I don't know if the parent of this comment was intended to be funny or not. I didn't find it funny.
I'd just like to make a distinction between writing silly games for your calculator, and cheating in class.
I had a great time programming my TI-85 and TI-82 when I was in my high school math classes, I never once used them to cheat, and I went on to major in Math in college. Lots of my other friends played with them when they were bored, but didn't ever cheat. Sure, sometimes we didn't pay attention to the lecture - but we wouldn't have been paying attention to the lecture without a calculator either - often we figured out what was going on in the first 10 minutes of class and were bored, while all of the other students were still struggling.
My suggestion is this: encourage use of graphing calculators to understand math. Tolerate use of calculators during class (but take them away from any students who abuse this privelege). Disallow them during exams.
One other suggestion: if you're a Math teacher, take the time to learn how to use these calculators. If you suspect a student of cheating, take their calculator and examine it for notes. If you want to be fair, you'll tell your students about this policy ahead of time.
Actually, you can use a polynomial-time solution to ANY NP-complete problem to construct a polynomial-time solution to any other NP-complete problem. That's what NP-complete is.
Should it be that surprising that the highest rates of piracy are in regions where people can least afford to pay for software to begin with, i.e. Eastern Europe, Middle East, Africa, Latin America?
The BSA is vastly overestimating losses due to piracy because people in those regions simply wouldn't use that software at all if they couldn't get it without paying for it.
So it seems to me that for the same price as an iMac you can get a Dell with a faster processor, that's it. The iMac has a better graphics card plus FireWire, the Dell comes with a bundled printer. The 1.4 GHz P4 is hardly twice as fast. Considering the 1 GHz P3 beats the 1.4 GHz P4 on most benchmarks, and the 500 MHz G3 is nearly as fast as the 1 GHz P3, they're not all that far different.
Sure, you can go down to your local cheap computer dealer and get more bang for your buck, but then you'll probably end up with cheap components that won't run Linux, may crash under Windows more often, and you won't get any support from the manufacturer. People pay a premium for Dell for the same reason they pay the premium for Apple.
You may not like Apple, but there's just no truth to the price/performance argument. The iMac costs a little bit more for the same stuff, that's it. A little, not a lot. For a lot of people, the MacOS makes it worth it.
A lot of the article is about whether or not you should ever rewrite code.
SMS: Joel, what, in your opinion, is the single greatest development sin a software company can commit?
Joel: Deciding to completely rewrite your product from scratch, on the theory that all your code is messy and bug prone and is bloated and needs to be completely rethought and rebuild from ground zero.
SMS: Uh, what's wrong with that?
Joel: Because it's almost never true. It's not like code rusts if it's not used. The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they've been fixed. There's nothing wrong with it.
Joel blasts rewriting code some more, but doesn't really get into alternatives. Instead he talks about forcing programmers to get with the program, and if they don't, fire them.
Isn't there sometimes a happy medium between completely rewriting the whole codebase and continuing to hack it up? For example, maybe you can identify certain modules that can be isolated and rewritten, then tested rigorously against the old code to make sure they're functionally identical. Or you could separate the old code into a library that just does the computational part of a program, and then write a new GUI around it from scratch.
He takes Netscape as an example, saying the worst mistake they made was to rewrite it from scratch.
I admit that it would have been nice if they released the source code to Netscape 4.x, and not just Mozilla. Even if the code was the most gawd-awful thing in the world, in the years since Mozilla started don't you think we (the open-source community) could have at least fixed some of the more annoying bugs in Netscape?
We find on page 222 the pseudocode for the
WriteColor procedure:
Ummmm, the algorithm that Apple patented is more complicated than that WriteColor procedure. WriteColor draws an image with _one_ level of transparency - i.e. each pixel is either completely transparent or completely opaque. Apple's algorithm is for how to draw an image where each pixel can be partially transparent - anywhere from 0 (totally transparent) to 255 (totally opaque).
That's not to say that Apple's algorithm isn't completely obvious - and I'm sure there's prior art out there, but you'll have to look a little harder.
BTW, there isn't anything Bill Atkinson did for Apple in QuickDraw that isn't spelled out in this book.
