rate I see the things that Miguel is trying to do as good things for the community. Commoditizing certain types of applications is the foundation of the gpl culture. Almost all successful gpl apps have been an Nth implementation of a defacto or real standard. beatiful things like mono, wine, or other API implementations are just further attempts to sing the same song. It is not a song we'll have to sing forever though. Already there have been a couple of really new and fresh ideas released as oss. Myabe someone will fill in my thinking with examples for me.
this sig is deprecated
Miguel makes a semi-interesting point, but Mr. Microsoft makes a better one: why on earth would the average programmer be rooting upwards through the class tree 10 or 11 levels?
The whole point of abstraction is that Joe Programmer knows "button" derives from the next highest object. That's it. It's nice to know the other levels when you're learning the language's abstraction model for the first time/creating it, but once you get into down and dirty practical programming, you only really need to look up and down a few levels. If you're going all the way back up to Object and reconfiguring it, you're reinventing the wheel. That was the language designer's job.
I agree with the parent. "Arms" is mispelled. However, the parent neglected to provide a link to the corrected word.
Gee whiz... sorry if I came across that way, but in all honesty I was just pointing out that Avalon wasn't/won't be the only thing to do this.
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
Well, yes it is complex. But it only appears complex because of a lack of abstraction. It is a matter of perception.
There has always been a big clash between the simple black box and the gazillion arugument camp
In case you haven't noticed, I favor the simple black box.
Let me just say that the reason why people don't fall over when they walk, or birds do not fall out of the sky when they fly is because of an interface which was designed with a very simple black box interface.
Enuf said. Either you get it or you don't.
When I first read this I said "huh" but then I see that Miquel De Icaza supports the Palestinean intifada, including all its violence. He has a link on his website to pro-intifada web sites.
What makes iD special is game play and the game engine.
If Carmack moved to DX9 or it's successors, players and developers would move with him.
(I think he was making a joke. I think, I do not know.)
That isn't the right one.
http://slashdot.org/~miguel
"My concerns stem from the fact that we do not want to waste our time with dead-end APIs as we are vastly under-resourced, so we must choose carefully."
So? Does he expect Microsoft to change what it is doing because they don't have the budget to port everything they are releasing? If you don't feel like it is a priority then fine, but I fail to see how that should factor into a analysis/review of the software itself.
Then again it seems to be increasingly rare for people to make unbiased decisions these days, so I guess I shoudln't expect anything less.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
Actually, I believe when MS flew Miguel in for his job interview, he used the opportunity to tell them how flawed their business model was and why open-source is a superior approach. You can read it here . (registration required though) So no, from that article, my feeling is that Icaza does not have a "hardon" for microsoft but actually hates their business model and all that they represent.
I'm waiting for the part where you tell us all how to disarm an enemy soldier without killing anyone, especially when said enemy soldier is hell-bent on killing you.
It's one thing to be an idealist or pacifist; it's quite another to actually implement it. Ask Ghandi's dead Indians how much fun it is to be a pacifist.
WTF! If you hate them why apply for a job there???? Your logic falls down friend, oh dear me your logic needs medical attention stat!
Hey guys,
Just wanted to point out that the inflamatory
comments that are being made in my name are someone
else's idea of fun. Some guy decided to squatter
the login `Miguel de Icaza'.
Miguel.
so I will....
after years of programing I have come to the following:
1. Object-C rules. NeXT was the best.
2. Aqua is better thought out then any of this crap!
Just my 2 cents.
Oh, yes I am an Apple Fan Boy and proud of it!
I do not hate Microsoft, but I think that they will
eventually open source some interesting pieces of
software. The pieces are already in movement.
Microsoft is like any other corporation, they have
to do what is best for their shareholders. They
have had a pretty good ride but Linux and open
source have changed the plane, so they will
likely have to transform in the future in a different
kind of company.
