Re:what is the status of Open BeOS
on
Java For BeOS
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· Score: 1
Alive, kicking and marching relentlessly. OBOS Status To be frank, the project has progressed further than I expected; they have already achieved a fairly sound file system module, and there have been reports that the printing service works as well. Hopefully, they will make it to release before the OS starts to "age", avoiding the fate of GNUstep, which has faded to obscurity despite achieving compatability with most of the OpenStep standard.
One major benefit of microkernel operating systems has come to light with the OBOS project: ease of reverse engineering. Since each of BeOS's modules communicate using a simple messaging API, it has been possible for the BeOS team to replace existing services in BeOS with new ones for testing purposes.
If you start doing anything too complex with wxWindows, the disparity between GTK, Win32 and MacOS becomes a real hindrance in creating an application with a uniform appearance and polished "feel".
In my private projects, it's a real crisis trying to decide between Qt, which I feel is superior for cross-platform design, and Wx, which is Free and Open on all platforms, not just the open source ones. And yes, my projects really do require that I produce executables for the Mac and Windows crowd.
There is one thing that both excel at, however. They both beat the living hell out of using MFC for me.
Considering that the plaintiff was representing himself, and the defendants were driven to set up a legal defense fund and hire counsel, I find it more than a little comic that the terms of the settlement were abused in this fashion.
A settlement doesn't imply a profession of guilt; it only indicates that the parties involved have decided on an out-of-court solution to a problem. It should have little impact on the proceedings with the other defendants.
Besides, if he tried to use this out of court settlement as leverage against the other defendants, I'm sure they could simply ask for the exact same terms. (snicker)
I'm not advocating blocking a customer from a service simply because of their platform.. I'm advocating a company make sure they clearly state their limits of support to the customer.
This entire conversation started with someone asking why software and hardware for satellite networking is win32/intel specific, not why Your-Local-DSL provider is skittish about your Redhat box.. If you had been paying attention, you would have noticed that I was advocating that customers vote with their feet for those vendors that provide solutions that are based on open standards and provide coherent API specifications to developers.
Simply hanging up on someone is a wonderful way to injure a service-oriented business's standings in public opinion. One offended customer invariably complains to several of his or her peers, causing them to become more and more aggressive in their dealings with your products.
I don't doubt that a majority of Linux users are capable of connecting to dialup, DSL, cable, &etc. But it is the minority who are having a problem and unwilling to RTFM who become nightmares for support personnel.
Yep. Our support department doesn't support NT 4 and earlier, Windows 2000 or XP aside from Home Edition. If they had the choice, they wouldn't support XP, either; it's a support nightmare since users have so much control over appearance, layout, etc.
Having done a stint or two of technical support, a tour in quality assurance, I can point out several costs of supporting less-used OS's and hardware platforms.
First, it's not quite so easy to provide technical support for more than one environment. Like it or not, it isn't just a case of hitting Command-C instead of Control-C; Windows users expect one set of UI conventions, Mac users expect another, and Unix users want it three different ways, and it should also work from the command line. Each OS requires different tactics to work around existing issues. For technical support departments supporting diverse platforms is a nightmare, since it means they have to either spend most of their time in training, or provide multiple specialized departments, which can easily eat up manpower.
Setting rigid support boundaries is a partial solution, but I have yet to have a customer who knew of the support boundaries and had a problem outside those nicely defined lines who didn't try to cajole and/or threaten me into helping him "just this once." It wastes my time, and his.
For developers, this is similarly a nightmare. I know of one decent cross-platform GUI toolkit that works on X11, Win32 and Mac OS, and on the Mac, it doesn't conform strictly to the Apple User Interface guidelines. Compound that with the highly specialized skillset required to write drivers for a particular operating system, with some exceptions, and to go with your bloated support department, you'll have an increased software development budget, and QA budget.
The only recourse we fringe users have is open standards; encourage your vendors to use published protocols, open standards and to document their API's. Take those documents and write a solution for your environment of choice.
Don't hold your breath for Tarkin.. At the moment, it appears that it will be wavelet based and will either be revolutionary or a footnote in history, depending on how things turn out.
I bought an iBook, back in November, for the sole purpose of running Mac OS X. After about four months of enjoying the slow responses, lack of hardware accelleration, and a PPP dialer that would hang the system at odd moments. This was tolerable when I was using the laptop at home for odd jobs, but when I decided to start using it at work, instead of my Windows workstation, Mac OS X's poor support for my iBook became a source of frustration.
