Slashdot Mirror
Croquet Project Releases Initial Developer Release
kourge writes "Croquet Project previously has been slashdotted. Today, Croquet Project released its initial developer release, codenamed 'Jasmine.'
Although it isn't a finished product, it still is complete enough for developers to develop in Croquet. Croquet itself is written in Squeak, a branch of the Smalltalk language.
Please remember to download Croquet via BitTorrent, which provides faster speeds and won't overload the server." The idea is ambitious: An OpenGL-based "complete development and delivery platform" delivering "shared telepresence, shared authorship of complex spaces and their contents, and shared access to network-deliverable information resources" is only part of it. Croquet's license is blessedly simple, too.
croquet license
Copyright (c) 2002-2004 by Viewpoints Research Institute, Inc. and other individual, corporate, and institutional contributors who have collectively contributed elements of the CroquetTM software code to the Croquet Project. CroquetTM is a trademark of Viewpoints Research Institute, Inc..
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
Sure, it looks really cool. But i cant understand how something like that would allow you to work effeciently..
So many new languages, so little time...
I'd like the admin tool icon to be a mallet, and kicking users off should be the users 'ball' being whacked thru the 'exit' wicket.
By sharing a 3D space with avatars you can create some interesting things.
For example, someone enters your croquet space and you open up a local chess app which appears before you both and you can have a game of chess. And yet the chess program is not network aware. This is phenomenally cool and has all sorts of applications.
I know it's been done before in things like "moove" but I think it's rad to have your smb share as a "room" which people can enter. The rooms then have unix-like privelages. So there is a root "machine room" the door to which only authenticated users can enter. And you could have terminals that "float" along with you that only you can see.
It is the next paradigm shift for certain multi-user applications. Sending a freind an file over IM is more of a question of leaping through a hyper-portal and throwing an object over to them. Or they might in your croquet space and you wouldn't have to "give" it to them at all, they'd just see it there in front of them.
Endless possibilities.
This release will be noteworthy to both developers and end users who just want to see "see what it's like". Soon after getting Slashdotted so long ago, Croquet.org removed the download and (basically) hasn't updated since. The vast majority of the (casual) interest in the project had to be stemmed off until now. As such, I'm sure we can expect the site to get hit with both old techies who never got a chance to see it, as well as new ones who are just hearing about it for the first time.
I've never understood what makes 3D environments better than 2D for applications and input devices made for 2D displays. In my opinion, the new spatial dimension you can move through is what makes it bad since it takes longer time to accomplish tasks.
Is it really more convenient to collaborate like this than just via a web conference or something?
Obviously someone see advantages here, or they wouldn't put so much effort into these projects.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Windows
Mac
Linux
Though they want you to agree to the license before you can get to those links.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
What is this ... new code that women talk in now?
This sounds like it was made for females and "girly men"... I don't drive cars made for women (all you guys driving PT Crusiers should know that ;)) and I wont use a developing tool made for them either!
Now, if you will excuse me.. my wife is calling.
Shared open-source central repository for storage and retrieval of all created and modified objects, allowing naïve 3D developers to leverage the distributed expertise of Croquet's large-scale networked community
Read: porn repository for aspiring 3D designers unaware of the finer points of the human anatomy.
"Croquet Project previously has been slashdotted."
And since we hate the bastards, lets do it to 'em again!
Seriously. Ouch.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
It looks like one of the project leaders is Alan Kay, whose team at Xerox developed the "window and mouse" interface...
gives me some hope for the eventual acceptance of the language, though I realize that its like HP's RPN calculators. Most people never 'got it' and they bought calculators with an = sign.
When the facination with code objects is over ("the faster the better" erupts from the Microsoft quarter, "we can't make as much money from new code as we can from old code") the world will begin to realize the importance of object relationships, object states and state machines and its effect on used interfaces.
Data structure is fine but it needs to be married to the articulation (partly in the GAAP sense of the word) of inter object relationships through an intermediary of a state machine and projected onto a 3D GUI like Croquet.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
onlyjoking.com/torrentmirror.torrent
liqbase
Yet Another Wonderful New Operating System...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
How does it handle run time exceptions, like sticky wickets?
No, wait, that's Cricket.
I'm so confused. :(
--- Ban humanity.
The kind of easy you can give to children and complete beginners who've never seen a computer before. You can get into it as deeply as you like, it's basically smalltalk.
e.g.
http://www.squeakland.org/
It should really be the default development environment for normal users on Linux desktops.