How about making it really fast??? I'm still incredibly impressed with the amount of graphics power they got out of that original 8 MHz computer. Did you realize that even back in 1984, the Mac screen had rounded corners - and any drawing that took place on the screen was automatically clipped to those rounded corners? That's not exactly trivial to implement without a significant performance penalty.
Well, I took a look at their patent, and it really seems like they did patent alpha-blending. Obviously they never should have been granted such an obvious patent.
However, unless anyone has any evidence to the contrary, I'm going to assume that Apple only filed this as a defensive patent, and never intends to sue anyone because they make use of this idea.
The other difference between the two articles is that the latter one is talking about Cable in particular, rather than "broadband" (i.e. both Cable and DSL).
I used to have DSL. When I moved, I tried a Cable Modem instead. I found the quality of my connection was better, and the service technicians were far more knowledgeable. Of course, that reflects more on the individual companies (Verizon for DSL vs. Charter for Cable) than it does on DSL vs. Cable, but considering the number of people I know who gave up on DSL because of technical problems, I wouldn't be surprised if DSL is losing business to Cable.
Here in Pasadena, Cable is cheaper and they can come install it within a day or two of your order. When I got DSL, I had to wait six weeks for the first visit, and it took them quite a few tries to get it working.
As a developer who depends on Sourceforge on a daily basis, I'm far more concerned with whether or not VA will be able to continue to support Sourceforge in the future, and I care far less whether all of the software used to create Sourceforge is open-source.
29,000 projects are currently being hosted on Sourceforge. Okay, a lot of those are vaporware, but I think it's fair to say that there are at least a thousand interesting and valuable projects there. It would be a huge loss to the open-source community if all of these projects were suddenly homeless.
Sourceforge has done more to increase the sense of community among open-source developers than any other site. Whenever I want to find out if someone is developing source code that does something I want, where do I turn first - Freshmeat? Nope, Sourceforge, because it's so convenient and standardized. I know how to navigate Sourceforge quickly to download the latest release, browse the CVS archives, or check their bug reports - whereas all non-SF projects have these things in very different places, if at all (how many other projects have a working CVSWeb up and running - not many!). Hosting a project on Sourceforge makes it convenient for developers to examine what you're doing and join in, which is what makes open-source work.
I never would have joined if Sourceforge was not free, but if it came down to paying a subscription (in order to host a project there) or letting Sourceforge die, I would pay for it in a second. If they have to do this, it would be nice if they set up a system for micropayments - so grateful users could easily donate a couple of bucks to keep their favorite projects on Sourceforge.
I looked through the Harry Potter site and yours trying to figure out which one they copied.
Is it the burrowing owl? Their owl looks very similar to yours...though they look different enough that I'm tempted to say that it's a coincidence...but I could have found totally the wrong picture, and if so, sorry...
I can't resist making a shameless plug for my project, Audacity.
While Audacity is nowhere near being a complete replacement for a full set of commercial audio tools, I believe it's one of the best editors available for Linux today and has a lot of potential to be extremely competitive with commercial multitrack audio solutions within the next year or two. Here's what it has going for it:
It's cross-platform. We use wxWindows (but with native audio I/O code for each platform) and Audacity currently runs on Linux, Windows, MacOS (9 and X), and other Posix systems.
Fully non-destructive editing, using a novel blocked-file approach which caches the current mix for faster real-time playback.
Supports (on most sound cards) full-duplex recording - sing harmonies with yourself!
Import and Export MP3 files from within Audacity (using LAME for exporting)
Built-in effects include Bass Boost, FFT Filter, and Noise Reduction. Compression/Expansion under development. Support for VST plug-ins on Windows and MacOS, and LADSPA support is under development.
Unlimited number of tracks and automatic mixing. The code in CVS (not yet released) supports automatic resampling.
Built-in envelope editor
Spectrogram mode and frequency analysis tools
(For those of you who have tried the current release (0.97) and are having audio I/O problems on Linux, rest assured that the latest version in CVS has much improved audio I/O and should solve all of those problems and more...)
There are three or four active developers of Audacity, and another dozen or so people who contribute code or bug fixes from time to time. We're definitely interested in more help - visit the web site and contact us if you're a C++ whiz (or have some other skill which might be useful for us) and want to join the team!