I spent a week installing Gentoo, and discovered that Linux has better support for my video card, ran faster, crashed less, and didn't freeze up the system for simple networking tasks.
While it is amusing that Linux/x86 often supports a computer better than Windows, I find it more than hilarious that Linux/ppc supports my iBook better than Apple's own OS.
(For those about to hit flame mode, my iBook is maxed out with 320mb of ram, and I've done all the patches, updates and tweaks. Apple's new 10.2 hardware support does not include the ATI Rage chipset in the 1st gen iBooks.)
Next time some security person looks through your bags and says your extra batteries look 'suspicious', tell him you're carrying extras for customs in third world companies.. It's very common for them to go 'missing' when they check your bags.
They keep fairly well, are cheap when you buy them stateside, and make excellent bribes.
They could have, if they had compromised an ftp site distributing FreeBSD, and modified the current ports package. That wouldn't have affected existing sites unless they updated their ports tree, which some bleeding-edge users are prone to do.
The original commenter implied that I disliked CDE because it came from a 'big bad company'. Incorrect. I dislike it, because under the OS predominant in my company, it is a big ticking time bomb, and a constant maintainability issue if we want Sun's X11.
Almost makes me wish OpenWindows hadn't gone the way of the dodo..;)
Is it? And can you be sure that the organization that intercepts is free of individuals whose sole loyalty is to the state? Agents have been found in high level positions in the CIA in the past, indicating that there could be other compromised individuals there, and in other intelligence agencies. Indeed, the large number of individuals involved make it a statistical likelihood.
Probably your data isn't anything particularly worthy of espionage, but it is careless to assume that automatically everyone who could intercept your communications is friendly. Corporations tend to make this mistake as well, allowing potentially harmful information to travel their intranets in plaintext.
I hate to preach, but don't trust encryption methodologies you can't examine closely, and try to ensure that only the endpoints involved in a communication can determine the data being passed.
And here I thought I bitched about it because, if a witless new Sysadmin uninstalled the package from Solaris, it left the OS in a state inaccessible from the console, and was otherwise hooked into all sorts of things I like to lock down on a server.
What if it was a flaw in the protocol itself, perhaps some easily assailable bit of amateur cryptography that, if fixed on a given host, makes that host incompatible with all the other hosts using MSMQ ?
Or of course, this could just be a scarecrow, and there could be no bugs in Microsoft's MQ.. And President Bush could actually be a transvestite named Susan..
As a grown example of what an early elementary school introduction to computers can do for an individual, I'd like to refute this. From grades 5-8, I attended school in the Gardiner, ME school system, which was rather forwards thinking and had a mandatory Logo program for all students in 5th and 6th grades. In seventh grade, I took pre-algebra, being on a relatively fast track, and in eighth grade, I took Algebra I.
The following summer, my parents decided to move to another school system in Maine, with a similar curriculum, but one signifigant difference: no Logo for the elementary students. When signing up for courses, my family and I had to fight long and hard with the faculty to get them to believe a freshman could be capable of taking Geometry. In the former school system, all the college prepatory track students were expected to take Geometry in their Freshman year. I do not remember anyone struggling with algebra, in Junior High school.
The primary difference was Logo. For the uninitiated, Logo is a simplified Lisp dialect that can be used to teach young children how to program. When we were taught Logo, we were taught in an encouraging fashion, our teachers introducing one primitive at a time, and showing us how the primitives might be used, then given time to play, and a list of examples we might want to try to draw. The programming curriculum was based on Seymour Papert's work at MIT with young children, and was not intended strictly to teach children to program, but to teach us how to break problems down into managable chunks, and set a foundation for analytical thought that served my peers and I well through the rest of our academic careers.
Now, do I believe students need top of the line hardware, the latest software, and a system administrator for each school? No. An Apple IIe and a copy of Terrapin Logo for each student in the class was sufficient to make such a profound change. The trick is to introduce new concepts early in a child's life, when their patterns of thought can be easily changed, instead of later when they have set preconceptions about how the world works.
When my daughter is old enough to hit enter on the keyboard, you can be assured I'll be teaching her Logo.. Or, perhaps Scheme, since Logo had a few warts that I'd like to avoid having to explain..
Eh, Marvel sprung that clone nonsense out of their hat when Image Comics, and Dark Horse, started edging in on their slice of the pie. When Todd McFarlane left Spider-Man to kick off Spawn, and start that huge indie surge, Marvel decided they needed to take one of their flagship characters and make him 'Darker, more gritty.'
