It's the real reason that D hasn't taken off yet. Well, that and the fact that it has 90+ (!) keywords. The guys at digital mars are doing what Sun tried to do with java; it's ours, ours, and ours alone ! Yes, there is a spec, and yes you can build compilers, but wait - not so fast. You have to let us test your stuff, or you can't call it D. And maybe pay us a little. Or at least remember us in any code that you write. . Whenever I go to digital mars' website, I'm reminded of my Corba days and that institution - I forget what it's called - that was in charge of it. People should be well reminded that the days of commercial languages are over. Even Microsoft won't try it anymore. That should say something.
The problem is that bringing an encrypted or sealed letter (or business papers) across the border, will probably not raise a flag, even when inspected. Bringing an encrypted laptop across, however, may prompt them to force you to reveal the key. If all that was ever sealed had to be opened at the border, there would be no international business.
This is the problem with people running international companies that rely on a single letter to brand all their products - you can only have 26 of them. Let's see where we are with that; 'g' is for Google, 'j' is for Sun, 'i' is for Steve.. Hey ! We can make a nursery rhyme out of this !
Well, if I may be the devil's advocate here, if you have garlic breath in the morning, then obviously, the garlic made it into your bloodstream somehow. I don't know that rubbing things on your feet is a past-pass into your bloodstream (intuitively, I'd say it isn't), but having garlic in your bloodstream definitely is good for a headache (as it dilutes the blood).
It may be that you're the only one running a service on a domain, which you own. They just have to do an reverse name lookup on the IP address to get to yours.
I think it's safe to say that what Nokia wants is different from, and opposed to what RMS wants, even if both parties haven't come down to defining it to its legal-speak extremes. Because as long as there is a layer of software underneath your OS/userland that you're not allowed to modify to exercise your freedom to tinker and pass on, RMS will be opposed to it. He may not (yet) have worded it so in whatever the current version of the GPL is, but I do think that this is in his line of thinking.
I realize I am putting words into RMS's mouth here, and if I'm wrong, I apologize profusely, because I do respect his opinion. But all I can see here is something yet unforbidden.
I've said it before; trade secrets will be the most important aspect of this (whether or not they should be is of minor importance); especially for foreign business travelers, since American intelligence agencies have shown themselves time and again incapable to contain themselves when it comes to passing around business secrets to local competitors.
Look man, I'll just wave into the camera next time I walk past it Ok ? I mean, I know where they landed the thing, it's just that I always walk through the park.
Re:Finally, developers' ignorance and childish
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The State of X.Org
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· Score: 1
No, when I say inefficient, I don't mean that it's costing a lot of time on the wire (well, it/does/, as well), but that I, as a raw X-clientlib-programmer, must type an enormous amount of (needlessly complicated) functioncalls. Of course then you say; 'Ah ! But you must never program in raw X-clientlib'. No, of course not, and service-programmers must never call select().
Let me repeat my point of view: it's nice that gtk+ and QT exist, but their existence is a perversion wrought by history. It's nice that we can bend fonts over backwards using some client library, but the very fact that we must do it on the client side, is wrong, wrong, wrong. Sorry.
Re:Finally, developers' ignorance and childish
on
The State of X.Org
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· Score: 1
Look, everything we're talking about is (some form of) RPC. Basically, now, on the wire, people are calling functions like putpixel(x,y,color) a million times over (and I know, you can draw lines, fill planes and cache images), while they could be calling drawscrollbar(x,y,width,height,index,max) or something like that. You say the second approach is not flexible enough, I say the first is too inefficient.
And I agree that nowadays, with gtk+ and qt and whatnot, things are looking pretty nice. But just remember, if you will, how much time it took us to get here ! And all the while, competing APIs (mac, windows), just had these calls out of the box. And they/did/ profit *a lot* from the uniformity of their look and feel. And you could still push a single pixel over in their APIs.
So, I'm not saying that you should be able to *upload* an.so to have a certain widget for your particular app. No, you should get together with a few people, and instead of trying to agree on APIs and coding standards in C, try to agree what widgets go in the toolkit. Windows did it, Mac did it, java did it, but X just said: 'hey, you have lines, pixels, planes and images, what more can you possibly want ?'.
With regards to fonts you're probably right; but the same argument applies here as well - those APIs that turn fonts into shadowed, hollowed out, red-morphed-into-blue shapes that bend around a circle, they had to be written as well. They could have extended the server-side, but chose to do it on the client side instead. Probably because they were rebuffed by the people behind XFree86 too. But that only makes my argument for me - it was a choice made from poverty of options, turned into richness, but, originally, the wrong choice nonetheless. At least in my opinion.
Re:Finally, developers' ignorance and childish
on
The State of X.Org
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· Score: 1
People would be free to create their own widgets; the API would certainly have to be backwards-compatible. But the back-end, which is now largely a forgotten playground, would become alive with the creation of new widgets just as well. Or so I imagine it at least.