In either case, working for Microsoft is not the
end of the world. I just happen to be a lot
happier working for Novell doing open source
software and working with many talented developers
from the Novell background, the SUSE background
and Ximian. An opportunity in a lifetime to
reshape this industry.
Miguel.
A troll Who usually posts as the Bungie(192858) except in gnome/mono/KDE/ruby/python threads where he openly trolls and has even been known to argue with him/herself. Yes we know.
Shheeesh Kebab, really!? thanks for pointing that that out dude! Can you spell obvious?
Oh dear God, this needs to be modded up. I'm seriously sick of extraneous linking.
From the site:
Q: What principles guide your work?
EI: EI is committed to communicating the realities of life on the ground for ordinary Palestinians and challenging myths and distortions about them in the commercial media through analysis and our own reporting. EI is independent of any political, factional, ethnic, or religious affiliation, and bases its view of the conflict on the foundation of universal human rights and international law. The Electronic Intifada condemns all attacks on civilians, regardless of the perpetrators, yet encourages people to examine the structural roots and dynamics of violence in the conflict and the imbalance of power that perpetuates these dynamics.
EI seems to be about the spread of information not violence.
openOffice is already a registered tradmark, buy a older office suite that never realy caught on.
They didn't realise this when they created the open source open office, and the original makers of open office contacted them on this issue and the compromise is to call the project "Open Office.org". And hence OO.org
No. Please let me know how to spell obvious.
Quote:
"In Windows today there is the secure desktop, but you must press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to get to it first. "
He must be talking about pre-NT days, because he cannot be talking about their worthless taskmanager. Telling the taskmanager to kill a process is like a police officer telling Rodney King to pull his car over. In theory it should work, but most of the time is just ends with a system crash.
Dont believe me?? Well try developing M$ service application's for a living and see how many times you reboot your dev machine because of processes getting stuck in M$'s memory "wonderland". Annoying to say the least...
This guy is doing good things... helping mono is awsome.
I'm not trying to be Xeno Phobic but write in the language that people can best understand your arguments. Miguel's blog is a bunch of off the cuff un-supported arguments.
Un-supported only in the sense that there are no examples and/or references. He may be right but doesn't do a very good job expressing his thoughts.
It would be nice to see a better articulation of why it is that he's so concerned with Avalon, in the section about the developer needing to know a lot of the internals to implement code, he's very short on details of why this is. If your going to go to the trouble of jotting good thougts down in a blog - make them worthwhile.
p r i c k t w a t c u n t obvious
Isn't this kind of discussion rather lethal? What would stop Microsoft from doing the same thing they did with Sender ID? 'Royalty Free but non-transferrable'. Is that why they are acting more open and saying .NET stuff will be RF patented? Are we sitting on a landmine?
It's all fine and good if Miguel's plan is to license them for use in Mono if needed, but that means it's more useless than Java to the Free Software world.
Faking someone else should be strongly discouraged, but maybe not by modding down. When he actually does defame Miguel, he gets modded down properly. Of course, the Karma system at Slashdot has some decent flaws, and this is very obviously one of them. (Bad usernames posting good things.)
If you've looked at .NET, you'd see that they have. MFC is dead.
> Perhaps the most shocking revelation is the
> absolutely horrendous inheritence hierarchy
> exposed by the Avalon API.
Good grief. This coming from a GNOME luminary
which said project uses Gtk? Gtk is a piss-poor
toolkit. They should have stuck with the X model
of toolkit implementation. Instead we got stuck
with a toolkit which doesn't integrate well with
X and doesn't particularly stand well on it's
own. Get your own house in order first.
all it's 2D rendering
"its".
I am not sure what you mean by your post
It looks like you misinterpreted somewhat.
Anyways if you meant what I think you meant...
bless you
Noooo, Quartz is based on a PDF-like model.
Icons, and the decorations on the widgets (such as buttons) are currently done with bitmaps, but there's no technical reason they couldn't switch to resolution-independent graphics for those elements.