Deleted
Dave Reed did an extensive Croquet demo at the Freenix Track of the Usenix ATC this year. Seemed really cool, but at the time was too buggy to be usable. Basically, Croquet lets you put all kinds of interesting workspaces in a collaborative 3D virtual world: sort of the logical completion of the virtual world description languages that were popular some years ago. Must be a Smalltalk guru to play, it looks like. Has a fancy synchronization protocol that takes care of most lag issues.
Let's hope that the bugs are sufficiently out that we can have big fun with this. I'm looking forward to trying it.
An OpenGL-based "complete development and delivery platform" delivering "shared telepresence, shared authorship of complex spaces and their contents, and shared access to network-deliverable information resources" is only part of it.
Anybody else feel buzzword overload coming on?
.. listening music though my virtual xmms player. The player could be or not attached to my avatar position, in case i wanted the music to folow me or not .. the sound would have 3d positioning (routed somewhat from the real xmms application to a crocket sound output interface), anyone who "aproachs" my avatar would start listening to music gradually (only if the sound output is activated from their side).. This thing has millions of applications, and imho, is the only 3d desktop that would make sence, why? Because of it's resource sharing with others.. This is way too cool! ;)
I fuse with Mercer every single day...
Oh please. The main post was filled with enough marketspeak and buzzwords to choke a Microsoft Marketing Rep. Tell me what it does. Tell me why it is unique or 'cool'. Tell me what problem it solves or why it is an innovation.
DAMN YOU OCTODOG! DAMN YOU TO HELL!
You can find some great video clips of Alan Kay demoing Croquet here. Well worth watching, this is much more than just a 3D desktop.
You are really engaged in a battle of definitions here on what "You can stop others from doing anything they want" means. Ultimately, it boils down to your different interpretations who is meant by "you". Grandparent refers to the original developer, you refer to everybody else who might be repackaging things under a proprietary license. Technically, grandparent is right, because the license on a piece of software is issued by the developer. If you are releasing something under the BSD or Croquet license, you can't stop others from doing anything they like.
Grandparent says the BSD license means that you as a developer have very little means of stopping from doing what they want with your software including forking it. This is correct. You (Parent) say that the BSD license means that the recipient of said software can re-release a fork under a proprietary license, effectively stopping others from doing what they want. This is also correct, however you are not talking about the BSD license any more, as you are rereleasing it under a different license now. The BSD license gives you that freedom. It is up to you to determine if you consider that freedom a bad thing.At this point, you are engaged in a debate that is based solely on the fact that you have different definitions of "freedom" and whether freedom should include freedom to restrict freedom. This is a highly academic debate on principles that is not leading anywhere by itself; partly because there is no "solution", partly because it will mislead you to equate all instances of problems to which these definitions of freedom are applicable. The situation is different in the case of slavery vs. the case of software, because slavery and software are different things, and everybody will agree on this, no matter what definition of freedom you are applying.
The BSD license gives you a right that the GPL doesn't give: the right of rerelease under a different license. Nobody will deny that. Whether that's a good thing or not or whether you want to consider the BSD license or the GPL "freer" is up to you, but here, there's no easy way to decide by means of logic alone.
Comparing this with slavery is a very bad case of argument by moral equivalence; it's bad because the moral equivalence isn't really there, unless you equate the freedom to rerelease software with the freedom to keep slaves. Do you consider these to be morally equivalent?
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
Why? Let's see:
- The one huge PITA for me is the navigation. The mouse interface is as disturbing as it can get. If I had a joypad connected, the up=forward system would make perfect sense, but this way I automatically tend to navigate as in _any_ 3D-Shooter. I could adapt, granted, but where is the actual gain? Why is navigating this way supposed to be better?
- Most icons are not very intuitive, be that trained or natural intuition. I can figure how to move, rotate, activate, close and focus those windows, but most of the icons in the menu are absolutely beyond me. Some do nothing, some crash something, some spawn world objects that don't have a closing icon, etc. Tooltips _and_ at least a minimum documentation would be neat... And don't you point me at their getting started section. Have you actually read that? It wasn't much, so the average slashdotter should have been able to...
- How do I get a mozilla window? Or, for that matter, any application? Maybe it is my inability to use the menu icons right, but, if screenshots show off with a webbrowser open, then I expect, even in a developer's version, to be able to easily repeat that.
- Runtime environment. Not much to add, I guess. I have a personal dislike for anything that looks like the kindergarten-gaudy version of drag'n'drop your code. Hell, even QBasic looks more professional. It might be the best language/codebase for the purpose, but it sure looks stupid...
