I did an REU last summer analyzing various ecology-oriented datasets collected in beaver meadows. One of the things we used for this analysis was an application I wrote for visualization. 10 plots in the window, scrolled in unison, click to get details on each point, zoom-in and out &c. In any case, this got me excited, and I've been searching for an existing model of an ecological system for which I could create a plugin for my visualizer.
My setup for the 2D non-animated data browser I created: Squeak 3.0 with some classes borrowed (PlotMorph) and a bunch of others that I wrote myself.
I've not started my animation/modeling work yet, that will be something I'll be working on after finals for a fun project. But my software setup will be the same, but manipulating the information and thus changing the direction of the modeled and animated creatures in real-time.
I may do this using Alice3D, which is a 3D environment within Squeak, or just by using the native GUI toolkit of Squeak, Morphic, which really accommodates doing this kind of work. 2D animation is trivial. You just have each object have a #step method that applies whatever needed changes are required, and a #stepTime method that determines what the interval between updates is.
If you're a C/C++/Java bigot, Smalltalk may come as a bit of a shock. But if you're interested in the best tool for the job, and are looking for an intuitive way to do 2D modelling and animation, Squeak is definitely worth evaluation.
You can email me if there's any other questions you have about my work, or about how useful Squeak is for this kind of stuff- I'd be happy to help.
Again, you're having a problem figuring out that just because something isn't innovative, it doesn't mean that it's worthless. Samba is definitely a worthwhile recipient of praise, no doubt; however, it's not innovative. I've said this over and over again- what is so confusing?
Heh. Basic does indeed blow. But REALBasic makes it tolerable, and has some handy GL and sprite libs for games. There's no way to develop REALBasic on Windows, but it can target Win32 from te Mac.
Heh. I think the problem is that I'm a pragmatic computer scientist rather than a businessman or someone who mans the help desk. I don't throw around words like 'innovative' when they're not deserved. However, since it's easily forgotten around here, just because a project isn't innovative, it doesn't mean that it's bad, not useful, or an unneeded copy of someone else's work.
Admittedly, my area of study (or personal interest) isn't clustering, but if you're an expert, what are some things that Beowulf *does* do fundamentally different? The "just go check google" excuse is cop-out.
No, I don't dismiss them as 'simply derivative." That's your spin on it. They recycle old ideas, but do so in a way that makes them more accessible for more people. That's very commendable, but hardly innovative. I admit that my words have been antagonistic with people that cannot distinguish "innovative" and "good," or "not innovative" and "worthless."
Being emotional and knee-jerk about it doesn't change my opinion, or the facts. I'm sorry that you feel that my not praising something for what it is not is a crime, but I think that praising such projects for their actual strengths is far better.
Man, you do it too. Confuse my saying that Samba doesn't do anything innovative with "Samba sux0rz and M$ r00lz!!!" That's not what I'm saying.
Slightly improving on something doesn't count as innovation. Well, according to Microsoft it does occasionally, but is that what you really want? For all open source projects to be just like MS even in their propaganda?
That's great he did it with no help from MS (why would he get it from them?) and no budget. That's awesome, and open source and free software definitely can work. But just because it's useful it doesn't mean that it's innovative, it means that it works well. Samba has allowed connectivity between Unix and Windows for a huge heap of people. But that doesn't make it innovative, it makes it popular.
In this case, MS didn't innovate either. They didn't invent the SMB/CIFS format. But they did popularize it, and if it weren't for MS making it relevant, no one would care about Samba. There's no reason a person on an all-Linux network would use Samba any more than they would AppleTalk.
The very thing that makes Samba worthwhile is that MS popularized it. Sure, SMB/CIFS exists in LanMAN, OS/2 and others, but those are piddly in comparison with the install base of Windows which has driven the development of Samba. Maybe you're not comfortable with that, but perhaps you shouldn't be using Samba+Windows.
What in the slashkiddie brain equates "open source project doesn't innovate" with "Microsoft does?" There's not some cosmic dichotomy between OS/FS and MS, where is one doesn't innovate in a particular area the other one does by default.
I don't use any MS products, except for at a 6 hr/week job. I'm not sure why the string of MS products has to do with this.
Huh? Why would NeXTSTEP coming with a TeX distro make TeXShop a likely candidate to win this award? OmniDictionary didn't have it made in the shade, just because NS used to come with a cool version of webster's dictionary...
Is there any concrete information about this? Did Apple really license/buy it and integrate it into Sherlock 3, or does it just have a lot of the same features? Has there been an announcement about it from Apple or the guy who makes Watson, or is it just jibbajabber?
Yeah, I noticed that spaces in filenames really cornfuse it. But I indeed do love TeXShop. However, I'm not exactly sure why it's much cooler than using emacs21+xdvi, like I do when I'm at school under Solaris. I suppose it's nice to have the tables of environments and commands in TeXShop. In any case, it's nice to have a solution that is consistent with OS X itself.