Aqua would scale *now* though certain elements would be somewhat blocky at larger sizes.
Wasn't Apple researching this in the 1980's? I wondered what happened? Apple bought a cray just to research this.
I am going to be an apple user and would be jealous if Windows became 3d.
http://saveie6.com/
But he hasn't. He still sticks with OpenGL, even after ditching C. (finally, even though the code I saw flashed on the screen in some interview video still looked like the C he's always written)
Dude if this is offtopic sorry - but you should check out qt, thats a pretty solid toolkit right there
Maybe you should read the articles on the site before you try to smear someone on a topic not related to this thread
I don't know anything about Quartz, so this has piqued my curiosity. By "PDF-like", do you mean to say that Quartz is based on Postscript? And it's fast???
Now, THAT would be a thing to behold.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
I wonder if it is possible for Rocklyte to implement 3D rendering features like in Avalon in their Athene Desktop.
I have tried out Athene and it is very fast - they claim over 25% speed increase to X11.. This is a complete alternative to X11 but can also run X11 apps.. Try out the free version http://www.rocklyte.com/athene/. You can run games on the desktop using SDL.. they have a version of Doom and Quake available for download as well.
I was very impressed with both the desktop as well as the underlying technologies - the desktop is scripted using an XML-like language called DML..and the engine used is called Pandora.
The graphics driver technology is based on SNAP graphics from SciTech and seems very easy to manage.
My two primary gripes with the system were that the licensing seems a little restrictive.. and also, the package management software seemed very weak (if you are using the OS).
But other than that - a very polished desktop.. and underlying API. Most impressive.. Definitely the most innovative and cutting edge Linux desktop and distribution around.
Also wonder if there is a move to implement Windows Forms (for Mono) using the Pandora Engine SDK.
What do you find interesting in a VMS and Java clones is beyond me, two of the worst technologies ever created in the history of software. Not to mention the most directly at odds with the Unix philosophy.
If you are going to "reshape this industry", you could at least try to do so into a less hideous new shape. (l)Unix has been dead for more than fifteen years[1], but better things have been around for almost as long.
If you like C but are tired of doing memory allocation, why don't you use the language that the creators of C spent twenty years designing[2] to overcome C limitations: Limbo
Rob Pike admitted that the main problems with C (as a high level language) are the lack of proper strings and the lack of garbage collection, with limbo you get that and a bunch of other really wonderful goodies, like the best parallel programming framework using CSP and the most beautiful and simple distributed environment thanks to 9p/Styx.
Not only that, but now Inferno/Limbo and Plan 9 are open source.
Note: Now you can even run most of Plan 9 user space under Linux: Plan 9 on Unix
[1] "Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad." -- Rob Pike circa 1991
[2] Directly or indirectly most languages developed at Bell Labs for the last 30 years have been predecessors of Limbo
Best wishes and I hope that some day you will correct your misguided ways
uriel
"When in doubt, use brute force." Ken Thompson
"This isn't a Microsoft, Linux, or Java issue"
The whole point is that it *is* a Microsoft issue. Java is seldom used to write viruses because it is difficult to do. This is because Sun thought about security when the designed the thing in the first place. Linux is pretty secure, too, partly by design and partly in the nature of OSS model iteslf. Windows is not secure and cannot be (consider, for instance, that any application can post an event in any other applications event queue). To misquote Douglas Adams the reason that the fundamental deign flaws in Windows are seldom experienced is because they are entirely hidden by the superficial ones. SP2 has been largely and extensively debunked for the lipstick on a pig that it is here.
The object hierachy does look horendous for buttons compared to .net 1.1/2.0 which has
System.Object
System.MarshalByRefObject
System.ComponentModel.Component
System.Windows.Forms.Control
System.Windows.Forms.ButtonBase
System.Windows.Forms.Button
I hope .net doesn't go the way of the java framework - complex and unintuitive - as this is what attracted me to .net from java in the first place, the excellent hierachy of the classes, the extra functionality and also the extra bit c# has.