It was entirely out of character for Spider-Man, and it was this change, along with the sixteen-million covers for various issues, and other collectible nonsense, that chased me out of my hobby.
I'll thank you to leave that Brooding, Tortured Hero crap with most of Grunge Rock where it belongs.. In the 90's. =)
Legacy, she is a mother.. There's a large number of Apache httpd.conf configuration tools out there, and older 1.3.x sites often have large configurations that they aren't particularly eager to migrate to a newer layout.
In my opinion, for human readability, XML lacks something. There's a large amount of redundant syntax that is employed to simplify a task that is very rarely present in configuration files: the markup of textual information with formatting and metadata. XML, like HTML and SGML, is a Markup Language, and is a fairly verbose one at that, and while it does become readable after prolonged exposure and familiarity with each format, to the eye of a casual user, it's a bit burdensome.
An example of the negative aspects of migrating a configuration file from a proprietary format to XML can be seen in the move from OpenStep to Mac OS X's Cocoa. OpenStep's key:value format might not have been the end all and be all, grand unifying format system, but it was very readable, and worked well for its problem domain. It was easy to read, and had a minimal lexical redundancy. Writing parsers for OpenStep's format was relatively simple. Apple, in its lust for buzzwords, moved things to XML proplists, making these files 'well-formed', in the words of the W3C. The size of the files has doubled in most cases, and the amount of redundant information makes it rather annoying to hand-edit proplists, which is the NextStep's BOFH's preferred way of making many changes.
Finally, if you are working with a legacy product, you may find it annoying to perform the unusual acrobatics required by the implementation of expat's callback-based parser, or fighting with an overblown implementation of DOM, which is better suited to the behemoth we call the modern web browser.
In closing, XML's great for markup, but it isn't the end-all, be-all for data representation.
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Alive, kicking and marching relentlessly. OBOS Status To be frank, the project has progressed further than I expected; they have already achieved a fairly sound file system module, and there have been reports that the printing service works as well. Hopefully, they will make it to release before the OS starts to "age", avoiding the fate of GNUstep, which has faded to obscurity despite achieving compatability with most of the OpenStep standard.
One major benefit of microkernel operating systems has come to light with the OBOS project: ease of reverse engineering. Since each of BeOS's modules communicate using a simple messaging API, it has been possible for the BeOS team to replace existing services in BeOS with new ones for testing purposes.
If you start doing anything too complex with wxWindows, the disparity between GTK, Win32 and MacOS becomes a real hindrance in creating an application with a uniform appearance and polished "feel".
In my private projects, it's a real crisis trying to decide between Qt, which I feel is superior for cross-platform design, and Wx, which is Free and Open on all platforms, not just the open source ones. And yes, my projects really do require that I produce executables for the Mac and Windows crowd.
There is one thing that both excel at, however. They both beat the living hell out of using MFC for me.
On behalf of Buddhist Martians everywhere, sir, I take offense!
Considering that the plaintiff was representing himself, and the defendants were driven to set up a legal defense fund and hire counsel, I find it more than a little comic that the terms of the settlement were abused in this fashion.
A settlement doesn't imply a profession of guilt; it only indicates that the parties involved have decided on an out-of-court solution to a problem. It should have little impact on the proceedings with the other defendants.
Besides, if he tried to use this out of court settlement as leverage against the other defendants, I'm sure they could simply ask for the exact same terms. (snicker)
I'm not advocating blocking a customer from a service simply because of their platform.. I'm advocating a company make sure they clearly state their limits of support to the customer.
This entire conversation started with someone asking why software and hardware for satellite networking is win32/intel specific, not why Your-Local-DSL provider is skittish about your Redhat box.. If you had been paying attention, you would have noticed that I was advocating that customers vote with their feet for those vendors that provide solutions that are based on open standards and provide coherent API specifications to developers.
Simply hanging up on someone is a wonderful way to injure a service-oriented business's standings in public opinion. One offended customer invariably complains to several of his or her peers, causing them to become more and more aggressive in their dealings with your products.
I don't doubt that a majority of Linux users are capable of connecting to dialup, DSL, cable, &etc. But it is the minority who are having a problem and unwilling to RTFM who become nightmares for support personnel.
Yep. Our support department doesn't support NT 4 and earlier, Windows 2000 or XP aside from Home Edition. If they had the choice, they wouldn't support XP, either; it's a support nightmare since users have so much control over appearance, layout, etc.
