The SF Dune series may not have been great, but one has to admit it was a helluva lot better than that giant feces of a movie that was the original Dune film adapatation.
Well, Dune was incredible. And (at least IMO) the House prelude books are pretty great too. The Legends series is looking like it'll be interesting too, the Butlerian Jihad does have me wondering.
But I've also read Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, and God Emperor of Dune as well as the begining of Heretics of Dune. They've gotten worse and worse each book, but I would love to know if they got better for one of the last books. Would there be a reward for me to keep on reading if I thought God Emperor made it seem like Frank started drinking heavily before writing outlines? I am fascinated by the Dune universe, but I couldn't bring myself to keep wasting my time with the original Dune novels.
There is no direct PDF reader for the Newton. I have a PyObjC script on my Mac (which should be converted to ObjC or Squeak) that converts from PDFs to JPEGs. The Newton asks the Mac for a conversion, gets a web page filled with the images, which is savable by Newt's Cape as an ebook for later zooming and annotation.
I was doing this on the J720 as well (but from within Squeak) and still do, depending. But now I have the PocketPC Acrobat on the Jornada, thanks to some handy PPC compat libs.
I rely on the bus (in addition to my feet and bike- no car) to get everywhere around town. Carrying around paper schedules was a pain, and sometimes they'd go out of date without you knowing.
Luckily, my city has all the bus schedules on line. For me, it was a simple matter of downloading the PDFs of the schedules and putting them on my PDA, which is usually a Newton 2100, but also a Jornada 720 (for research).
I've been meaning to write a small app in Squeak for Dynapad that does something similar to this hardware solution. It has all the data for the all the bus routes in town (as well as the Greyhound route I take to my parents house), and gives you available bus times out of a given location. Creating a multi-route iternerary would be pretty easy as well.
Unfortunately, I've not gotten around to this yet. The code side of it would be pretty straightforward and IMO fun to write. But the Duluth Transit Authority has opted to only have the schedules online in paper form or as PDF- which would mean I'd have to do some serious PIA data entry. It would be a pain to maintain, looking over a lot of numbers to find a couple of minor changes in bus schedule.
So, I figured I could dick aroudn with pdf2txt or pdf2html converters, parsing from there. But parsing never is fun to me, in any language, so I've kind of not bothered, just dealing with the plain old PDFs for now.
No, that's not making the point clear. I was asking why having a strong, biased preference was a good thing, not how your language preference influences your poems.
Hitler killed people of many religion, races, creeds and sexual orientations, but he preferred killing Jews. I don't see how that illustrates the idea that strong personal prefs are good than your natural language example does.
Pfft, this isn't flamebait. Sure, I don't like Java, is any sort of dissent always some sort of troll? If you like the new for(), be an adult and rebute me, tell me why adding new syntax that is inconsistent with the rest of the language is a good thing. Give me a good argument, and I'd be happy to concede that you're right.
The fact of the matter is that it's a show of the weakness of Java that to add any feature- however small- the syntax has to be extended. More mature languages in the same/similar class as Java can achieve this without adding a new syntactical element everytime some little feature is requested. Smalltalk and Lisp manage fine. Hell, even languages that may be arguable as less mature as Java like Python and Perl can manage to add features without adding new syntax.
Personal biases are, imho, always a good thing, as long as it's not BASIC. (sorry, couldn't resist)
Color me goofy, but is the joke the whole line, or just the BASIC part? I thought it was just the BASIC part, in which case: how do you figure that personal biases are a good thing? I always thought of them as slightly-negative or possibly neutral, something which simply is.
But Java has that C-like syntax which grabs the average programmers. Not to mention billions in hype. It's not about true capability, but backwards compatability in ways of thinking.:)
The new for kind of blows. Why bother with inventing another chunk of syntax (furthering Java's complication and ugliness) rather than use existing metaphors?
If only Java had anonymous functions, it would be easier to make it a tolerable language. One could always use anonymous classes, but who would rather type 5 lines instead of one to achieve the same thing with the new for? It would be a lot more conceptually consistent, but I guess the JCP doesn't want to give in and make Java a good language.
