How much of the graphical user interface evolution on UNIX has been put back because the varying WMs and toolkits?
It's better now that we're down to X.org and GTK or Qt, but years were wasted because you couldn't write an app that took advantage of, say, Display Postscript or multi-head or decent colour-correction or a given GUI toolkit without restricting your market.
For a very long time---and ending not so long ago---state of the art, cross-platform GUI toolkits on UNIX started and ended with Motif. That's horrible.
That doesn't really speak to the question of whether the window manager should be built-in...
I mean, I don't want to sound like the situation is all roses here. Yes, as you say, there's been a lack of focus that has detracted from the overall experience. But, you gotta look at the bright side, too. Suppose Motif and/or mwm had been integrated tightly into the X server... Where would we be now? We'd still be stuck with it, probably... Would we really be happier knowing that a clear direction had been chosen, if that clear direction sucked?
I think the lack of focus is an unavoidable consequence of a system that's developed without clear-cut, authoritative leadership. That's a down-side of using a system that's not been designed by a single group like Microsoft or Apple. But the up-shot is that a system like that is open to experimental ideas. The result isn't a true meritocracy of software (that is, no matter how good a piece of software you might write for a particular task, there are still practical problems in terms of getting people to invest themselves in using it) but there are always options...
Going back to the question of tighter integration of the wm with the X server - I remain unconvinced. I could see how X could benefit from better compositing support and other features to make wm's behave better, but I don't see what the benefit would be of having the wm built right in to the X server. It seems like running it on the local machine is just as good...
That's not what he's talking about. OS X is a BSD-based system and as such, can run almost any Unix program, including X11. Apple has been including XQuartz (X + a bunch of libraries + hooks so it works nicely with the rest of OS X) since Leopard. http://xquartz.macosforge.org/
Nicely? I never thought it worked that nicely... Though maybe they've improved things since 10.4 "Cheetara"...
Does anybody know if it's possible to compile a version of Chromium for X11 Mac?
What, seriously?
Maybe things have changed over the last few years but I couldn't stand the poor integration of the X server into Mac OS X... it's one of the reasons I moved away from the Mac platform and back to Linux... Bad clipboard support, bad window list integration, troublesome keyboard shortcuts... It's like Apple went out of their way to make X11 apps uncomfortable.
Ninokuni will be on a 4gigabit (512mb) cart and will fill it to the brim.
Still, this is Nintendo we're talking about. Think about the specs on the Wii, for instance, and then tell me about how Nintendo's next handheld is going to be a huge upgrade in terms of storage and capabilities over the DS.:)
Also, Ninokuni is decidedly not typical of a DS game - even new ones...
A 3G chip adds manufacturing cost, won't play well in all countries (look at how the kindle has had functionality removed outside the US), can be incredibly slow depending on the network and location, will be incredibly expensive for the 500mb+ downloads that will probably make up DS2 games...
Go back and read tepples' post about the typical size of current Nintendo games...
Current DS games are only around 32MB. Wii Ware games tend to be around 50MB. Do you really think the games in Nintendo's next handheld are going to be over ten times that size?
I'll admit my joke may not have been very funny at all - but, man, way to kill the fun. You're like Sam the Eagle or something, bein' all serious...
A lesser man would have simply said "whoosh". I, however, am willing to accept the notion that there's more at play here than your apparent lack of humor.:)
What we *really* need is a droid that understands the binary language of moisture vaporators.
Sir, my first job was making tired old Star Wars references, very similar to your vaporators in most respects. And, please, sir, the Jawas have some lovely merchandise here - may I suggest you allow them to fit you for a stillsuit?
Waibel is an leader in speech-to-speech translation and multimodal speech interfaces.
Is Waibel also "an leader" in grammar detection?
Yes. Whenever you use their translator it will detect your grammar for you.
In early versions they had a voice message that would play: "Waibel translator has detected grammar in your sentence!" after every time you said something. After a while they decided to remove it - I'm not sure why.
See, this kind of Anglo-centric thinking gets us nowhere. We can't get everyone in the world to agree to adopt English as their preferred natural language... It'd never work, there would be too much resistance. People don't want to give up their native tongues to speak English.