The really cool thing about wxWindows is that at any time somebody could write wxQt, and immediately all wxWindows programs could integrate with KDE as well as they currently integrate with GNOME.
I haven't regretted for a second choosing wxWindows, even if nobody ever writes wxQt, but I sure do like my KDE desktop.
I have no idea where you got the idea that 128/44 is standard CD quality. I'm not even sure what 128/44 means.
Let's figure out what the bitrate of CD-quality audio is:
1. 44100 Hz (i.e. 44 kHz)
2. Two channels
3. 16 bits per sample
44100*2*16 = 1411200 bits per second, or 1411 kbps. That's the bitrate of CD audio.
Note that these are bits, not bytes. A CD takes up 1411/8 = 176 kB per second.
So the fact that an MP3 sounds pretty good at 192 kbps (which is 24 kB per second - the capital B for Bytes instead of bits) is actually quite impressive. It's compressing by about a factor of 7.
Luckily, most rippers don't even give you a choice. They just rip the raw bytes and stick a WAV header on each track. Good rippers verify that they're reading the CD correctly, of course, but they don't do any compression or re-encoding.
While I understand your point, please don't try to group all open source authors into one big group. People write open source software for lots of different reasons.
There are lots tools available now that make it easy for open-source (and non open-source) developers to target both Windows _and_ Linux. My favorite is wxWindows, a cross-platform C++ toolkit that lets you write one program and recompile it for Windows, Linux/GTK (and any other Unix where you can get GTK to compile), Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, and OS/2 (!). Ports for embedded devices and the Linux framebuffer are under development. wxWindows is open-source (LGPL) of course. Unlike other similar toolkits, it uses native widgets, so their scrollbars are real Windows scrollbars on Windows, and real GTK scrollbars on Linux.
I've been working on Audacity using wxWindows for the past two years, and I've never regretted choosing to make it multi-platform. I really wanted to support MacOS, since that's what a lot of my friends and family use, but I also wanted to support Linux because that was my favorite environment, and of course by supporting Windows I could make my program available to the greatest number of people.
Many people have written to me and the other developers thanking us for giving them an open-source alternative on Windows. Some of them want to transition from Windows to Linux, and like that there will be a familiar audio software package available on both. Others prefer to stick with Windows because of special hardware that's not supported on Linux yet (i.e. digital sound cards) or because they're not hackers and actually don't mind using Windows.
Remember, to the non-programmer, one of the biggest advantages of open-source is that it's more likely to be around five years from now than a commercial or a shareware program. Programmers lose interest, companies lose interest, but when a project is open-source, somebody else can pick up where the original developer(s) left off. So I think that open-source on Windows makes a lot of sense, and I'd like to see a lot more of it.
I tried to install StarOffice as root on my RedHat 7.1 system, and all hell broke loose. I couldn't launch StarOffice from any user account at all. I uninstalled it and installed it in my user account, and this time it worked fine. But now only I can use it.
* Anyone know why it failed as root?
* Anyone know how I could make it run the user configuration part of the setup, so other users on my computer can use StarOffice?
I'd love to hear other StarOffice tips and tricks, too...
I primarily use my CD burner to make CDs of my own music. CD burners are incredible for low-budget amateur musicians who want to give out demos (a demo CD is much better than a demo tape) or even sell CDs at gigs.
I'm not saying that a lot of people aren't pirating music, but there are also a lot of people like me that burn their own music, or just make their own mix CDs for personal use (for listening in the car, for example).
Actually, there's a very good reason why ordinary users (non-developers) often prefer open-source programs over other alternatives: they know that it's much less likely the program will die.
I can think of many great Mac and Windows utilities that are no longer available because the original author lost interest. However, if a program is open-source, there's a much better chance that someone will continue to maintain it.
Of course, it's silly to use an open-source program when it's simply not as good as a closed, but free, or cheap shareware program. Support open-source, but don't sacrifice productivity! For example, Audacity, the open-source audio editor I'm developing, is usable now, but doesn't have as many features as CoolEdit (yet). So if you are running Windows, and can afford CoolEdit, you're still better off buying it (of course, I love it if you use Audacity when you can and send in bug reports!).