Having said that, Chris Powell does point out that it's not even beta yet...
Nothing costs nothing
They have had a pretty good ride
Second richest company in the world is a pretty good ride !
Nothing costs nothing
From the simplegeek (Microsoft) guy.
.doc, but in this case it is much more than a music experience taking place.
'I actually really do understand some of the technical and political reasons why everyone (Real, Microsoft, Apple, etc.) participate in these format wars, but in the end it is consumers that pay. '
Well, it pays your salary!
A lot of developers for Linux don't care for formats. They just make everything work the same - xine, mplayer vlc.
Then some app is build upon this technology - and bazaam, both Ipod, CD's and music players can 'play' every format.
Why? Because the developers wanted it. In Microsoft and Apple it would be a disaster if they suddenly had support for the other standard (their own standard would loose).
So get your ass out Chris - com*friggin*plain to your Boss. If you think it is hurting you - a technology expert, how do you think the rest of the world is feeling towards Microsoft?
It is the same problem with
As Miguel said - please start to cooporate, in the long run it is best for both of you.
Blind fanboyism doesn't get you anywhere ...
Because he isn't trying to change the industry for the better, he's simply satisfying his ego. Microsofts marketing budget puts the buzzwords into the boardroom and then Miguel enters the picture, the knight in shining armour come to save those poor fortune 500 companies from vendor lock-in. This is not how to reshape an industry, its a copy of previous Microsoft behaviour.
With NT 4.0, they moved the display drivers into the system space, not the entire GUI subsystem. This was for performance reasons.
I knew it was a bad idea, and I'm sure that there are those at Microsoft (Dave Cutler, probably) who thought it was a bad idea too. But it's a tradeoff, and at the time the business risk was considered acceptable because they had a driver certification program, and they were going to make sure that drivers would behave themselves.
Chip H.
Aqua is pixel based and cannot handle scaling.
I infer from the sentence above that you don't really grok what Aqua is.
Aqua is the look & feel of Mac OS X: the shape of the scroll bar elements, the standard window title bars, the way that modal dialogs "slide out" from the window they pertain to, etc. IOW, Aqua is appearance and behavior. To say that it's "pixel based" is meaningless.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Actually Miguel is from Mexico, not Spain.
As a spaniard I need to make that clear.
Seems that was the way that Miguel used to see Avalon, and the almost-defunct WinFS (check out ReiserFS4 metadata, btw), but now, surprise, is not!
.NET is killer. It is what Java wanted to do with the Web, but with the channel to deploy it and the lessons learned from Java mistakes."p r-24.html
s s?thread_id=27453
r view_with_miguel_de_icaza_cofounder_of_gnome_ximia n_and_mono.html
Check this out:
"They are all fine points of view, but what makes Longhorn dangerous for the viability of Linux on the desktop is that the combination of Microsoft deployment power, XAML, Avalon and
http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/archive/2004/A
"Avalon will be a lot easier to write than the previous ActiveX; it's a lot prettier, so when organizations are using Longhorn-based machines, which I assume will be sold everywhere by 2008, it's going to be increasingly hard for the rest of us to get there unless we have an implementation of an equivalent technology."
http://www.theserverside.net/common/printthread.t
"Longhorn has kind of a scary technology called Avalon, which when compounded with another technology called XAML, it's fairly dangerous. And the reason is that they've made it so it's basically an HTML replacement. The advantage is it's probably as easy as writing HTML, so that means that anybody can produce this content with a text editor."
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/04/28/inte
So, what was all that crap that he told us "fear Microsoft, you morons, we need something like they have to have more 'competition' there" about?
A big FUD? A way to try to implement and waste time with, all we know, some probabily vapourware or with a product that does not work well? Think about WinFS. He also used to say that it will be the doom for all the Linux users don't have a stuff like that, but even the Microsoft users will not have a stuff like that, at least the way all the utopic dudes wants to!
