It's an interesting concept, although I think the time might be better spent developing original content rather than rehashing a classic. I liken it to someone rewriting Tolkien.
Rewriting Tolkien is all too common nowadays; what recent fantasy-quest novel isn't just a rehash of LotR with the names, faces, and map changed?
Do they have the rights to this? Or is U One Public Domain?
Was it created before 1923? If not, it's under de facto perpetual copyright, as Congress has an unwritten agreement with Disney Enterprises to pass a bill every 20 years that extends the term of all subsisting copyrights by 20 more years.
You're right it already runs on the only OS that matters.:)
The only operating system that matters is the one that has drivers for your hardware. Unfortunately, for most users who bought home computers, that's Windows 9x. Does BeOS work with winmodems or winsoundcards?
Basically, there's a dependence flow, where each cell on a spreadsheet is referenced to cells on previous sheets.
The Free Software Foundation has a dependence flow manager that can track dependencies between objects in a filesystem and can call programs to re-create files when the files they depend on have changed. This tool is called GNU Make and comes with most distributions of a GNU system or a GCC development environment.
I'd actually love to move to a browser interface
And you can with server-side Ruby, Python, Java, or Perl. Simply port your simulation to a compiled or interpreted language, create a makefile to re-run the simulation whenever the input changes, and write CGI programs to coordinate the whole mess into a Web application. If the whole thing runs on one box (as is most often the case for a flat-file app), and that box must run Windows, use the Win32 version of Apache HTTP Server, the MinGW GCC distribution (or Cygwin if your app is GPL compatible), and ActivePerl or ActivePython.
Re:For 2D use OpenGL. For input use Allegro.
on
Whither OpenAL?
·
· Score: 2
using OpenGL with a Z of 0 would work too, certainly. Maybe it could be over complicated for 2D though
I don't see how OpenGL would be over-complicated. If you worry about performance issues, rest assured that most modern video cards accelerate parallel (2D or isometric) projections as easily as they do perspective projections.
Alegro is a new one of me. How well does its API fit in with OpenGL/AL/ML? Does it fit at all?
The Allegro library has its own 2D graphics, stereo sound, and joy/mouse/key input functions; it also has fixed-point math (essential for developing for 486 or other low-end targets that leave out FPU for cost or power consumption) and basic 2D and 3D matrix and quaternion manipulation. The base Allegro distribution contains no OpenGL support, but George Foot's AllegroGL extension lets you start OpenGL, make all OpenGL calls, and copy between Allegro surfaces and OpenGL surfaces. However, it doesn't fit in with OpenAL etc. yet.
For 2D use OpenGL. For input use Allegro.
on
Whither OpenAL?
·
· Score: 2
As well as that, are there any decent cross-platform 2D & Input layers that could fit in with OpenGl, OpenML & OpenAL?
For input, you could use SDL's or Allegro's input layer. For 2D, just use the special case of OpenGL graphics where z = 0 (note that this is also how DirectX 8 does DirectDraw, as a special case of Direct3D 8).
It would be interesting to see how those three fit together, as it really could give OSS a set of API's to combat DirectX with effectivly
Copyright does not make you an owner, it makes you the beneficiary of a temporary exclusive right to copy the work. You can't own software.
Right. In that vein, many people have dropped the term "IP" entirely and taken up calling such rights "government-granted monopolies," or GGMs. ( Read More... | )
But the big question about this "Stallman" is "Does he run Linux?"
Of course. Linux makes up a part of the primary operating system used at the FSF; it's the kernel of the GNU/Linux system: GNU's Not UNIX®, and Linux® Is Not UNIX®. I still wonder why FSF didn't register the "GNU" mark.
Can ECMAScript give me an Excel spreadsheet within IE?
No, because IE doesn't have an ECMAScript DOM. However, ECMAScript can give you a spreadsheet from a plugin that has a DOM.
The simulation stuff would be easy to port
Correct. An Excel spreadsheet has the characteristics of any declarative program, and given that you can parse the file format, automatically translating such a spreadsheet into Haskell or another declarative language (or even C) would probably be straightforward. From there, use ODBC to talk to the database and pull all your data.
I've never really liked spreadsheets for implementing heavy apps because they blur the line between a declarative program and a flat database.
it's the links to the spreadsheet that would be difficult (this example is spread out over 30 sheets with somewhere around 2mil calculations).
What kind of "links" are you talking about? SQL can easily link several tables together with a relational "join" operator.