> Nor would there be computers. Or much of the > industrialized world.
To an extent. The acedemic world came up with a large amount of the 'innovations' we use today. What else do you expect? Open software developers can innovate, certainly, but for the most part they choose to copy. No one can know what the world would be like with no corporations.
I don't miss the point, I think you do. I think you confuse the issue, and take "not innovative" to mean "crappy." A lot of people make that mistake, so it's not a big deal. That's not the case.
It doesn't matter if it's SMB, NFS, or anything else. An open source implementation of a standard created or propagated by some business isn't innovative. It's practical and cool, but it's nothing new.
Again, just because it's not innovative it doesn't mean it's not useful. Millions of people could use Samba- but what does that have to do with how innovative it is?
The post to which I replied was praising Samba as an example of how it doesn't just copy existing software/protocols, but that it innovates. Samba is not an example of this. It's a great example of software that works (and works better in many cases than the older commercial versions). That's important. Just because Samba does slightly better what someone else invented, it sure doesn't mean it's innovative.
I'd love to think about it, but you didn't back yourself up. What do LVS Project or Beowulf do that's fundamentally different? What sets them apart other than that they're free? There would be something quite a bit different about a Neon with a fusion engine, indeed. But Kia making an $7000 SUV that uses the same ideas as a GMC SUV isn't an innovation, it's just cheaper.
Christ. Are some moderators that jerky that they mark a guy as flamebait because he thinks it's difficult? Man, that's sad. And lame. But then again, this is Slashdot!
What else would you expect other than "if the files go away, so does your data?" You seem to criticize Quicken for keeping records in both memory and files. How else is there to do it? If I delete a Gnumeric spreadsheet file, the data is gone. How else would you have it?
Heh. Samba isn't an innovation. It is a typical case of "open source just copies the corporates." If it wasn't for "the corporates," there wouldn't be a need for Samba. Why would people be so hot about SMB compatibility if it weren't for MS's huge install base? They wouldn't be.
As far as the Linux Virtual Server Project and Beowulf, sorry to rain on your parade, but clustering was around for a long time before that. They're awesome projects, that bring clustering to us for free, but they do do anything that's really new.
We'll likely never see the same in the desktop market. Anything truly new innovative is usually dismissed, because it is different than the status quo. Joe Sixpack end-users don't want innovative, they want what they're used to. Which is why KDE and GNOME aim to be like Windows and to a lesser extent Mac OS. Again, this isn't a slam on them per se, they make Unix more accessible for a lot of people, but they are largely copies of old ideas. And that's fine. Because they make the old ideas Free and accessible, which is a good thing.
There are already innovative things out there, like Squeak and Self which use the Morphic GUI framework. Most people, especially most "open source" developers, dismiss it, because it's not like everything else they've used before it.
Re:Free as in upgrade or free is in not-free?
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Jaguar Reviewed
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· Score: 2
They were giving out 10.2 quietly for free, or are you talking about 10.1? They announced that 10.1 would be available in the retail stores, but if you're talking about 10.2, I find that hard to imagine, as I've not heard about anyone else picking one up there!
Not quite... I believe it was over other MS apps that they were creating for the new Mac OS. MS Word being one of them, that was quite popular, and existed only on the Mac at that time. But it may have been BASIC too, but by that year hadn't Apple's own AppleSoft BASIC become more popular?
Windows wasn't a misuse of Apple's GUI. It was a ripoff of it. "Misuse" implies that MS licensed it, and abused or overstepped their bounds for that license. But that isn't the case.
Apple didn't invent the GUI. Nor was it demonstrated by "some prof." The first GUI was created by Ivan Sutherland in 1963 while he was working on his PhD at MIT. By GUI, I'm talking about the first program with an interactive graphics display.
However, systems like Mac OS and the Windows GUI shell isn't just a GUI. What MS stole from Apple was the WIMP (windows, icons, menus and pointer), which is more than a babystep up for any sort of interactive graphics display.
The WIMP was first invented at XEROX Parc, as an internal research project as part of the development of the Smalltalk programming language. You can see a screenshot of a modern version of Smalltalk's similar environment here. The original looked pretty similar, but it had a BeOS-like tabbed window decoration, and was only in black and white. Incidentally, as a part of the Smalltalk project, OOP (the term, and the way we know it today- Simula had something similar a few years before). This was during the 70s, with the first commercially available WIMP system, Smalltalk-80 in 1980.
Apple didn't steal the WIMP, per se. They aquired engineers that worked on it from Xerox. Xerox didn't see it as commercially viable. It is a common misconception, that Apple stole it from Xerox, while Jobs snuck in covertly.
With them, Apple brought the first generally available commercial computer using a WIMP interface, the Lisa. Couple years later, MS had released Windows 1.0, a pretty substandard copy of Apple's aquired ideas, and what little they knew of Xerox's work.