Now that the technology owner is in trouble with it, he says that it's a lot of shit? Oh, come on.
The big point here is that, with some effort, you don't need Microsoft programs anymore to do what your company needs to run your computers. And we don't need people trying to convince us that WE NEED THEM if we really don't need. Gimme a break.
just use embed instead.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
New reply from the Microsoft guy.
Watch great movie opening scenes!
However, the Southern engineering observation:applies.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Hmmmm,
OSS has more developers than Microsoft as a whole.
Microsoft has more developers than Mono alone.
Mono is tracking Microsoft APIs.
Would microsoft choose to generate a mass of APIs, wait to see which one MONO follows and then deprecate it?
Nahhh... couldnt possibly do that!
That would be mean!
Also, since media bias is in general in favour of those who claim to speak and act on behalf of the Palestinians, it's difficult to understand why media activism would be required (see another perspective)
http://opera.infoplease.com/search.php3?in=diction ary&query=mis-spelt
The average person, when they say "DirectX", is referring to Direct3D. You are the first person in this thread to use it in the sense of the whole DirectX system. Therefore, your post is entirely accurate, and also entirely off-topic. Sorry and all that.
The key problem with the microkernel debate is that there were few true microkernels around at the time. Mach (the only freely available microkernel at the time) was a perfect example of how *not* to write a microkernel. The microkernel is about as big as Linux itself and it's slow. It's little surprise that Microsoft integrated tons of stuff in to their Mach microkernel. It would be pig slow if they didn't
x OnL4/
If you want an example of how a "microkernel done right" looks like, take a look at the L4 kernel.
BTW, Linux *has* been ported to this real microkernel:
http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/L4/Linu
It's a bit slower than regular Linux but not noticably so and it gains all the advantages of a microkernel design.
Hmm typical MS blinders. As they have forgotten that there is already a project with this name.Apache Avalon is a API/Framework for java.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
And oh, completely offtopic -- what's the deal with saying, work fine in OOorg -- shouldn't that be works fine with OO? Why the org/.org thingy?
Trademark. Somebody holds a trademark on OpenOffice(tm) that's not connected to the OpenOffice.org project we all love (theoretically, anyway, that love I mean). So OpenOffice.org had to change their name to avoid getting in trouble over the trademark. Mind you, the OpenOffice(tm) crew (whoever they are, I forget who) are totally disconnected from OO.org, and I think they're not even competitive with them. So it's cool, just respecting someone else's trademark, and they're happy with OpenOffice.org's fix of just appending .org to their name.
Like what I said? You might like my music
You just made my dick hard.
Just in case you wanted to know...
Like what I said? You might like my music
"its".
"Tits"!
You wasted your time replying to an Anonymous COWARD trolling...
What makes iD special is game play and the game engine. If Carmack moved to DX9 or it's successors, players and developers would move with him.
Truthfully, developers and players have moved. The only games developed in OpenGL any more are those from id, id engine licensees, and some low-end shareware. That's it.
I wrote software on a windows platform for years. The problem with MS is that it is first and foremost a marketing driven company. They don't release any software unless it somehow ties you to the operating system.
I don't want to be chasing their tails I like technically driven solutions. If you want to make me a linux developer happy give me this. Take mozilla and make it a real development platform. Put a nice clean api on it and let me use mozilla to write all of my software so it will run fast on anything. This is what I want, doing so would neutralize the platform, the only thing I care about.
Got Code?
You make some good points. But remember a few other things.
NT is (or at least was) a microkernel. That's been compromised considerably with poor decisions later on, but you can't consider it a monolithic kernel - it's really a hybrid kernel that started as a microkernel and then adopted some monolithic practices.