Re:Cocoa + Distributed Objects
on
.NET or CORBA?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Yes, it is a part of OpenStep. I wouldn't say that this erases hardware concerns though- asking them to migrate to OpenStep would be far more silly (and quite possibly far more expensive) than the switch to Mac OS X, even with new Mac hardware. However, you may have meant to suggest a switch to Linux with GNUstep. And yup, GNUstep supports the same DO API, and it's working now.
Cocoa + Distributed Objects
on
.NET or CORBA?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
DISCLAIMER: You may not be interested in this combo because of a prejudice or (more likely) an existing hardware investment.
Mac OS X + Cocoa may be an option worth exploring. Users of the Objective-C language and the Cocoa libraries find it quite excellent. I'm primarily a Smalltalk programmer, used to the very supportive development environment and mature and full-featured library provided by it... Which generally makes me hard to impress. However, in a couple dives into OS X application development, I have to say that it is a very nice setup.
Part of the default Cocoa libraries is a pretty mature Distributed Object framework.
Then again, for something as simple as distributed objects and a UI, I have everything that I need to do that already in Squeak. I can use protocols like XML-RPC or SOAP in this setting, or a faster protocol that is more specific to Smalltalk.:)
Exactly my point! At least someone has the intelligence to see that point (however poorly made), rather than figure that I am claiming FreeBSD is GPL simply because I use both of those words in the same post.:)
First, read the post to which I replied. Then go read what I said. While I didn't feel the need to go out and point at it, I was discussing the point the original author made- GPL software (like the Linux kernel) vs. non-GPL stuff like FreeBSD. He said that this was a reminder of the non-Freeness of FreeBSD. It's not. This could happen on a GPL project. Read it slowly if need be.
Linux may have its fair share of users, but it could do a helluva lot better if there weren't 100 different distros with no functional difference. Oh, I forgot- real h4ck3rz love inconsistency and redundant work!
Just as 5.0 was coming out and there seemed to be this general quietness about freedom and the GPL and RMS bashing seemed to be at an acceptable high point the good lads at FreeBSD go and remind us all again what open and freedom is all about.
What does this have to do with GPL or its attitude? Linus could just as easily bar kernel patch submission from some individual who he thought was causing problems.
This problem individual could just as easily keep on running with his own special kernel, with all these swell changes Linux kept rejecting. Same goes for FreeBSD- you can get the source, and this guy, or anyone, could keep on writing new code, patching their setup and giving the away the code.
Just because a project is GPL doesn't mean that it'll take code from anyone, or have a CVS server to which anyone could commit. From where would you get this silly idea?
Com'mon, how is that a troll? Because I'm not praising Linux? Man, what a sad comment on Slashdot users. I guess it's unfair to generalize from a handful or zealouts, but it happens a lot. Half of the posts I make that may critisize Linux in some fashion get marked as trolls. The above post I made was in all truth, and relevant considering the parent to it.
You may not agree, but it doesn't make the post a troll. Since it's very plainly not a troll, why not be an adult and reply intelligently?
I came to a similar dillemma: I had amassed an amount of email which was pushing me over disk quota at my university. I could've deleted the email or my web page. Didn't sound like a good solution. The email wasn't critically important, but not worthless enough to just delete. But most of them also aren't so important that I need to read one of these old message too often. I was using pine on a Uni's Unix machine.
I was long wanting to switch to the email client in Squeak, Celeste, as I spend most of my time in Squeak. I even telnet'd from it to access my email from within a client in Squeak.
So, I setup Celeste to get my mail via POP. Had it download all my messages in my INBOX. Then, I downloaded the mail folders from the Solaris machine. Gzip and ftp. Celeste has the ability to import messages from Unix mailbox files. So I did that, into respective folders/categories. All done, less fuss than reading through the replies in this Ask Slashdot.:)
Most clients can read mbox format.