Re:WxWindows is the de facto cross platform Standa
on
Qt for Mac
·
· Score: 2
Have you ever tried writing wxWindows apps? They do an excellent job of mixing the important native controls (scrollbars, buttons, edit text fields) with emulated widgets (tree controls, help viewer, tabbed dialogs) provided for platforms that don't support that particular widget.
Try it, it's way better than Java.
Re:WxWindows is the de facto cross platform Standa
on
Qt for Mac
·
· Score: 2
Read my previous post. wxMac is actually coming along really well, and it supports OS X now.
Unfortunately, the website is a bit out of date. The truth is that the MacOS version of wxWindows has supported OS X (Carbon) for months now, and it now compiles without any modifications using your choice of CodeWarrior 5.3 + the latest Universal Headers, CodeWarrior 6.x as-is, or Apple's gcc on Mac OS X.
Yes, there are some bugs left, but I've been able to work around those without too much trouble, and there are multiple people actively working on this port.
If you like wxWindows and want to port to the Mac, just get the latest code from CVS and join the mailing list.
Are there any developers out there really developing cross platform products that target Macs? In a similar vein, Mac enthusiasts like to focu on aesthetics, but cross-platform development needs to forego this aspect of useability in favor of LCD functionality.
I'm leading the development of Audacity, a cross-platform audio editor, for Linux, Windows, and MacOS (both 8/9 and X), using wxWindows. MacOS is a very important platform for me - I love Linux, and I've advertised Audacity on a number of Linux sites, but we still get more MacOS downloads than Linux (and far more Windows downloads than either of those). A year ago, when I started this project, Qt wasn't an option. I think I'd still choose wxWindows, but Qt is definitely looking better.
I'd also disagree with the statement that cross-platform apps have to target the LCD. In Audacity, all of the audio I/O code is written natively for each platform and supports some special features on each one. wxWindows fills in a lot of features that are missing on one or more platforms, for example providing a tree control and file dialog on Linux, but allowing you to use the native ones on Windows. Also, the Linux version of Audacity supports a lot of command-line options that just aren't available for Windows and MacOS, but the MacOS version lets you drag and drop files onto the application, for example.
Also, there are plenty of other cross-platform apps that target MacOS, both 9 and X. How about Mozilla?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know if the parent of this comment was intended to be funny or not. I didn't find it funny.
I'd just like to make a distinction between writing silly games for your calculator, and cheating in class.
I had a great time programming my TI-85 and TI-82 when I was in my high school math classes, I never once used them to cheat, and I went on to major in Math in college. Lots of my other friends played with them when they were bored, but didn't ever cheat. Sure, sometimes we didn't pay attention to the lecture - but we wouldn't have been paying attention to the lecture without a calculator either - often we figured out what was going on in the first 10 minutes of class and were bored, while all of the other students were still struggling.
My suggestion is this: encourage use of graphing calculators to understand math. Tolerate use of calculators during class (but take them away from any students who abuse this privelege). Disallow them during exams.
One other suggestion: if you're a Math teacher, take the time to learn how to use these calculators. If you suspect a student of cheating, take their calculator and examine it for notes. If you want to be fair, you'll tell your students about this policy ahead of time.
Actually, you can use a polynomial-time solution to ANY NP-complete problem to construct a polynomial-time solution to any other NP-complete problem. That's what NP-complete is.
Very interesting.
Should it be that surprising that the highest rates of piracy are in regions where people can least afford to pay for software to begin with, i.e. Eastern Europe, Middle East, Africa, Latin America?
The BSA is vastly overestimating losses due to piracy because people in those regions simply wouldn't use that software at all if they couldn't get it without paying for it.
I agree, $72 per year is a bit much.
That's why Salon only costs $30 per year.
If you want only one month at a time, it's $6/mo.
Google is doing what they're supposed to. Note that Google doesn't actually contain any quotes from their website, nor do they have a cached page.
However, Google still has kpmg.com in their database, probably because of other sites that link to it.
Why does someone have to do this everytime there's an article on Macs?