Having done a stint or two of technical support, a tour in quality assurance, I can point out several costs of supporting less-used OS's and hardware platforms.
First, it's not quite so easy to provide technical support for more than one environment. Like it or not, it isn't just a case of hitting Command-C instead of Control-C; Windows users expect one set of UI conventions, Mac users expect another, and Unix users want it three different ways, and it should also work from the command line. Each OS requires different tactics to work around existing issues. For technical support departments supporting diverse platforms is a nightmare, since it means they have to either spend most of their time in training, or provide multiple specialized departments, which can easily eat up manpower.
Setting rigid support boundaries is a partial solution, but I have yet to have a customer who knew of the support boundaries and had a problem outside those nicely defined lines who didn't try to cajole and/or threaten me into helping him "just this once." It wastes my time, and his.
For developers, this is similarly a nightmare. I know of one decent cross-platform GUI toolkit that works on X11, Win32 and Mac OS, and on the Mac, it doesn't conform strictly to the Apple User Interface guidelines. Compound that with the highly specialized skillset required to write drivers for a particular operating system, with some exceptions, and to go with your bloated support department, you'll have an increased software development budget, and QA budget.
The only recourse we fringe users have is open standards; encourage your vendors to use published protocols, open standards and to document their API's. Take those documents and write a solution for your environment of choice.
Don't hold your breath for Tarkin.. At the moment, it appears that it will be wavelet based and will either be revolutionary or a footnote in history, depending on how things turn out.
There's a lot that can be done with a stick and a hook.. Looters aren't particlarly interested in seeing things undisturbed.
That was, in fact, what I am referring to.. For those who may be confused, my card is treated by OS X as a fat dumb and happy framebuffer.
I bought an iBook, back in November, for the sole purpose of running Mac OS X. After about four months of enjoying the slow responses, lack of hardware accelleration, and a PPP dialer that would hang the system at odd moments. This was tolerable when I was using the laptop at home for odd jobs, but when I decided to start using it at work, instead of my Windows workstation, Mac OS X's poor support for my iBook became a source of frustration.
I spent a week installing Gentoo, and discovered that Linux has better support for my video card, ran faster, crashed less, and didn't freeze up the system for simple networking tasks.
While it is amusing that Linux/x86 often supports a computer better than Windows, I find it more than hilarious that Linux/ppc supports my iBook better than Apple's own OS.
(For those about to hit flame mode, my iBook is maxed out with 320mb of ram, and I've done all the patches, updates and tweaks. Apple's new 10.2 hardware support does not include the ATI Rage chipset in the 1st gen iBooks.)
Next time some security person looks through your bags and says your extra batteries look 'suspicious', tell him you're carrying extras for customs in third world companies.. It's very common for them to go 'missing' when they check your bags.
They keep fairly well, are cheap when you buy them stateside, and make excellent bribes.
They could have, if they had compromised an ftp site distributing FreeBSD, and modified the current ports package. That wouldn't have affected existing sites unless they updated their ports tree, which some bleeding-edge users are prone to do.
At our ISP, we tend to use GetRight and its throttling features for big downloads, so we don't take up a huge portion of our customers' bandwidth.
Call me when they package a troposcatter antenna in a PCMCIA card..
I specify FreeBSD, because of the current descendants of BSD-Lite, it has the nicest ftp client at the moment.
I really wish they'd steal a more up to date version from FreeBSD, instead of using one from before 2.2..
The original commenter implied that I disliked CDE because it came from a 'big bad company'. Incorrect. I dislike it, because under the OS predominant in my company, it is a big ticking time bomb, and a constant maintainability issue if we want Sun's X11.
;)
Almost makes me wish OpenWindows hadn't gone the way of the dodo..
Is it? And can you be sure that the organization that intercepts is free of individuals whose sole loyalty is to the state? Agents have been found in high level positions in the CIA in the past, indicating that there could be other compromised individuals there, and in other intelligence agencies. Indeed, the large number of individuals involved make it a statistical likelihood.
Probably your data isn't anything particularly worthy of espionage, but it is careless to assume that automatically everyone who could intercept your communications is friendly. Corporations tend to make this mistake as well, allowing potentially harmful information to travel their intranets in plaintext.
I hate to preach, but don't trust encryption methodologies you can't examine closely, and try to ensure that only the endpoints involved in a communication can determine the data being passed.