If you can't get to your raw mbox files, it would be easy to write a script to pull out messages via IMAP, and then output them to Unix mbox format. Then import. I was working on a similar thing before figuring out I could simply download my mbox files. I had written most of a script that went to the mail server, iterated over each mail category and saved it to the mail database. Squeak provides a nice MailDB class for it's own mail database format, so it was less than a dozen lines of code.
It sounds like you need to give OS X a try. Would you judge Windows by version 3.1? Would you judge Linux by version 1.2? They were the first versions of those operating systems I tried out, but I've got over it.
You can't expect someone like this to do try something to rational. At least not most of them at that state of mental development. I think a lot of this is fueled by the same kind of fear Windows users have in relation to Linux. These Linux users are (rightly so) attached to Linux, emotionally. They see OS X as a threat to Linux and what it provides. They have friends dumping their scatter-brained Linux machines and getting Macs.
I know this because I too was like this when I was a kid. Not to the point where I tried to hard to spread FUD, fortunately. I was lucky enough to mature to the point where I wanted a computer for what it could do for me, how it could make the work I do easier, rather than having a 1337 machine against which I had to fight against.
This post was a bit harsh, for that I apologize. I guess I'm a bit fed up with Leenucks h4ck3rz who are so full of bullshit that they haven't been able to notice that the puck mouse is history, and that a Mac with a floppy drive can format a disk. WOWZA!
My problem with Linux user interfaces is that they're usually BAD, not with the way they look. The UIs which have made the most sense to me can be found in NeXTSTEP and Newton OS, two decidedly not very pretty GUI appearances. I wouldn't care if the Mac OS Classic or X looked like Motif (*shudder*), if it presents a more consistent front to me, I would like it.
Most Linux users are used to thinking of shitty UIs as OK or GOOD. But they're used to that. I was once that way as well. My hodge-podge Linux system was mostly usable, but at the time I didn't know how my computer could help me work, rather than making me help it work at all.
X11 under OS X on my G3/500 iBook is pretty fast. It was actually quite a bit faster than X11 under Debian Linux 3 on the same machine. This is both under Darwin straight up, rootless X11, as well as rooted X11 side-by-side with Quartz/Aqua. I wouldn't be surprised if some tweaking would've sped it up on Debian though- I imagine CoreGraphics in Darwin/OS X runs at a higher priority than X does on Linux.
I don't know if I'd say that. I've had the same amount of absolute crashes on Linux that I've had with OS X: one. In OS X, I was running the public beta, and on Linux, I was running a very beta X11 server.
If you look at "stability" as a function of total time spent recovering from the effects of some OS or application glitch divided by total productivity, I'd say OS X wins. I'd chalk this up largely to the more mature APIs in OS X rather than BSD vs Linux, however.
This is a great example of the kind of attitude a lot of Linux users have. You want a machine that works as well as a Mac OS X machine? Install a GTK+ and E theme!
No matter how much lipstick you put on your grandma, her plumbing still doesn't work like it used to. Likewise, even with a shitty Aqua theme on a windowing system that can't even handle alpha without employing one of many hacks may give you those "pretty stoplight buttons," it sure as hell doesn't give you a clean or consistent interface. It's the same one you had before, exempting a different pixmap in your window decorations.
An interface is a lot more than the color your buttons are. It goes a lot deeper, into the way you interact with the computer.
I already have a reason to never own a windows machine again. I call it "Mr. iBook." Hell- this "Mr. iBook" of which I speak has also given me a reason to never waste my time with Linux again. Imagine that! Two birds with one beautiful white stone!
pudge is a Mac user himself. And being a Slashdot editor, I bet he even knew about Taco and Hemos. So, you see, it was supposed to be funny. Maybe not yuk-it-up funny, but all the same.
That's why there exists wxWindows, which provides such a wrapper. You still have to download different binaries for each system, but you can't get much better without having applications written in cross-platform, bytecode-based languages like Smalltalk or Python.
Some projects do use wxWindows. Other people take the approach of seperating model and view well, and simply redoing the GUI for each environment on which they want the app to run. Depending on the nature of the project, this can be very easy or very hard.