On the other hand, Linux started as a monolithic kernel, and clearly still is, but it's incorporated an awful lot of that 'modular design' logic when it made sense to Linus, and in some ways could be considered closer to a microkernel. You don't see the UI running in kernel space, obviously, while NT, the ostensible microkernel of the pair, does exactly that. Linus started with a monolithic kernel and adopted microkernel-ish logic wherever it made sense to him, whereas MS started with a microkernel and imported monolithic logic where it made sense to them.
So the labels can be a bit confusing when applied to the real world. There isn't just A and B, but all sorts of possible variations and permutations with some features of each.
L4-Hurd, I agree, will be something very sweet, when it's finally ready, but it does seem to be a dish that needs a very long simmering time.
Lastly, I'm not sure who you're listening to, but obviously not people worth listening to, if they're saying that binary-only drivers are a good thing. They aren't. Linus doesn't support them, the Linux development model doesn't support them, they are strictly not to be encouraged. Anything that discourages them is probably a good thing.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I think that just demonstrates that Miguel probably knows something about inheritance....
As an American I need to make that clear.
As a Texan, I certainly want Miguel to remember the Alamo!
Like what I said? You might like my music
"My name is Miguel de Icaza. You killed my development environment. Prepare to die."
This space for rent
What do you find interesting in a VMS and Java clones is beyond me, two of the worst technologies ever created in the history of software. Not to mention the most directly at odds with the Unix philosophy.
.NET and Mono, we will see but as of now, I have directly copied applications from my development windows machine running the .NET framework, onto our server running MONO and have never had to debug a single application after the move. To me this concept is not one of the worst technologies ever created, it was just Java's implementation of the concept that fell apart.
If you are going to "reshape this industry", you could at least try to do so into a less hideous new shape. (l)Unix has been dead for more than fifteen years[1], but better things have been around for almost as long.
It's funny that everyone keeps heralding how Unix and its variants are a dead end, but more and more operating systems are reinventing the wheels of Unix to provide the security and flexibility that Unix provided 10 years ago.
If you like C but are tired of doing memory allocation, why don't you use the language that the creators of C spent twenty years designing[2] to overcome C limitations: Limbo
It is simply a matter of popularity, you can design a language that does everything, but if it does not win mind share, then you have a very good dead language. I cannot comment on Limbo, as I have never used it, but the progression from C to C# is night and day. C is just old and it feels old, every time you have to touch memory allocations, or make sure everything is cleaned up. As for Java, it has become very bloated and the promise of write once run anywhere has somewhat fallen apart. As for
[1] "Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad." -- Rob Pike circa 1991
"Those who don't understand UNIX are doomed to reinvent it, poorly." --Henry Spencer
This reminds me of the kind of debate that goes on in the corp world. Say, two guys (good guy, bad guy) argues the right way of using a product. ... I agree that everybody needs this soap, but it should be used with warm water",
One of the (good guy) says, "Well, Yea
the other guy answers "No, no no no! It can be used with both cold AND warm water!". To add to the cred, the "disussion"
turns ugly (now, this reminds me of the 2 dudes Bush&Kerry) and they start to throw soaps on eachother. Whereupon the good guy proceeded to take
that mittenful of the deadly soap crystals and rub it all into his (bad guy) beady little eyes with a vigorous circular motion hitherto unknown to the people of
this area (this sound familiar), Well he (the bad guy) was very upset, as you can understand And rightly so, because the Deadly yellow snow crystals had
deprived him of his (hang on, yellow snow?? This is a RIPOFF!!).
Ehhrr ok, this has turned a itzy bit OT, so I wish U all a nice holiday!
Cheers.
One of Miguel's complaints is that Avalon exposes too much? This is actually something I *like* about Swing.
Let's say you project that involves storing a little extra info with each character in a text editor. Each character has unique info, so you can't efficiently use the usual sorts of mechanisms...what you really need is to replace the core storage model of the editor, so that each character is 64 bits, with a few extra methods to pull those out.
In Swing, this is easy to do, because it exposes every component of the text editor. The storage object implements a simple interface, so it's easily replaceable. I haven't found any other API that allows this.