And here I thought I bitched about it because, if a witless new Sysadmin uninstalled the package from Solaris, it left the OS in a state inaccessible from the console, and was otherwise hooked into all sorts of things I like to lock down on a server.
Thanks for setting me straight.
What if it was a flaw in the protocol itself, perhaps some easily assailable bit of amateur cryptography that, if fixed on a given host, makes that host incompatible with all the other hosts using MSMQ ?
Or of course, this could just be a scarecrow, and there could be no bugs in Microsoft's MQ.. And President Bush could actually be a transvestite named Susan..
As a grown example of what an early elementary school introduction to computers can do for an individual, I'd like to refute this. From grades 5-8, I attended school in the Gardiner, ME school system, which was rather forwards thinking and had a mandatory Logo program for all students in 5th and 6th grades. In seventh grade, I took pre-algebra, being on a relatively fast track, and in eighth grade, I took Algebra I.
The following summer, my parents decided to move to another school system in Maine, with a similar curriculum, but one signifigant difference: no Logo for the elementary students. When signing up for courses, my family and I had to fight long and hard with the faculty to get them to believe a freshman could be capable of taking Geometry. In the former school system, all the college prepatory track students were expected to take Geometry in their Freshman year. I do not remember anyone struggling with algebra, in Junior High school.
The primary difference was Logo. For the uninitiated, Logo is a simplified Lisp dialect that can be used to teach young children how to program. When we were taught Logo, we were taught in an encouraging fashion, our teachers introducing one primitive at a time, and showing us how the primitives might be used, then given time to play, and a list of examples we might want to try to draw. The programming curriculum was based on Seymour Papert's work at MIT with young children, and was not intended strictly to teach children to program, but to teach us how to break problems down into managable chunks, and set a foundation for analytical thought that served my peers and I well through the rest of our academic careers.
Now, do I believe students need top of the line hardware, the latest software, and a system administrator for each school? No. An Apple IIe and a copy of Terrapin Logo for each student in the class was sufficient to make such a profound change. The trick is to introduce new concepts early in a child's life, when their patterns of thought can be easily changed, instead of later when they have set preconceptions about how the world works.
When my daughter is old enough to hit enter on the keyboard, you can be assured I'll be teaching her Logo.. Or, perhaps Scheme, since Logo had a few warts that I'd like to avoid having to explain..
Eh, Marvel sprung that clone nonsense out of their hat when Image Comics, and Dark Horse, started edging in on their slice of the pie. When Todd McFarlane left Spider-Man to kick off Spawn, and start that huge indie surge, Marvel decided they needed to take one of their flagship characters and make him 'Darker, more gritty.'
It was entirely out of character for Spider-Man, and it was this change, along with the sixteen-million covers for various issues, and other collectible nonsense, that chased me out of my hobby.
I'll thank you to leave that Brooding, Tortured Hero crap with most of Grunge Rock where it belongs.. In the 90's. =)
Legacy, she is a mother.. There's a large number of Apache httpd.conf configuration tools out there, and older 1.3.x sites often have large configurations that they aren't particularly eager to migrate to a newer layout.
In my opinion, for human readability, XML lacks something. There's a large amount of redundant syntax that is employed to simplify a task that is very rarely present in configuration files: the markup of textual information with formatting and metadata. XML, like HTML and SGML, is a Markup Language, and is a fairly verbose one at that, and while it does become readable after prolonged exposure and familiarity with each format, to the eye of a casual user, it's a bit burdensome.
An example of the negative aspects of migrating a configuration file from a proprietary format to XML can be seen in the move from OpenStep to Mac OS X's Cocoa. OpenStep's key:value format might not have been the end all and be all, grand unifying format system, but it was very readable, and worked well for its problem domain. It was easy to read, and had a minimal lexical redundancy. Writing parsers for OpenStep's format was relatively simple. Apple, in its lust for buzzwords, moved things to XML proplists, making these files 'well-formed', in the words of the W3C. The size of the files has doubled in most cases, and the amount of redundant information makes it rather annoying to hand-edit proplists, which is the NextStep's BOFH's preferred way of making many changes.
Finally, if you are working with a legacy product, you may find it annoying to perform the unusual acrobatics required by the implementation of expat's callback-based parser, or fighting with an overblown implementation of DOM, which is better suited to the behemoth we call the modern web browser.
In closing, XML's great for markup, but it isn't the end-all, be-all for data representation.