I just configured a low-end Dell Dimension at their website. The main option they left out that I had to add was Ethernet:
Dell Dimension 4300S: $873
1.4 GHz Pentium 4
128 MB RAM
20 GB HD
15" monitor
16 MB ATI Rage graphics card
CD-ROM drive
10/100 Ethernet + Modem
Free Lexmark printer
iMac w/128 MB RAM: $849
500 MHz G3
128 MB RAM
20 GB HD
15" monitor (integrated)
CD-ROM Drive
16 MB Rage 128 Ultra
10/100 Ethernet + Modem
Firewire
So it seems to me that for the same price as an iMac you can get a Dell with a faster processor, that's it. The iMac has a better graphics card plus FireWire, the Dell comes with a bundled printer. The 1.4 GHz P4 is hardly twice as fast. Considering the 1 GHz P3 beats the 1.4 GHz P4 on most benchmarks, and the 500 MHz G3 is nearly as fast as the 1 GHz P3, they're not all that far different.
Sure, you can go down to your local cheap computer dealer and get more bang for your buck, but then you'll probably end up with cheap components that won't run Linux, may crash under Windows more often, and you won't get any support from the manufacturer. People pay a premium for Dell for the same reason they pay the premium for Apple.
You may not like Apple, but there's just no truth to the price/performance argument. The iMac costs a little bit more for the same stuff, that's it. A little, not a lot. For a lot of people, the MacOS makes it worth it.
SMS: Joel, what, in your opinion, is the single greatest development sin a software company can commit?
Joel: Deciding to completely rewrite your product from scratch, on the theory that all your code is messy and bug prone and is bloated and needs to be completely rethought and rebuild from ground zero.
SMS: Uh, what's wrong with that?
Joel: Because it's almost never true. It's not like code rusts if it's not used. The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they've been fixed. There's nothing wrong with it.
Joel blasts rewriting code some more, but doesn't really get into alternatives. Instead he talks about forcing programmers to get with the program, and if they don't, fire them.
Isn't there sometimes a happy medium between completely rewriting the whole codebase and continuing to hack it up? For example, maybe you can identify certain modules that can be isolated and rewritten, then tested rigorously against the old code to make sure they're functionally identical. Or you could separate the old code into a library that just does the computational part of a program, and then write a new GUI around it from scratch.
He takes Netscape as an example, saying the worst mistake they made was to rewrite it from scratch.
I admit that it would have been nice if they released the source code to Netscape 4.x, and not just Mozilla. Even if the code was the most gawd-awful thing in the world, in the years since Mozilla started don't you think we (the open-source community) could have at least fixed some of the more annoying bugs in Netscape?
Ummmm, the algorithm that Apple patented is more complicated than that WriteColor procedure. WriteColor draws an image with _one_ level of transparency - i.e. each pixel is either completely transparent or completely opaque. Apple's algorithm is for how to draw an image where each pixel can be partially transparent - anywhere from 0 (totally transparent) to 255 (totally opaque).
That's not to say that Apple's algorithm isn't completely obvious - and I'm sure there's prior art out there, but you'll have to look a little harder.
BTW, there isn't anything Bill Atkinson did for Apple in QuickDraw that isn't spelled out in this book.
How about making it really fast??? I'm still incredibly impressed with the amount of graphics power they got out of that original 8 MHz computer. Did you realize that even back in 1984, the Mac screen had rounded corners - and any drawing that took place on the screen was automatically clipped to those rounded corners? That's not exactly trivial to implement without a significant performance penalty.
Well, I took a look at their patent, and it really seems like they did patent alpha-blending. Obviously they never should have been granted such an obvious patent.
However, unless anyone has any evidence to the contrary, I'm going to assume that Apple only filed this as a defensive patent, and never intends to sue anyone because they make use of this idea.
The other difference between the two articles is that the latter one is talking about Cable in particular, rather than "broadband" (i.e. both Cable and DSL).
I used to have DSL. When I moved, I tried a Cable Modem instead. I found the quality of my connection was better, and the service technicians were far more knowledgeable. Of course, that reflects more on the individual companies (Verizon for DSL vs. Charter for Cable) than it does on DSL vs. Cable, but considering the number of people I know who gave up on DSL because of technical problems, I wouldn't be surprised if DSL is losing business to Cable.