When the G5 is available, the slowest speed going to the desktop market according to the article is 1.2 GHz.
MHz != performance. Nothing else matters but the time you spend waiting for an operation to complete.
Apple advertises the PowerPC G4 as being 100% faster than P6-core (Celeron/PIII) processors at a given clock rate, which is about right for digital signal processing applications such as Photoshop filters. In actual use, this figure is closer to 50% faster, making Apple's fastest processor (867 MHz G4) equivalent to a 1.3 GHz PIII. Yes, Apple's offerings are a bit slow right now, but it's not as bad as is commonly thought, and the G5 will easily beat P4.
Somewhat different computing paradigm. The VRML file contains "sensors" which trigger events that are processed by scripts. In other words, the data drives the code instead of the code driving the data.
It's the same paradigm HTML and Doom use. An HTML file contains "links" which trigger events that are processed by scripts. A WAD file contains "lines" which trigger events that are processed by scripts.
You are talking about two different things - hard drive space and internet bandwidth.
Yes, I am talking about two different things, and I want to emphasize that they are different. Hard drive space is nearly free; however, moving files from one hard drive to another hard drive isn't.
And besides, you can get most software on CD.
But what if the specific program I want isn't on a CD? Is there a service where I can enter my CC#, address, and the URLs of files accessible by Freenet, HTTP, or FTP, and have the files burnt onto a CD and sent to me?
Now, can you read the bold-faced words for me? Can you tell me if they're the same words?
I know "bandwidth" and "hard drive space" are not the same. Please replace the part of my comment with "However, this is not true of all resources on which the size of an application depends. For example, last-mile bandwidth has not yet become too cheap to meter."
Useful tip for Excel: Type all your formulas in lowercase. If Excel finds no syntax problem in your formula, Excel will uppercase it in the formula bar. This has been true since at least Excel 3. This is the kind of useful feature the lack of which leaves a bad taste in reviewers' proverbial mouths.
Some things just become too cheap to meter, and hard drive space is one of them.
If this statement were true, nobody would need gzip. However, last-mile bandwidth has not yet become too cheap to meter. It costs some people $200,000 to get high-speed access because they don't live in an area where the local telecommunication monopolies offer DSL or cable modem service. Ever try downloading the whole set of Windows service packs or a Debian apt-get upgrade over a telephone modem connection billed by the minute (as is the case in e.g. Europe)?
Basically, he said that Kwrite could often export DOC files OK in their experimental builds, but any kind of fancy embedding or something being wrong by literally one byte... would CRASH WORD!!
So when your user asks to export a.doc file, export a.rtf file named something.doc. Word knows what to do when it sees the RTF header instead of its own COM stream header.
given that Word has 90% (or whatever..huge %!) market dominance
On the Web, HTML has 99% market dominance. Plain ASCII.txt has five-nines market dominance; the 1e-3% is largely old mainframes still running EBCDIC.
many of these people know VBA
IOW, you're saying "You can take the VBAer out of VBA, but you can't take the VBA out of the VBAer." To show a VBA programmer that VBA/VBS is considered harmful, put her on Windows 9x (95, 98, ME), send her a memo infected with a macro virus, and then send her a VBS that claims to be another memo.
It's really not VBA so much as the lack of good file and memory protection in the host operating system. VB* just makes it too easy to write viruses and trojans, which has earned it the nickname "Virus Builder."
it helps to be able to send and receive office docs that other people can read.
And HTML+CSS2 doesn't meet your requirements why? Is it too hard to ask your clients to save their documents as HTML?
An office suite that can't read MS Office documents is just about as useful as a server operating system that can use nothing but floppy disks.
Most office suites can read MS Office documents, but not MS Office documents saved in the proprietary "serialized COM stream" format, which is almost like trying to open another app's files by reading core snapshots. If you save an MS Office document in a standard format such as text, basic RTF, or MHTML (HTML, CSS, and graphics in a single MIME file), free software will import it just fine.
"A server that can read only floppy disks"? Try "a server that can't read Apple II or C=64 floppy disks because they use a different type of modulation." Trying to read Word documents (which are intimately tied to MS COM) is almost like trying to read a hard drive by removing the platters and placing them in another housing (assuming cleanliness).
If HTML frames are so good, why don't popular web sites such as Yahoo!, MSN, AOL.com, ebaY, and Slashdot use them? Those sites mostly use tables or CSS2 instead.
(On the other hand, you might be talking about a different kind of frame. If so, please fill me in instead of calling this comment flaimbait.)