- My last point: Sharing userspace over network. I theory this is great. Having the ability to cyberspace parts of my system is way cool for cooperative work, etc. BUT (big but here) only when I can absolutely retain the ability to seal the rest of my system from intruders. Same problem as shared directories: In theory, great. In realita? Security holes amass. If everyone was an enlightened and good person this weren't an issue, but, statistically, everyones a script-kiddie. So, please, give me a)private-by-default and b)clear indication when a network connection exists, including the ability to turn any such conectivity off, ok?
I hope some people will comment! This post is not intended as flamebait, you know...I read some of the FAQ and looked at all the pretty screenshots, and I'm impressed and excited by the possibilities; this is the first 3d-space idea that "works" for me in that it doesn't seem (completely) gratuitous and looks like it would work quite well in a sharing-based environment.
:)
But what I'm looking for is, well, more. For example, they don't tackle (or I didn't understand it) storage or organization of multiple portals (storage meaning "where do you find it in the space", not where is it on a disk). And then, if I have multiple portals for different things, how can I arrange them and subsequently, find them quickly in the space. All those floating windows gotta live somewhere.
I think it's a shame that many people will think Smalltalk is a new language. It's funny how so many younger languages are simply trying to reach the level of usability that Smalltalk has had for, in computing time, forever.
Smalltalk has been around for over twenty years, and has contributed many of the ideas that we work with today. Java is, in some ways, the bastard child of C++ and Smalltalk. Objective-C (Mac OS X) uses Smalltalk's messaging semantics for object oriented programming.
I've just started working with Smalltalk after years of Objective-C and Java. Smalltalk used to be hideously expensive, but several environments are available either open source (Squeak, GNU Smalltalk) or with non commercial licenses (Cincom). It's an amazing language, very natural. Almost a relief after the convultions of static typing, and languages designed by a committee. We all went down the Algol family of languages -- but now we have enough computing power to use something better.
Squeak - Croquet's environment - at first looks like a 1980's GUI - but is a rich development environment in its own right. Squeak images work on every major platform - write once, run everywhere. Give Smalltalk and Squeak a chance, you'll be pleasantly surprised to find such a useful development environment.
/* Dang, I can't type that well. */
The license applies to binary and source form distributions, they are generally held to both be covered by copyright law, so they are both implicitly under the license. Almost EVERY Open Source license has this clause in it. People generally put the copyright notice in the documentation accompanying the binaries (documentation files are included in their definition of "the Software"), in a README file, or you can probably compile it as a string if you prefer. If the license doesn't specify, then anything that complies with the license can be presumed to be valid.
As for "this software", the license only applies to _this software_. Not to other software that you write, that links to this software - that's the way copyright law works, unless you put unusual clauses in place like the GPL does.
You are looking for surprises where there aren't any. This isn't some strange new license, it's just the simplest possible Open Source license (whether you think this means it's the best is a different issue).
Here is a blog from David A. Smith, one of the developers.
It's a VM. Just like any other VM.
evil is as evil does
The point of this that shouldn't be missed is that this is a tool for communication and information exchange.
Many things are accomplished with greater ease in the flattened down two dimensions of most applications, but talking to someone or trying to express an idea is sometimes cumbersome what all you have is text and flat images at your disposal. THAT is why multimedia is such a big deal.
I think this sort of technology could really take off in terms of person to person idea exchange.
If you set aside the computational usefulness of computers for a moment (not a small aspect I know), then the major purpose of our IT is communication and information exchange.
I think the idea is an old one whose realization should be encouraged and welcomed.
Smalltalk, Objective-C, and Java? You need to broaden your horizons man.
Many comments so far seem to grouse about the limitations of the 3-D interface vice the 2-D interface. Instead think about such an OS with head mounted display and gesture recognition technology. Now you're talking about an immersive computer experience and croquet would seem to be a good step in that direction.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
After going through the screenshots and faq, wow this is revolutionary. It really re-thinks the way we interact, not only with the pc, but with other over the internet. It really utilizes all the broadband and graphics capability our pc and internet offers today, instead of the same old 2d windows and mouse interface which was conceived before any of these are available.
Croquet spaces to me is like the convergence of MMORPGs and the WWW. A 3d OS which by its very nature becomes a browser to the interweb.
Now imagine a Doom engine version of this! Where you walk into one room to talk to your boss and clients at work, to another to interact with profs and peers at some part time class, and another to do some fragging. All in one continuous virtual reality.
I'm applauded by some bad comments here. I don't think many understands the revotionary practicality this may bring as an extension to our world offline. This is the Matrix, without the realism made possible by plugs into your head.
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