IMG was added for Mosaic in one of the first short-sighted decisions which led to the mess that was later called HTML 3.2. When submitted for peer-review (your so-called "proper channels") people suggested that maybe it would be better to make a more general embedding element and that it should be a container so that backward-compatible content could be included inside. The ALT, element, if you think about it, is useless for this because no previous browser knew to look there! Also, it can only support plain text, so more "rich" alternatives such as a link to another document or even just a few paragraphs of text are not an option.
Mosaic developer said "tough luck, I've already written it" and released it as it was. Since Mosaic was the biggest browser at the time people quickly sucked down this new IMG element and everyone was forced to co-operate.
To me, this sounds like exactly what Microsoft is doing. IMG was a quick hack with little forward planning just to get images into web pages as quickly as possible. Mosaic and then later Netscape continued this trend by adding poorly-considered features such as FONT, APPLET, EMBED and framesets which are now, thankfully, deprecated in current W3C specifications in favor of better thought-out and more general features. Sadly, W3C's versions have buggy support in most current browsers. (They haven't replaced frames, but I suspect that's because it was a pretty bad idea in the first place, so the best thing to do is just to avoid it.)
"Besides, since when do you judge an organisation by what they say about themselves?"
/. AC more?
You think I should trust a
The parent AC claimed Miquel was a terrorist sympathizer and posted a link that they claimed proved this. The link does not prove this and the AC provided no other proof so I call bullshit on him.
Only because someone had wasted a mod point calling it informative.
How is something that doesn't provide any evidence or arguments at all considered insightful? ...
Blind fanboyism doesn't get you anywhere
Wow. As they say: "You must be new here". On Slashdot, blind fanboyism (as long as the object of adoration is Linux, Apple, or Kerry/Dems) gets you all the mod points you could want!
i wish someone had the time to separate the facts from this discussion.
microsofts 'avalon' is the 'next version' of software to come out of redmond, ok.
i submit the following tensor:
microsofts' ( avalon ) < Hardened ( Linux + mozilla + openOffice + Apache + mySQL/PostSQL + Perl/PHP/Java/Mono )
Imagining... imagining... nope, can't do it. Must not be possible.
Hint it wasn't the Texans...
A man who wants nothing is invincible
Tejano? So what exactly does the Mexicans winning at the Alamo have to do with someone descended from the native tribes originally living in Texas, anyway? Do you like the idea that a foreign imperialistic power sought to prevent Texas from achieving independence (and ultimately lost, individual battle victories notwithstanding)?
Like what I said? You might like my music
Aqua is appearance and behavior. To say that it's "pixel based" is meaningless.
What I mean is that controls are absolutely positioned. Avalon and Gtk and Qt are container based, controls are positioned based on the containers they are in.
Also, since media bias is in general in favour of those who claim to speak and act on behalf of the Palestinians, it's difficult to understand why media activism would be required (see another perspective)
It is a common claim of those on the right of American politics that the two ends of the political spectrum are the Republican and Democrat parties, and that any media organization to the left of Fox News has a "left-wing bias".
Needless to say, it's complete nonsense.
So, let's have a look at the situation in Israel and Palestine:
1. Which side has tanks, helicopters and the like?
2. Who is building settlements in whose country?
This is not to say that suicide bomings are a good thing - clearly going in to a restauant and blowing up civilians is a bad thing. But, and here's the elephant in your little worldview, so is driving tanks over people's villages and shooting their children. What word do the Israelis and their apologists use to describe that? Oh yes - a security action targetting known criminals...
What I mean is that controls are absolutely positioned.
No, they can move and resize based on their resizing attributes.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The whole Texas "independence" movement was nothing but a raw land grab. That is why it is great that you Anglo Texans stopped saying that Texas' "independence" was about "freedom". That was a huge lie because the first thing the Anglo Texans did was make Blacks slaves again (they had been freed by Mexico in 1828, over 30 years before the U.S. fought a civil war that accomplished the same thing in the U.S.).