"Last Tuesday's Financial Report" is much more readable than... "fr0123.dat"
So call the file fr0123.dat, but design your filesystem to store a piece of metadata "icon_name" that can hold a longer filename. Use the filename for locating directories and files, but also show the icon name in file pickers. fr0123.dat (last Tuesday's financial report) is quick to type-select and easy to read. Several DOS TUI shells did this. Windows almost does this, except it always computes the filename from the icon name.
Manual page breaks cause trouble with the different font metrics of e.g. Times/TNR and Helvetica/Arial fonts from different vendors. The problem of pagination would be better handled by a layout engine that can say "This table must fit on one page" or "Do not break <p> elements such that only one line remains on a page."
As an AC pointed out, CSS2 Paged Media supports many of the features you mentioned; all you need to do is fund a project to implement it.
line-breaks?
I've always used <br/> to create line breaks in XHTML.
Lost productivity time due to malfunctioning import filters
You shouldn't be trying to import a COM serialization (Word's native document format since office97); it'd be almost like trying to import a core snapshot from a program running under debugger control.
How hard is it for Word users to save as text, RTF, or HTML? Most of these free software office suites import HTML and other standardized formats just fine.
(meta)Postercomment compression filter defined
on
ZDNet Reviews KOffice
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· Score: 1
What in the hell is the postercomment compression filter
When you post a comment, Slashcode compresses your comment to see if you just typed the same thing over and over to crapflood the database. Because of the way the developers implemented postercomment compression (the fraction remaining after compression must be greater than r, and r is a piecewise constant function of the comment length), the filter rejects all comments under about 100 bytes.
The reason is that he doesn't have the resources to handle all architectures. He recognizes that there are other people who are competent and have the machines needed to actually test the patches.
So why didn't somebody on the list tell pulsar what channels to go through? "Linus actively maintains only the x86 version, but here are the addresses of the maintainers of ports to other architectures" is better than "WONTFIX. Period."
Slashdot Mirror
It's an interesting concept, although I think the time might be better spent developing original content rather than rehashing a classic. I liken it to someone rewriting Tolkien.
Rewriting Tolkien is all too common nowadays; what recent fantasy-quest novel isn't just a rehash of LotR with the names, faces, and map changed?
Do they have the rights to this? Or is U One Public Domain?
Was it created before 1923? If not, it's under de facto perpetual copyright, as Congress has an unwritten agreement with Disney Enterprises to pass a bill every 20 years that extends the term of all subsisting copyrights by 20 more years.
You're right it already runs on the only OS that matters. :)
The only operating system that matters is the one that has drivers for your hardware. Unfortunately, for most users who bought home computers, that's Windows 9x. Does BeOS work with winmodems or winsoundcards?
Basically, there's a dependence flow, where each cell on a spreadsheet is referenced to cells on previous sheets.
The Free Software Foundation has a dependence flow manager that can track dependencies between objects in a filesystem and can call programs to re-create files when the files they depend on have changed. This tool is called GNU Make and comes with most distributions of a GNU system or a GCC development environment.
I'd actually love to move to a browser interface
And you can with server-side Ruby, Python, Java, or Perl. Simply port your simulation to a compiled or interpreted language, create a makefile to re-run the simulation whenever the input changes, and write CGI programs to coordinate the whole mess into a Web application. If the whole thing runs on one box (as is most often the case for a flat-file app), and that box must run Windows, use the Win32 version of Apache HTTP Server, the MinGW GCC distribution (or Cygwin if your app is GPL compatible), and ActivePerl or ActivePython.
using OpenGL with a Z of 0 would work too, certainly. Maybe it could be over complicated for 2D though
I don't see how OpenGL would be over-complicated. If you worry about performance issues, rest assured that most modern video cards accelerate parallel (2D or isometric) projections as easily as they do perspective projections.
Alegro is a new one of me. How well does its API fit in with OpenGL/AL/ML? Does it fit at all?
The Allegro library has its own 2D graphics, stereo sound, and joy/mouse/key input functions; it also has fixed-point math (essential for developing for 486 or other low-end targets that leave out FPU for cost or power consumption) and basic 2D and 3D matrix and quaternion manipulation. The base Allegro distribution contains no OpenGL support, but George Foot's AllegroGL extension lets you start OpenGL, make all OpenGL calls, and copy between Allegro surfaces and OpenGL surfaces. However, it doesn't fit in with OpenAL etc. yet.