Here in Pasadena, Cable is cheaper and they can come install it within a day or two of your order. When I got DSL, I had to wait six weeks for the first visit, and it took them quite a few tries to get it working.
29,000 projects are currently being hosted on Sourceforge. Okay, a lot of those are vaporware, but I think it's fair to say that there are at least a thousand interesting and valuable projects there. It would be a huge loss to the open-source community if all of these projects were suddenly homeless.
Sourceforge has done more to increase the sense of community among open-source developers than any other site. Whenever I want to find out if someone is developing source code that does something I want, where do I turn first - Freshmeat? Nope, Sourceforge, because it's so convenient and standardized. I know how to navigate Sourceforge quickly to download the latest release, browse the CVS archives, or check their bug reports - whereas all non-SF projects have these things in very different places, if at all (how many other projects have a working CVSWeb up and running - not many!). Hosting a project on Sourceforge makes it convenient for developers to examine what you're doing and join in, which is what makes open-source work.
I never would have joined if Sourceforge was not free, but if it came down to paying a subscription (in order to host a project there) or letting Sourceforge die, I would pay for it in a second. If they have to do this, it would be nice if they set up a system for micropayments - so grateful users could easily donate a couple of bucks to keep their favorite projects on Sourceforge.
Is it the burrowing owl? Their owl looks very similar to yours...though they look different enough that I'm tempted to say that it's a coincidence...but I could have found totally the wrong picture, and if so, sorry...
Harry Potter's Owl (Hedwig?)
Don's Owl
While Audacity is nowhere near being a complete replacement for a full set of commercial audio tools, I believe it's one of the best editors available for Linux today and has a lot of potential to be extremely competitive with commercial multitrack audio solutions within the next year or two. Here's what it has going for it:
(For those of you who have tried the current release (0.97) and are having audio I/O problems on Linux, rest assured that the latest version in CVS has much improved audio I/O and should solve all of those problems and more...)
There are three or four active developers of Audacity, and another dozen or so people who contribute code or bug fixes from time to time. We're definitely interested in more help - visit the web site and contact us if you're a C++ whiz (or have some other skill which might be useful for us) and want to join the team!
Amen!
The really cool thing about wxWindows is that at any time somebody could write wxQt, and immediately all wxWindows programs could integrate with KDE as well as they currently integrate with GNOME.
I haven't regretted for a second choosing wxWindows, even if nobody ever writes wxQt, but I sure do like my KDE desktop.
I have no idea where you got the idea that 128/44 is standard CD quality. I'm not even sure what 128/44 means.
Let's figure out what the bitrate of CD-quality audio is:
1. 44100 Hz (i.e. 44 kHz)
2. Two channels
3. 16 bits per sample
44100*2*16 = 1411200 bits per second, or 1411 kbps. That's the bitrate of CD audio.
Note that these are bits, not bytes. A CD takes up 1411/8 = 176 kB per second.
So the fact that an MP3 sounds pretty good at 192 kbps (which is 24 kB per second - the capital B for Bytes instead of bits) is actually quite impressive. It's compressing by about a factor of 7.
Luckily, most rippers don't even give you a choice. They just rip the raw bytes and stick a WAV header on each track. Good rippers verify that they're reading the CD correctly, of course, but they don't do any compression or re-encoding.
While I understand your point, please don't try to group all open source authors into one big group. People write open source software for lots of different reasons.
There are lots tools available now that make it easy for open-source (and non open-source) developers to target both Windows _and_ Linux. My favorite is wxWindows, a cross-platform C++ toolkit that lets you write one program and recompile it for Windows, Linux/GTK (and any other Unix where you can get GTK to compile), Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, and OS/2 (!). Ports for embedded devices and the Linux framebuffer are under development. wxWindows is open-source (LGPL) of course. Unlike other similar toolkits, it uses native widgets, so their scrollbars are real Windows scrollbars on Windows, and real GTK scrollbars on Linux.
I've been working on Audacity using wxWindows for the past two years, and I've never regretted choosing to make it multi-platform. I really wanted to support MacOS, since that's what a lot of my friends and family use, but I also wanted to support Linux because that was my favorite environment, and of course by supporting Windows I could make my program available to the greatest number of people.