Slashdot Mirror
The SF Dune series may not have been great, but one has to admit it was a helluva lot better than that giant feces of a movie that was the original Dune film adapatation.
Well, Dune was incredible. And (at least IMO) the House prelude books are pretty great too. The Legends series is looking like it'll be interesting too, the Butlerian Jihad does have me wondering.
But I've also read Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, and God Emperor of Dune as well as the begining of Heretics of Dune. They've gotten worse and worse each book, but I would love to know if they got better for one of the last books. Would there be a reward for me to keep on reading if I thought God Emperor made it seem like Frank started drinking heavily before writing outlines? I am fascinated by the Dune universe, but I couldn't bring myself to keep wasting my time with the original Dune novels.
There is no direct PDF reader for the Newton. I have a PyObjC script on my Mac (which should be converted to ObjC or Squeak) that converts from PDFs to JPEGs. The Newton asks the Mac for a conversion, gets a web page filled with the images, which is savable by Newt's Cape as an ebook for later zooming and annotation.
I was doing this on the J720 as well (but from within Squeak) and still do, depending. But now I have the PocketPC Acrobat on the Jornada, thanks to some handy PPC compat libs.
I rely on the bus (in addition to my feet and bike- no car) to get everywhere around town. Carrying around paper schedules was a pain, and sometimes they'd go out of date without you knowing.
Luckily, my city has all the bus schedules on line. For me, it was a simple matter of downloading the PDFs of the schedules and putting them on my PDA, which is usually a Newton 2100, but also a Jornada 720 (for research).
I've been meaning to write a small app in Squeak for Dynapad that does something similar to this hardware solution. It has all the data for the all the bus routes in town (as well as the Greyhound route I take to my parents house), and gives you available bus times out of a given location. Creating a multi-route iternerary would be pretty easy as well.
Unfortunately, I've not gotten around to this yet. The code side of it would be pretty straightforward and IMO fun to write. But the Duluth Transit Authority has opted to only have the schedules online in paper form or as PDF- which would mean I'd have to do some serious PIA data entry. It would be a pain to maintain, looking over a lot of numbers to find a couple of minor changes in bus schedule.
So, I figured I could dick aroudn with pdf2txt or pdf2html converters, parsing from there. But parsing never is fun to me, in any language, so I've kind of not bothered, just dealing with the plain old PDFs for now.
No, that's not making the point clear. I was asking why having a strong, biased preference was a good thing, not how your language preference influences your poems.
Hitler killed people of many religion, races, creeds and sexual orientations, but he preferred killing Jews. I don't see how that illustrates the idea that strong personal prefs are good than your natural language example does.
Pfft, this isn't flamebait. Sure, I don't like Java, is any sort of dissent always some sort of troll? If you like the new for(), be an adult and rebute me, tell me why adding new syntax that is inconsistent with the rest of the language is a good thing. Give me a good argument, and I'd be happy to concede that you're right.
The fact of the matter is that it's a show of the weakness of Java that to add any feature- however small- the syntax has to be extended. More mature languages in the same/similar class as Java can achieve this without adding a new syntactical element everytime some little feature is requested. Smalltalk and Lisp manage fine. Hell, even languages that may be arguable as less mature as Java like Python and Perl can manage to add features without adding new syntax.
Personal biases are, imho, always a good thing, as long as it's not BASIC. (sorry, couldn't resist)
Color me goofy, but is the joke the whole line, or just the BASIC part? I thought it was just the BASIC part, in which case: how do you figure that personal biases are a good thing? I always thought of them as slightly-negative or possibly neutral, something which simply is.
But Java has that C-like syntax which grabs the average programmers. Not to mention billions in hype. It's not about true capability, but backwards compatability in ways of thinking. :)
The new for kind of blows. Why bother with inventing another chunk of syntax (furthering Java's complication and ugliness) rather than use existing metaphors?