With regards to your fonts-in-the-backend disaster; that cannot be blamed purely on its placing; fonts were then, are now, and will always be, an intellectual-property-shrouded very difficult hurdle to overcome. And that was one of the main reasons it failed; at the time, the (open source) availability of good fonts and presentation (anti-aliasing) technology were simply way behind the times and/any/ new approach to fonts would have failed. I still think having them in the backend would still be a good idea. As long as the package comes with a good standard app to select and expand them. Currently, xfontsel won't do, really. And them I'm being generous.
Re:Finally, developers' ignorance and childish
on
The State of X.Org
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· Score: 1
Thank you for your obviously so much better informed reply. 1) Must I remind you of the joke of two Keynesian economists walking on the street ? *) 2) Please refer to my post #23747305 further up - the widgets would be PLUGGABLE, so they could go with the times; distributions would take care of them looking dandy. dlopen came about in 1989, I think. *) 'There's a hundred dollar bill on the street.' 'Can't be; it would have been picked up already.'.
Re:Finally, developers' ignorance and childish
on
The State of X.Org
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· Score: 1
You wouldn't have to upload server-side binary blobs to draw widgets; they would already be there. They would have been loaded as '.so's when the X server booted up. Just specify that 'an X server isn't complete without the implementation of a scrollbar (and a menubar, and a dressed up window, and a tab-bar etc) on the server-side'. Then it's up to the distribution makers (redhat, suse, etc.) to pick and choose. All of a sudden a) calls to the X server are more relevant (that is, closer to what the user wants), b) can have specific events that are much easier to parse for client-libraries, and c) are much, much cheaper for the network. More snappy, more intuitive, and more bug-free. And for good measure, the X server distribution itself includes reference implementations of them as well (and doesn't expect them to be used).
Re:Finally, developers' ignorance and childish
on
The State of X.Org
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· Score: 2, Informative
Exactly, what you want is a pluggable gui-object model in the server. I want to be able to say, through the X-protocol: scrollbar there, these dimensions and gimme these events on it. Apart from the time it would save on the wire (gobs and gobs of it), there would be no more bad-headed implementations of a scrollbar. Also, cut-n-paste and drag-n-drop must be taken out of icccm and be given a decent implementation - what a load of crap that is !
It's not about the industries; you can make money in any way; it's about trust ! And that trust is gone as long as the US is seen as an unpredictable aggressor and an unfair competitor. And as long as it's losing billions a day on a war with no end in sight and no profit at the horizon. Get out of Iraq, get those spending habits under control, make your foreign policy predictable and you'll see the investors come running back.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the real reason that D hasn't taken off yet. Well, that and the fact that it has 90+ (!) keywords. The guys at digital mars are doing what Sun tried to do with java; it's ours, ours, and ours alone ! Yes, there is a spec, and yes you can build compilers, but wait - not so fast. You have to let us test your stuff, or you can't call it D. And maybe pay us a little. Or at least remember us in any code that you write.
.
Whenever I go to digital mars' website, I'm reminded of my Corba days and that institution - I forget what it's called - that was in charge of it. People should be well reminded that the days of commercial languages are over. Even Microsoft won't try it anymore. That should say something.
Slashdot. Where you can post a joke and receive a proselytization.
The problem is that bringing an encrypted or sealed letter (or business papers) across the border, will probably not raise a flag, even when inspected. Bringing an encrypted laptop across, however, may prompt them to force you to reveal the key. If all that was ever sealed had to be opened at the border, there would be no international business.
No man - he who dies with the most toys has just lost. The secret is to never ever die !
This is the problem with people running international companies that rely on a single letter to brand all their products - you can only have 26 of them. Let's see where we are with that; 'g' is for Google, 'j' is for Sun, 'i' is for Steve.. Hey ! We can make a nursery rhyme out of this !
'other alternative' is a pleonasm.
'loosing streak'; did you do that on purpose ?
Well, if I may be the devil's advocate here, if you have garlic breath in the morning, then obviously, the garlic made it into your bloodstream somehow. I don't know that rubbing things on your feet is a past-pass into your bloodstream (intuitively, I'd say it isn't), but having garlic in your bloodstream definitely is good for a headache (as it dilutes the blood).
It may be that you're the only one running a service on a domain, which you own. They just have to do an reverse name lookup on the IP address to get to yours.
But aren't they ?
Let the guy buy an island for himself already and retire ! Isn't he rich enough yet ?
I think it's safe to say that what Nokia wants is different from, and opposed to what RMS wants, even if both parties haven't come down to defining it to its legal-speak extremes. Because as long as there is a layer of software underneath your OS/userland that you're not allowed to modify to exercise your freedom to tinker and pass on, RMS will be opposed to it. He may not (yet) have worded it so in whatever the current version of the GPL is, but I do think that this is in his line of thinking.
I realize I am putting words into RMS's mouth here, and if I'm wrong, I apologize profusely, because I do respect his opinion. But all I can see here is something yet unforbidden.
I've said it before; trade secrets will be the most important aspect of this (whether or not they should be is of minor importance); especially for foreign business travelers, since American intelligence agencies have shown themselves time and again incapable to contain themselves when it comes to passing around business secrets to local competitors.