No. Clearly the way to go is to get everyone to speak Esperanto.
The N900 resolution is a pretty amazing 800x480 (compare with the iPhone's 480x320). So most apps do fit without any problem, but indeed it takes some more effort to make them finger usable.
My EEE 901 has a resolution of 1024x600, and yet there are still dialog screens in various programs (GNOME configuration dialogs are among the offenders) that don't fit on-screen and refuse to take up less than 600 pixels of vertical space...
The N900 has the same display resolution as a EEE701 - and, pixel resolution aside, there's the fact that screen fonts need to be reasonably large to be legible and, as you said, there's the problem of making things finger-usable (making the controls large enough and eliminating dependence on things like mouse hover or multiple mouse buttons - for the most part, anyway...)
WebOS is definitly a step up in terms of freedom and ease of development compared to anything out there today. It's biggest problem is a lack of apps. This is where maemo really shines, any linux app can be ported with minimal effort, in most cases it's just a few UI changes.
Don't underestimate the difficulty of "a few UI changes"... You're talking about taking a UI which in all likelihood doesn't even fit on the phone's screen, and redesigning it so it'll not only fit, but work nicely...
- if you are a web developer (html, css, javascript), you already know how to write code for this phone.
What if you're a real developer who knows a little bit of web development and despises the entire process?
(Actually, though, I'm sure the process is a lot less painful without the client/server side split and the involvement of server-side code in PHP or whatever emitting HTML and Javascript code...)
If I press end on a ringing call it will SMS that person with a "I'm really busy right now, I'll call you back as soon as I can"
Great, you just cost me $0.20, just to send me information I already could have figured out from the fact that you pressed "end" while I was trying to call you...
(I feel that with or without a texting plan, the carrier charges for SMS are complete bullshit...)
And the apps are all text (javascript to be precise).
That is actually the #1 reason I won't buy a Pre. I think it's a horrible design decision. The device has limited processing power, storage, and battery. I don't want it to waste time or power translating Javascript code.
Yes, it really sucks to have a mature system that supports remote display (want to run CPU-intensive apps elsewhere and display on your portable? Want to run apps on the portable and display them on a bigger screen?), is compatible with most UNIX GUI software written since the mid '80s, supports compositing, OpenGL, accelerated text rendering, and cleanly separates policy and mechanism so that window and compositing management can be easily swapped out and replaced.
You know, I am generally happiest when my machine is running an X server as the native environment - things just felt too awkward trying to run X apps on Mac OS X for instance - and I don't think X is as bad as people make it out to be...
But, on the other hand, I have to say, remote display really is not a priority for me on my phone at all.:) It might be fun to play with from time to time but in general it's not something I think I need.
Compatibility would probably be the main reason I'd appreciate Maemo's X server. One of the things that always drives me crazy with PalmOS is that it was always so much damn work to port things to it. Some of this work is unavoidable - when you're working with a small touchscreen display as your main interface, some of the UI assumptions that would go with a 1600x1200 display with a three-button mouse don't apply... To have a reasonable UI it has to be tailored to fit the small display and the precision limitations that go with a touchscreen (especially a resistive touchscreen operated without a stylus...)
and I mainly use Windows these days...but this seems like a none issue. If someone can get their executable on your system, I'm sure that they can come up with a better way of running it than having you ldd it.
The real trick is getting someone else to run it - preferably as root...
Slashdot Mirror
you guys are hilarious.
We certainly think so. XD
How much of the graphical user interface evolution on UNIX has been put back because the varying WMs and toolkits?
It's better now that we're down to X.org and GTK or Qt, but years were wasted because you couldn't write an app that took advantage of, say, Display Postscript or multi-head or decent colour-correction or a given GUI toolkit without restricting your market.
For a very long time---and ending not so long ago---state of the art, cross-platform GUI toolkits on UNIX started and ended with Motif. That's horrible.
That doesn't really speak to the question of whether the window manager should be built-in...
I mean, I don't want to sound like the situation is all roses here. Yes, as you say, there's been a lack of focus that has detracted from the overall experience. But, you gotta look at the bright side, too. Suppose Motif and/or mwm had been integrated tightly into the X server... Where would we be now? We'd still be stuck with it, probably... Would we really be happier knowing that a clear direction had been chosen, if that clear direction sucked?