As well as that, are there any decent cross-platform 2D & Input layers that could fit in with OpenGl, OpenML & OpenAL?
For input, you could use SDL's or Allegro's input layer. For 2D, just use the special case of OpenGL graphics where z = 0 (note that this is also how DirectX 8 does DirectDraw, as a special case of Direct3D 8).
It would be interesting to see how those three fit together, as it really could give OSS a set of API's to combat DirectX with effectivly
AllegroGL (OpenGL graphics + Allegro input + Allegro sound) works nicely.
Copyright does not make you an owner, it makes you the beneficiary of a temporary exclusive right to copy the work. You can't own software.
Right. In that vein, many people have dropped the term "IP" entirely and taken up calling such rights "government-granted monopolies," or GGMs. ( Read More... | )
But the big question about this "Stallman" is "Does he run Linux?"
Of course. Linux makes up a part of the primary operating system used at the FSF; it's the kernel of the GNU/Linux system: GNU's Not UNIX®, and Linux® Is Not UNIX®. I still wonder why FSF didn't register the "GNU" mark.
Get a GNU/Linux system today!Can ECMAScript give me an Excel spreadsheet within IE?
No, because IE doesn't have an ECMAScript DOM. However, ECMAScript can give you a spreadsheet from a plugin that has a DOM.
The simulation stuff would be easy to port
Correct. An Excel spreadsheet has the characteristics of any declarative program, and given that you can parse the file format, automatically translating such a spreadsheet into Haskell or another declarative language (or even C) would probably be straightforward. From there, use ODBC to talk to the database and pull all your data.
I've never really liked spreadsheets for implementing heavy apps because they blur the line between a declarative program and a flat database.
it's the links to the spreadsheet that would be difficult (this example is spread out over 30 sheets with somewhere around 2mil calculations).
What kind of "links" are you talking about? SQL can easily link several tables together with a relational "join" operator.
When the G5 is available, the slowest speed going to the desktop market according to the article is 1.2 GHz.
MHz != performance. Nothing else matters but the time you spend waiting for an operation to complete.
Apple advertises the PowerPC G4 as being 100% faster than P6-core (Celeron/PIII) processors at a given clock rate, which is about right for digital signal processing applications such as Photoshop filters. In actual use, this figure is closer to 50% faster, making Apple's fastest processor (867 MHz G4) equivalent to a 1.3 GHz PIII. Yes, Apple's offerings are a bit slow right now, but it's not as bad as is commonly thought, and the G5 will easily beat P4.
I use VB in Excel regularly. Think developing a Monte-Carlo simulation module for a forecasting model.
Which can easily be rewritten in ECMAScript, which is thought to be easier to sandbox.
but what other choices do I have given that all my clients run Office?
All your clients also run IE. You can script IE's DOM with ECMAScript.
I probably missed something really stupid.Somewhat different computing paradigm. The VRML file contains "sensors" which trigger events that are processed by scripts. In other words, the data drives the code instead of the code driving the data.
It's the same paradigm HTML and Doom use. An HTML file contains "links" which trigger events that are processed by scripts. A WAD file contains "lines" which trigger events that are processed by scripts.
You are talking about two different things - hard drive space and internet bandwidth.
Yes, I am talking about two different things, and I want to emphasize that they are different. Hard drive space is nearly free; however, moving files from one hard drive to another hard drive isn't.
And besides, you can get most software on CD.
But what if the specific program I want isn't on a CD? Is there a service where I can enter my CC#, address, and the URLs of files accessible by Freenet, HTTP, or FTP, and have the files burnt onto a CD and sent to me?
Now, can you read the bold-faced words for me? Can you tell me if they're the same words?
I know "bandwidth" and "hard drive space" are not the same. Please replace the part of my comment with "However, this is not true of all resources on which the size of an application depends. For example, last-mile bandwidth has not yet become too cheap to meter."
Useful tip for Excel: Type all your formulas in lowercase. If Excel finds no syntax problem in your formula, Excel will uppercase it in the formula bar. This has been true since at least Excel 3. This is the kind of useful feature the lack of which leaves a bad taste in reviewers' proverbial mouths.
Some things just become too cheap to meter, and hard drive space is one of them.
If this statement were true, nobody would need gzip. However, last-mile bandwidth has not yet become too cheap to meter. It costs some people $200,000 to get high-speed access because they don't live in an area where the local telecommunication monopolies offer DSL or cable modem service. Ever try downloading the whole set of Windows service packs or a Debian apt-get upgrade over a telephone modem connection billed by the minute (as is the case in e.g. Europe)?