If only Java had anonymous functions, it would be easier to make it a tolerable language. One could always use anonymous classes, but who would rather type 5 lines instead of one to achieve the same thing with the new for? It would be a lot more conceptually consistent, but I guess the JCP doesn't want to give in and make Java a good language.
Yes, it is a part of OpenStep. I wouldn't say that this erases hardware concerns though- asking them to migrate to OpenStep would be far more silly (and quite possibly far more expensive) than the switch to Mac OS X, even with new Mac hardware. However, you may have meant to suggest a switch to Linux with GNUstep. And yup, GNUstep supports the same DO API, and it's working now.
DISCLAIMER: You may not be interested in this combo because of a prejudice or (more likely) an existing hardware investment.
:)
Mac OS X + Cocoa may be an option worth exploring. Users of the Objective-C language and the Cocoa libraries find it quite excellent. I'm primarily a Smalltalk programmer, used to the very supportive development environment and mature and full-featured library provided by it... Which generally makes me hard to impress. However, in a couple dives into OS X application development, I have to say that it is a very nice setup.
Part of the default Cocoa libraries is a pretty mature Distributed Object framework.
Then again, for something as simple as distributed objects and a UI, I have everything that I need to do that already in Squeak. I can use protocols like XML-RPC or SOAP in this setting, or a faster protocol that is more specific to Smalltalk.
Exactly my point! At least someone has the intelligence to see that point (however poorly made), rather than figure that I am claiming FreeBSD is GPL simply because I use both of those words in the same post. :)
First, read the post to which I replied. Then go read what I said. While I didn't feel the need to go out and point at it, I was discussing the point the original author made- GPL software (like the Linux kernel) vs. non-GPL stuff like FreeBSD. He said that this was a reminder of the non-Freeness of FreeBSD. It's not. This could happen on a GPL project. Read it slowly if need be.
Linux may have its fair share of users, but it could do a helluva lot better if there weren't 100 different distros with no functional difference. Oh, I forgot- real h4ck3rz love inconsistency and redundant work!
Just as 5.0 was coming out and there seemed to be this general quietness about freedom and the GPL and RMS bashing seemed to be at an acceptable high point the good lads at FreeBSD go and remind us all again what open and freedom is all about.
What does this have to do with GPL or its attitude? Linus could just as easily bar kernel patch submission from some individual who he thought was causing problems.
This problem individual could just as easily keep on running with his own special kernel, with all these swell changes Linux kept rejecting. Same goes for FreeBSD- you can get the source, and this guy, or anyone, could keep on writing new code, patching their setup and giving the away the code.
Just because a project is GPL doesn't mean that it'll take code from anyone, or have a CVS server to which anyone could commit. From where would you get this silly idea?
Com'mon, how is that a troll? Because I'm not praising Linux? Man, what a sad comment on Slashdot users. I guess it's unfair to generalize from a handful or zealouts, but it happens a lot. Half of the posts I make that may critisize Linux in some fashion get marked as trolls. The above post I made was in all truth, and relevant considering the parent to it.
You may not agree, but it doesn't make the post a troll. Since it's very plainly not a troll, why not be an adult and reply intelligently?
I came to a similar dillemma: I had amassed an amount of email which was pushing me over disk quota at my university. I could've deleted the email or my web page. Didn't sound like a good solution. The email wasn't critically important, but not worthless enough to just delete. But most of them also aren't so important that I need to read one of these old message too often. I was using pine on a Uni's Unix machine.
:)
I was long wanting to switch to the email client in Squeak, Celeste, as I spend most of my time in Squeak. I even telnet'd from it to access my email from within a client in Squeak.
So, I setup Celeste to get my mail via POP. Had it download all my messages in my INBOX. Then, I downloaded the mail folders from the Solaris machine. Gzip and ftp. Celeste has the ability to import messages from Unix mailbox files. So I did that, into respective folders/categories. All done, less fuss than reading through the replies in this Ask Slashdot.
Most clients can read mbox format.