I think the lack of focus is an unavoidable consequence of a system that's developed without clear-cut, authoritative leadership. That's a down-side of using a system that's not been designed by a single group like Microsoft or Apple. But the up-shot is that a system like that is open to experimental ideas. The result isn't a true meritocracy of software (that is, no matter how good a piece of software you might write for a particular task, there are still practical problems in terms of getting people to invest themselves in using it) but there are always options...
Going back to the question of tighter integration of the wm with the X server - I remain unconvinced. I could see how X could benefit from better compositing support and other features to make wm's behave better, but I don't see what the benefit would be of having the wm built right in to the X server. It seems like running it on the local machine is just as good...
No. It's MacOS 10. OS X is just stupid intentionally confusing terminology.
X is the Roman numeral for 10. It's "Mac OS X", which I pronounce as "Mac oh-ess ten".
I pronounce it "Mac O'Sucks"
That's not what he's talking about. OS X is a BSD-based system and as such, can run almost any Unix program, including X11. Apple has been including XQuartz (X + a bunch of libraries + hooks so it works nicely with the rest of OS X) since Leopard.
http://xquartz.macosforge.org/
Nicely? I never thought it worked that nicely... Though maybe they've improved things since 10.4 "Cheetara"...
Does anybody know if it's possible to compile a version of Chromium for X11 Mac?
What, seriously?
Maybe things have changed over the last few years but I couldn't stand the poor integration of the X server into Mac OS X... it's one of the reasons I moved away from the Mac platform and back to Linux... Bad clipboard support, bad window list integration, troublesome keyboard shortcuts... It's like Apple went out of their way to make X11 apps uncomfortable.
Forget about the gp, why is THIS modded funny?
Because if you say "why is this modded funny" and "this" isn't modded funny, then people get confused...
The window manager should have been part of X from the get-go. So should a lot of things, for that matter.
Why is that?
It seems to me that the ability to come up with new and better window managers has generally been an asset.
Yes?
Ninokuni will be on a 4gigabit (512mb) cart and will fill it to the brim.
Still, this is Nintendo we're talking about. Think about the specs on the Wii, for instance, and then tell me about how Nintendo's next handheld is going to be a huge upgrade in terms of storage and capabilities over the DS. :)
Also, Ninokuni is decidedly not typical of a DS game - even new ones...
A 3G chip adds manufacturing cost, won't play well in all countries (look at how the kindle has had functionality removed outside the US), can be incredibly slow depending on the network and location, will be incredibly expensive for the 500mb+ downloads that will probably make up DS2 games...
Go back and read tepples' post about the typical size of current Nintendo games...
Current DS games are only around 32MB. Wii Ware games tend to be around 50MB. Do you really think the games in Nintendo's next handheld are going to be over ten times that size?
You don't say "Meh, automobiles aren't very innovative. They're really just a horse drawn carriage without the horse."
Well, that's because it's a pain in the ass to drag a horse-drawn carriage around places when you don't have a horse...
It's the DSi XL, clearly stated many times...
I'll admit my joke may not have been very funny at all - but, man, way to kill the fun. You're like Sam the Eagle or something, bein' all serious...
A lesser man would have simply said "whoosh". I, however, am willing to accept the notion that there's more at play here than your apparent lack of humor. :)
So is this "DS 39" or "DSi 40" or "DS9L" or "D6L" or what?
Esperanto? No, Latin is the One True Lingua Franca!
I thought Lingua Franca was the true Lingua Franca...
Or was I thinking of XML?
What we *really* need is a droid that understands the binary language of moisture vaporators.
Sir, my first job was making tired old Star Wars references, very similar to your vaporators in most respects. And, please, sir, the Jawas have some lovely merchandise here - may I suggest you allow them to fit you for a stillsuit?
Waibel is an leader in speech-to-speech translation and multimodal speech interfaces.
Is Waibel also "an leader" in grammar detection?
Yes. Whenever you use their translator it will detect your grammar for you.
In early versions they had a voice message that would play: "Waibel translator has detected grammar in your sentence!" after every time you said something. After a while they decided to remove it - I'm not sure why.