Basically, he said that Kwrite could often export DOC files OK in their experimental builds, but any kind of fancy embedding or something being wrong by literally one byte... would CRASH WORD!!
So when your user asks to export a .doc file, export a .rtf file named something.doc. Word knows what to do when it sees the RTF header instead of its own COM stream header.
given that Word has 90% (or whatever..huge %!) market dominance
On the Web, HTML has 99% market dominance. Plain ASCII .txt has five-nines market dominance; the 1e-3% is largely old mainframes still running EBCDIC.
many of these people know VBA
IOW, you're saying "You can take the VBAer out of VBA, but you can't take the VBA out of the VBAer." To show a VBA programmer that VBA/VBS is considered harmful, put her on Windows 9x (95, 98, ME), send her a memo infected with a macro virus, and then send her a VBS that claims to be another memo.
It's really not VBA so much as the lack of good file and memory protection in the host operating system. VB* just makes it too easy to write viruses and trojans, which has earned it the nickname "Virus Builder."
it helps to be able to send and receive office docs that other people can read.
And HTML+CSS2 doesn't meet your requirements why? Is it too hard to ask your clients to save their documents as HTML?
An office suite that can't read MS Office documents is just about as useful as a server operating system that can use nothing but floppy disks.
Most office suites can read MS Office documents, but not MS Office documents saved in the proprietary "serialized COM stream" format, which is almost like trying to open another app's files by reading core snapshots. If you save an MS Office document in a standard format such as text, basic RTF, or MHTML (HTML, CSS, and graphics in a single MIME file), free software will import it just fine.
"A server that can read only floppy disks"? Try "a server that can't read Apple II or C=64 floppy disks because they use a different type of modulation." Trying to read Word documents (which are intimately tied to MS COM) is almost like trying to read a hard drive by removing the platters and placing them in another housing (assuming cleanliness).
frames are a far better layout method!
If HTML frames are so good, why don't popular web sites such as Yahoo!, MSN, AOL.com, ebaY, and Slashdot use them? Those sites mostly use tables or CSS2 instead.
(On the other hand, you might be talking about a different kind of frame. If so, please fill me in instead of calling this comment flaimbait.)
"Last Tuesday's Financial Report" is much more readable than ... "fr0123.dat"
So call the file fr0123.dat, but design your filesystem to store a piece of metadata "icon_name" that can hold a longer filename. Use the filename for locating directories and files, but also show the icon name in file pickers. fr0123.dat (last Tuesday's financial report) is quick to type-select and easy to read. Several DOS TUI shells did this. Windows almost does this, except it always computes the filename from the icon name.
Does CSS-2 have headers
You mean the logo and ad banner at the top of every web page, or do you mean "headers per page with page numbering"?
footers
Again, the copyright notice at the bottom, or page numbering?
footnotes
HTML can easily do endnotes, and it can also do parenthetical citations, as you see Slashdot already starting to do with the bracketed hostname at the end of a link.
page-breaks
Manual page breaks cause trouble with the different font metrics of e.g. Times/TNR and Helvetica/Arial fonts from different vendors. The problem of pagination would be better handled by a layout engine that can say "This table must fit on one page" or "Do not break <p> elements such that only one line remains on a page."
As an AC pointed out, CSS2 Paged Media supports many of the features you mentioned; all you need to do is fund a project to implement it.
line-breaks?
I've always used <br /> to create line breaks in XHTML.
Lost productivity time due to malfunctioning import filters
You shouldn't be trying to import a COM serialization (Word's native document format since office97); it'd be almost like trying to import a core snapshot from a program running under debugger control.
How hard is it for Word users to save as text, RTF, or HTML? Most of these free software office suites import HTML and other standardized formats just fine.
What in the hell is the postercomment compression filter
When you post a comment, Slashcode compresses your comment to see if you just typed the same thing over and over to crapflood the database. Because of the way the developers implemented postercomment compression (the fraction remaining after compression must be greater than r, and r is a piecewise constant function of the comment length), the filter rejects all comments under about 100 bytes.
The reason is that he doesn't have the resources to handle all architectures. He recognizes that there are other people who are competent and have the machines needed to actually test the patches.
So why didn't somebody on the list tell pulsar what channels to go through? "Linus actively maintains only the x86 version, but here are the addresses of the maintainers of ports to other architectures" is better than "WONTFIX. Period."