Bah, you living things and their TLAs. CMS has stood for Creator of the Milky way and Stuff since the dawn of time.
God.
Look man, I'll just wave into the camera next time I walk past it Ok ? I mean, I know where they landed the thing, it's just that I always walk through the park.
No, when I say inefficient, I don't mean that it's costing a lot of time on the wire (well, it /does/, as well), but that I, as a raw X-clientlib-programmer, must type an enormous amount of (needlessly complicated) functioncalls. Of course then you say; 'Ah ! But you must never program in raw X-clientlib'. No, of course not, and service-programmers must never call select().
Let me repeat my point of view: it's nice that gtk+ and QT exist, but their existence is a perversion wrought by history. It's nice that we can bend fonts over backwards using some client library, but the very fact that we must do it on the client side, is wrong, wrong, wrong. Sorry.
Look, everything we're talking about is (some form of) RPC. Basically, now, on the wire, people are calling functions like putpixel(x,y,color) a million times over (and I know, you can draw lines, fill planes and cache images), while they could be calling drawscrollbar(x,y,width,height,index,max) or something like that. You say the second approach is not flexible enough, I say the first is too inefficient.
/did/ profit *a lot* from the uniformity of their look and feel. And you could still push a single pixel over in their APIs.
.so to have a certain widget for your particular app. No, you should get together with a few people, and instead of trying to agree on APIs and coding standards in C, try to agree what widgets go in the toolkit. Windows did it, Mac did it, java did it, but X just said: 'hey, you have lines, pixels, planes and images, what more can you possibly want ?'.
And I agree that nowadays, with gtk+ and qt and whatnot, things are looking pretty nice. But just remember, if you will, how much time it took us to get here ! And all the while, competing APIs (mac, windows), just had these calls out of the box. And they
So, I'm not saying that you should be able to *upload* an
With regards to fonts you're probably right; but the same argument applies here as well - those APIs that turn fonts into shadowed, hollowed out, red-morphed-into-blue shapes that bend around a circle, they had to be written as well. They could have extended the server-side, but chose to do it on the client side instead. Probably because they were rebuffed by the people behind XFree86 too. But that only makes my argument for me - it was a choice made from poverty of options, turned into richness, but, originally, the wrong choice nonetheless. At least in my opinion.
People would be free to create their own widgets; the API would certainly have to be backwards-compatible. But the back-end, which is now largely a forgotten playground, would become alive with the creation of new widgets just as well. Or so I imagine it at least.
/any/ new approach to fonts would have failed. I still think having them in the backend would still be a good idea. As long as the package comes with a good standard app to select and expand them. Currently, xfontsel won't do, really. And them I'm being generous.
With regards to your fonts-in-the-backend disaster; that cannot be blamed purely on its placing; fonts were then, are now, and will always be, an intellectual-property-shrouded very difficult hurdle to overcome. And that was one of the main reasons it failed; at the time, the (open source) availability of good fonts and presentation (anti-aliasing) technology were simply way behind the times and
Thank you for your obviously so much better informed reply.
1) Must I remind you of the joke of two Keynesian economists walking on the street ? *)
2) Please refer to my post #23747305 further up - the widgets would be PLUGGABLE, so they could go with the times; distributions would take care of them looking dandy. dlopen came about in 1989, I think.
*) 'There's a hundred dollar bill on the street.' 'Can't be; it would have been picked up already.'.
You wouldn't have to upload server-side binary blobs to draw widgets; they would already be there. They would have been loaded as '.so's when the X server booted up. Just specify that 'an X server isn't complete without the implementation of a scrollbar (and a menubar, and a dressed up window, and a tab-bar etc) on the server-side'. Then it's up to the distribution makers (redhat, suse, etc.) to pick and choose. All of a sudden a) calls to the X server are more relevant (that is, closer to what the user wants), b) can have specific events that are much easier to parse for client-libraries, and c) are much, much cheaper for the network. More snappy, more intuitive, and more bug-free. And for good measure, the X server distribution itself includes reference implementations of them as well (and doesn't expect them to be used).
Exactly, what you want is a pluggable gui-object model in the server. I want to be able to say, through the X-protocol: scrollbar there, these dimensions and gimme these events on it. Apart from the time it would save on the wire (gobs and gobs of it), there would be no more bad-headed implementations of a scrollbar. Also, cut-n-paste and drag-n-drop must be taken out of icccm and be given a decent implementation - what a load of crap that is !
Oh I don't know - betting the shop on C# and bringing the spec under certification ? Just my first thought.
It'll probably go all frootfflllarpflarpfloop when you drive them at certain speeds. Like driving your own private whoopie cushion.
What is this man talking about - did he make a commercial version of vi or something ? Madness.
It's not about the industries; you can make money in any way; it's about trust ! And that trust is gone as long as the US is seen as an unpredictable aggressor and an unfair competitor. And as long as it's losing billions a day on a war with no end in sight and no profit at the horizon. Get out of Iraq, get those spending habits under control, make your foreign policy predictable and you'll see the investors come running back.
Can I write an article now, headlined: 'Microsoft free, ten years later' ? Seriously folks, it's been that long.