When everyone can just speak English?
See, this kind of Anglo-centric thinking gets us nowhere. We can't get everyone in the world to agree to adopt English as their preferred natural language... It'd never work, there would be too much resistance. People don't want to give up their native tongues to speak English.
No. Clearly the way to go is to get everyone to speak Esperanto.
Built in on Windows, MacOS.
Built in on every web browser.
Built in on virtually all smartphones.
Available as Spidermonkey on Unix systems.
It's pretty much everywhere already. It'll replace most of the others; perl, python, ruby as the libraries and VMs available for it improve.
That's a lovely poem. Really. The Vogons would absolutely hate it.
Being a good scripting language is all well and good. That doesn't make said scripting language a good choice for an embedded platform.
The N900 resolution is a pretty amazing 800x480 (compare with the iPhone's 480x320). So most apps do fit without any problem, but indeed it takes some more effort to make them finger usable.
My EEE 901 has a resolution of 1024x600, and yet there are still dialog screens in various programs (GNOME configuration dialogs are among the offenders) that don't fit on-screen and refuse to take up less than 600 pixels of vertical space...
The N900 has the same display resolution as a EEE701 - and, pixel resolution aside, there's the fact that screen fonts need to be reasonably large to be legible and, as you said, there's the problem of making things finger-usable (making the controls large enough and eliminating dependence on things like mouse hover or multiple mouse buttons - for the most part, anyway...)
Still, sure would like me one o' them N900's... :)
WebOS is definitly a step up in terms of freedom and ease of development compared to anything out there today. It's biggest problem is a lack of apps. This is where maemo really shines, any linux app can be ported with minimal effort, in most cases it's just a few UI changes.
Don't underestimate the difficulty of "a few UI changes"... You're talking about taking a UI which in all likelihood doesn't even fit on the phone's screen, and redesigning it so it'll not only fit, but work nicely...
- if you are a web developer (html, css, javascript), you already know how to write code for this phone.
What if you're a real developer who knows a little bit of web development and despises the entire process?
(Actually, though, I'm sure the process is a lot less painful without the client/server side split and the involvement of server-side code in PHP or whatever emitting HTML and Javascript code...)
If I press end on a ringing call it will SMS that person with a "I'm really busy right now, I'll call you back as soon as I can"
Great, you just cost me $0.20, just to send me information I already could have figured out from the fact that you pressed "end" while I was trying to call you...
(I feel that with or without a texting plan, the carrier charges for SMS are complete bullshit...)
And the apps are all text (javascript to be precise).
That is actually the #1 reason I won't buy a Pre. I think it's a horrible design decision. The device has limited processing power, storage, and battery. I don't want it to waste time or power translating Javascript code.
Yes, it really sucks to have a mature system that supports remote display (want to run CPU-intensive apps elsewhere and display on your portable? Want to run apps on the portable and display them on a bigger screen?), is compatible with most UNIX GUI software written since the mid '80s, supports compositing, OpenGL, accelerated text rendering, and cleanly separates policy and mechanism so that window and compositing management can be easily swapped out and replaced.
You know, I am generally happiest when my machine is running an X server as the native environment - things just felt too awkward trying to run X apps on Mac OS X for instance - and I don't think X is as bad as people make it out to be...
But, on the other hand, I have to say, remote display really is not a priority for me on my phone at all. :) It might be fun to play with from time to time but in general it's not something I think I need.
Compatibility would probably be the main reason I'd appreciate Maemo's X server. One of the things that always drives me crazy with PalmOS is that it was always so much damn work to port things to it. Some of this work is unavoidable - when you're working with a small touchscreen display as your main interface, some of the UI assumptions that would go with a 1600x1200 display with a three-button mouse don't apply... To have a reasonable UI it has to be tailored to fit the small display and the precision limitations that go with a touchscreen (especially a resistive touchscreen operated without a stylus...)
Don't take my stupid jokes too seriously. They're only jokes, after all, and also very, very stupid. XD
and I mainly use Windows these days...but this seems like a none issue. If someone can get their executable on your system, I'm sure that they can come up with a better way of running it than having you ldd it.
The real trick is getting someone else to run it - preferably as root...