I saw something about this on the discovery channel a few years back. Hana Barbera (sp?) of Flinstones fame (I think..) was using a pen, whose ink had a little bit of his DNA in it, to sign animation sells before they were sold (they used the same ink to print official stickers and stamps too). He also had a small device that he could run over his signature to find out if the ink had his DNA in it or not.
FOX looks promising. It's not quite at v1.0 but it's getting there. It runs on many UNIX platforms as well as windows. Unfortunatly it doesn't run on Macs but it is designed to be very portable, so with a little work...
Ease of Development. Developing Graphical User Interfaces is a fairly complicated process. FOX reduces the burden on the developer significantly:
Orthogonality. A few powerfull concepts that can be recombined in many intuitive ways is preferable to a hodge-podge of ad-hoc solutions. In a well designed orthogonal toolkit, the developer will be able to transfer knowledge gained from one scenario to another.
Consistency. Consistent naming of member functions, consistent ordering of arguments and default parameters, as well as consistent behaviour of each Widget makes the system much more easy to learn.
Conciseness. Every line of code not written is a correct one. So minimizing the number of lines of code to accomplish the job is a Good Thing. FOX helps with this by being able to create and initialize most Widgets with a single line of code. The C++ capability for default parameters to arguments is heavily used, and a lot of glue code to cement Widgets to each other is eliminated completely by the ability of FOX Widgets to send messages to each other.
. . .
Platform Independence. Applications using FOX are not dependent directly on X-Windows. As all platform-dependencies are completely hidden from view by the FOX System (applications don't even include X-Windows header files!!), such applications will be easily ported to other platforms, simply by recompiling.
There is a program called iMesh (www.imesh.com) that does basically the same thing except that you use their web interface to do the search and their software comes up when you want to download something. They didn't appear to have a linux version last time I checked.
My college banned napster a few months ago and now they have a bigger problem because more then 3300 students are using this iMesh thing to transfer files. The network admins here didn't say that they were going to ban it as well but did urge students to minimize its use. I took that to mean that they either couldn't or didn't know how to ban it.
This could make a good case for allowing people to use napster because it uses a central cluster of servers and the bandwidth to those servers can be controlled.
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I saw something about this on the discovery channel a few years back. Hana Barbera (sp?) of Flinstones fame (I think..) was using a pen, whose ink had a little bit of his DNA in it, to sign animation sells before they were sold (they used the same ink to print official stickers and stamps too). He also had a small device that he could run over his signature to find out if the ink had his DNA in it or not.
Here is the URL: http://www.cfdrc.com/FOX/fox.html
Exerpt from the Forward:
My college banned napster a few months ago and now they have a bigger problem because more then 3300 students are using this iMesh thing to transfer files. The network admins here didn't say that they were going to ban it as well but did urge students to minimize its use. I took that to mean that they either couldn't or didn't know how to ban it.
This could make a good case for allowing people to use napster because it uses a central cluster of servers and the bandwidth to those servers can be controlled.