If you can't get to your raw mbox files, it would be easy to write a script to pull out messages via IMAP, and then output them to Unix mbox format. Then import. I was working on a similar thing before figuring out I could simply download my mbox files. I had written most of a script that went to the mail server, iterated over each mail category and saved it to the mail database. Squeak provides a nice MailDB class for it's own mail database format, so it was less than a dozen lines of code.
It sounds like you need to give OS X a try. Would you judge Windows by version 3.1? Would you judge Linux by version 1.2? They were the first versions of those operating systems I tried out, but I've got over it.
You can't expect someone like this to do try something to rational. At least not most of them at that state of mental development. I think a lot of this is fueled by the same kind of fear Windows users have in relation to Linux. These Linux users are (rightly so) attached to Linux, emotionally. They see OS X as a threat to Linux and what it provides. They have friends dumping their scatter-brained Linux machines and getting Macs.
I know this because I too was like this when I was a kid. Not to the point where I tried to hard to spread FUD, fortunately. I was lucky enough to mature to the point where I wanted a computer for what it could do for me, how it could make the work I do easier, rather than having a 1337 machine against which I had to fight against.
This post was a bit harsh, for that I apologize. I guess I'm a bit fed up with Leenucks h4ck3rz who are so full of bullshit that they haven't been able to notice that the puck mouse is history, and that a Mac with a floppy drive can format a disk. WOWZA!
My problem with Linux user interfaces is that they're usually BAD, not with the way they look. The UIs which have made the most sense to me can be found in NeXTSTEP and Newton OS, two decidedly not very pretty GUI appearances. I wouldn't care if the Mac OS Classic or X looked like Motif (*shudder*), if it presents a more consistent front to me, I would like it.
Most Linux users are used to thinking of shitty UIs as OK or GOOD. But they're used to that. I was once that way as well. My hodge-podge Linux system was mostly usable, but at the time I didn't know how my computer could help me work, rather than making me help it work at all.
X11 under OS X on my G3/500 iBook is pretty fast. It was actually quite a bit faster than X11 under Debian Linux 3 on the same machine. This is both under Darwin straight up, rootless X11, as well as rooted X11 side-by-side with Quartz/Aqua. I wouldn't be surprised if some tweaking would've sped it up on Debian though- I imagine CoreGraphics in Darwin/OS X runs at a higher priority than X does on Linux.
I don't know if I'd say that. I've had the same amount of absolute crashes on Linux that I've had with OS X: one. In OS X, I was running the public beta, and on Linux, I was running a very beta X11 server.
If you look at "stability" as a function of total time spent recovering from the effects of some OS or application glitch divided by total productivity, I'd say OS X wins. I'd chalk this up largely to the more mature APIs in OS X rather than BSD vs Linux, however.
This is a great example of the kind of attitude a lot of Linux users have. You want a machine that works as well as a Mac OS X machine? Install a GTK+ and E theme!
No matter how much lipstick you put on your grandma, her plumbing still doesn't work like it used to. Likewise, even with a shitty Aqua theme on a windowing system that can't even handle alpha without employing one of many hacks may give you those "pretty stoplight buttons," it sure as hell doesn't give you a clean or consistent interface. It's the same one you had before, exempting a different pixmap in your window decorations.
An interface is a lot more than the color your buttons are. It goes a lot deeper, into the way you interact with the computer.
I already have a reason to never own a windows machine again. I call it "Mr. iBook." Hell- this "Mr. iBook" of which I speak has also given me a reason to never waste my time with Linux again. Imagine that! Two birds with one beautiful white stone!
pudge is a Mac user himself. And being a Slashdot editor, I bet he even knew about Taco and Hemos. So, you see, it was supposed to be funny. Maybe not yuk-it-up funny, but all the same.
That's why there exists wxWindows, which provides such a wrapper. You still have to download different binaries for each system, but you can't get much better without having applications written in cross-platform, bytecode-based languages like Smalltalk or Python.
Some projects do use wxWindows. Other people take the approach of seperating model and view well, and simply redoing the GUI for each environment on which they want the app to run. Depending on the nature of the project, this can be very easy or very hard.