It is obvious that you have never read the real history of Texas preferring instead to believe the myths and legends called Texas history by the Anglos. If you had you would know that after the Alamo the Mexicans spared Anglo women and children, while after San Jacinto the Texans you seem to idolize massacared Mexican women and children. And I don't even want to get into how the Spanish land grant records "mysteriously" burned after the Anglos took over Texas.
What I think is funny is that if Stephen F. Austin and his band of illiterate Anglo rednecks would try the same thing today they would be called "terrorists". Instead they are called "heroes" and "founding fathers" like they did something good and honorable...
In an attempt to get this back on topic, what in the hell does the Alamo have to do with Miguel de Icaza???
A man who wants nothing is invincible
Nothing! The Tejanos are the descendants of the Spaniards and Mexicans that originally took the land away from the natives. Geez, Texas is 40% Hispano, it would do you some good to learn a little Spanish!
Hablo pequito espanol, bendejo.
Besides that, either you've just answered my question "yes", or you've just answered my question with "No, I'm not descended from the native americans who originally lived in Texas, instead I've chosen a label that contributes to the global problems of racism". If the answer is the first, hats off to you. If the answer is the second, it's not surprising that you have thus far assumed I am both white and ignorant. I know more spanish than many who actually have lineage to spaniards, and I'm not exactly white. You see, I take issue with the usage of many words used to describe ethnic membership. We'd be much better off if we all realized we're part of one race, not one of many races.
It is obvious that you have never read the real history of Texas preferring instead to believe the myths and legends called Texas history by the Anglos. If you had you would know that after the Alamo the Mexicans spared Anglo women and children, while after San Jacinto the Texans you seem to idolize massacared Mexican women and children. And I don't even want to get into how the Spanish land grant records "mysteriously" burned after the Anglos took over Texas.
Santa Ana's history speaks for itself, I think. A great general, but a generally bad guy. Now, I'm not saying the tactics of the revolutionists in Texas were the best either. American history is one hypocrisy after another, and the sooner we realize that, the sooner we'll figure out that we haven't learned from our history either. Oppression and conquest is the American Way.
In an attempt to get this back on topic, what in the hell does the Alamo have to do with Miguel de Icaza???
Heh, it all started as a joke, and would have safely remained a joke had you not popped off indignantly. ;) (It's not too late to save the joke, though, or at least turn it around to me popping off indignantly)
Like what I said? You might like my music
- Microsoft apologists mock /. programmer defenses of Icaza
- Mods find mocking funny, mod them up
- Insightful discussion of topic is stifled
Maybe if you had some basic knowledge of Unix history you would know that Plan 9 and Inferno are not "reinventions" of Unix, but they are the _evolution_ of the original Unix, developed by the same people, and based in the same principles and philosophy(and in part, code). Not some hacked up aberration that didn't respect the fundamental Unix way of doing things, like BSD(csh(1) ugh?), X(wtf?), GNU(info(1) --godawful-compiler-crap), not to mention proprietary variants and extensions(who can call Aix Unix with a straight face? and Sun obviously never understood Unix either, or they wouldn't have created two of the worst diseases that infest Unix: NFS and shared libs)
.NOT is a bad reinvention of Unix; Plan 9 _is_ the Unix spirit shining with new light.
If you are going to question Rob's credentials as Unix God, maybe you should first read his paper(co-authored by Brian God Kernighan) called: cat -v considered harmful; that formed the basis for the best Unix book every written: Programming in the Unix environment.
And yea, your quote from Henry is very good, too bad you got it completely wrong,
Maybe if you had bothered to read the linked papers, you would know why anyone that ever really understood what Unix stands for has considered it dead for more than 15 years. I'm sure Henry, if he weren't too busy working in the space industry, would agree with this.
Clueless fools like you, Miguel, and RMS where what killed Unix.