Many people have written to me and the other developers thanking us for giving them an open-source alternative on Windows. Some of them want to transition from Windows to Linux, and like that there will be a familiar audio software package available on both. Others prefer to stick with Windows because of special hardware that's not supported on Linux yet (i.e. digital sound cards) or because they're not hackers and actually don't mind using Windows.
Remember, to the non-programmer, one of the biggest advantages of open-source is that it's more likely to be around five years from now than a commercial or a shareware program. Programmers lose interest, companies lose interest, but when a project is open-source, somebody else can pick up where the original developer(s) left off. So I think that open-source on Windows makes a lot of sense, and I'd like to see a lot more of it.
I tried to install StarOffice as root on my RedHat 7.1 system, and all hell broke loose. I couldn't launch StarOffice from any user account at all. I uninstalled it and installed it in my user account, and this time it worked fine. But now only I can use it.
* Anyone know why it failed as root?
* Anyone know how I could make it run the user configuration part of the setup, so other users on my computer can use StarOffice?
I'd love to hear other StarOffice tips and tricks, too...
For a second there I thought it said cache-less society. My system would run a lot slower without that large L1 cache!
I primarily use my CD burner to make CDs of my own music. CD burners are incredible for low-budget amateur musicians who want to give out demos (a demo CD is much better than a demo tape) or even sell CDs at gigs.
I'm not saying that a lot of people aren't pirating music, but there are also a lot of people like me that burn their own music, or just make their own mix CDs for personal use (for listening in the car, for example).
This sentence has one nonstandard English flerbage.
Actually, there's a very good reason why ordinary users (non-developers) often prefer open-source programs over other alternatives: they know that it's much less likely the program will die.
I can think of many great Mac and Windows utilities that are no longer available because the original author lost interest. However, if a program is open-source, there's a much better chance that someone will continue to maintain it.
Of course, it's silly to use an open-source program when it's simply not as good as a closed, but free, or cheap shareware program. Support open-source, but don't sacrifice productivity! For example, Audacity, the open-source audio editor I'm developing, is usable now, but doesn't have as many features as CoolEdit (yet). So if you are running Windows, and can afford CoolEdit, you're still better off buying it (of course, I love it if you use Audacity when you can and send in bug reports!).
Have you ever tried writing wxWindows apps? They do an excellent job of mixing the important native controls (scrollbars, buttons, edit text fields) with emulated widgets (tree controls, help viewer, tabbed dialogs) provided for platforms that don't support that particular widget. Try it, it's way better than Java.
Read my previous post. wxMac is actually coming along really well, and it supports OS X now.
Unfortunately, the website is a bit out of date. The truth is that the MacOS version of wxWindows has supported OS X (Carbon) for months now, and it now compiles without any modifications using your choice of CodeWarrior 5.3 + the latest Universal Headers, CodeWarrior 6.x as-is, or Apple's gcc on Mac OS X.
Yes, there are some bugs left, but I've been able to work around those without too much trouble, and there are multiple people actively working on this port.
If you like wxWindows and want to port to the Mac, just get the latest code from CVS and join the mailing list.
I'm leading the development of Audacity, a cross-platform audio editor, for Linux, Windows, and MacOS (both 8/9 and X), using wxWindows. MacOS is a very important platform for me - I love Linux, and I've advertised Audacity on a number of Linux sites, but we still get more MacOS downloads than Linux (and far more Windows downloads than either of those). A year ago, when I started this project, Qt wasn't an option. I think I'd still choose wxWindows, but Qt is definitely looking better.
I'd also disagree with the statement that cross-platform apps have to target the LCD. In Audacity, all of the audio I/O code is written natively for each platform and supports some special features on each one. wxWindows fills in a lot of features that are missing on one or more platforms, for example providing a tree control and file dialog on Linux, but allowing you to use the native ones on Windows. Also, the Linux version of Audacity supports a lot of command-line options that just aren't available for Windows and MacOS, but the MacOS version lets you drag and drop files onto the application, for example.
Also, there are plenty of other cross-platform apps that target MacOS, both 9 and X. How about Mozilla?