Only for those who take what was said way out of proportion. Those same people have plenty of other things to get excited about, like "faces" and "pyramids" on Mars, that a little safety won't be much of a boon to them. How many initial space missions did they keep them in quarantine because they were afraid of cosmic moon virii?
Slashdot Mirror
I did an REU last summer analyzing various ecology-oriented datasets collected in beaver meadows. One of the things we used for this analysis was an application I wrote for visualization. 10 plots in the window, scrolled in unison, click to get details on each point, zoom-in and out &c. In any case, this got me excited, and I've been searching for an existing model of an ecological system for which I could create a plugin for my visualizer.
My setup for the 2D non-animated data browser I created: Squeak 3.0 with some classes borrowed (PlotMorph) and a bunch of others that I wrote myself.
I've not started my animation/modeling work yet, that will be something I'll be working on after finals for a fun project. But my software setup will be the same, but manipulating the information and thus changing the direction of the modeled and animated creatures in real-time.
I may do this using Alice3D, which is a 3D environment within Squeak, or just by using the native GUI toolkit of Squeak, Morphic, which really accommodates doing this kind of work. 2D animation is trivial. You just have each object have a #step method that applies whatever needed changes are required, and a #stepTime method that determines what the interval between updates is.
If you're a C/C++/Java bigot, Smalltalk may come as a bit of a shock. But if you're interested in the best tool for the job, and are looking for an intuitive way to do 2D modelling and animation, Squeak is definitely worth evaluation.
You can email me if there's any other questions you have about my work, or about how useful Squeak is for this kind of stuff- I'd be happy to help.
Just what I was wondering. Thanks!
Again, you're having a problem figuring out that just because something isn't innovative, it doesn't mean that it's worthless. Samba is definitely a worthwhile recipient of praise, no doubt; however, it's not innovative. I've said this over and over again- what is so confusing?
Heh. Basic does indeed blow. But REALBasic makes it tolerable, and has some handy GL and sprite libs for games. There's no way to develop REALBasic on Windows, but it can target Win32 from te Mac.
Heh. I think the problem is that I'm a pragmatic computer scientist rather than a businessman or someone who mans the help desk. I don't throw around words like 'innovative' when they're not deserved. However, since it's easily forgotten around here, just because a project isn't innovative, it doesn't mean that it's bad, not useful, or an unneeded copy of someone else's work.
Admittedly, my area of study (or personal interest) isn't clustering, but if you're an expert, what are some things that Beowulf *does* do fundamentally different? The "just go check google" excuse is cop-out.
No, I don't dismiss them as 'simply derivative." That's your spin on it. They recycle old ideas, but do so in a way that makes them more accessible for more people. That's very commendable, but hardly innovative. I admit that my words have been antagonistic with people that cannot distinguish "innovative" and "good," or "not innovative" and "worthless."
Being emotional and knee-jerk about it doesn't change my opinion, or the facts. I'm sorry that you feel that my not praising something for what it is not is a crime, but I think that praising such projects for their actual strengths is far better.
I agree. I don't mind it for iTunes though. QT is barely acceptable, but Sherlock with the brushed metal, blech.
Man, you do it too. Confuse my saying that Samba doesn't do anything innovative with "Samba sux0rz and M$ r00lz!!!" That's not what I'm saying.
Slightly improving on something doesn't count as innovation. Well, according to Microsoft it does occasionally, but is that what you really want? For all open source projects to be just like MS even in their propaganda?
That's great he did it with no help from MS (why would he get it from them?) and no budget. That's awesome, and open source and free software definitely can work. But just because it's useful it doesn't mean that it's innovative, it means that it works well. Samba has allowed connectivity between Unix and Windows for a huge heap of people. But that doesn't make it innovative, it makes it popular.
In this case, MS didn't innovate either. They didn't invent the SMB/CIFS format. But they did popularize it, and if it weren't for MS making it relevant, no one would care about Samba. There's no reason a person on an all-Linux network would use Samba any more than they would AppleTalk.
The very thing that makes Samba worthwhile is that MS popularized it. Sure, SMB/CIFS exists in LanMAN, OS/2 and others, but those are piddly in comparison with the install base of Windows which has driven the development of Samba. Maybe you're not comfortable with that, but perhaps you shouldn't be using Samba+Windows.
What in the slashkiddie brain equates "open source project doesn't innovate" with "Microsoft does?" There's not some cosmic dichotomy between OS/FS and MS, where is one doesn't innovate in a particular area the other one does by default.
I don't use any MS products, except for at a 6 hr/week job. I'm not sure why the string of MS products has to do with this.
Huh? Why would NeXTSTEP coming with a TeX distro make TeXShop a likely candidate to win this award? OmniDictionary didn't have it made in the shade, just because NS used to come with a cool version of webster's dictionary...
Is there any concrete information about this? Did Apple really license/buy it and integrate it into Sherlock 3, or does it just have a lot of the same features? Has there been an announcement about it from Apple or the guy who makes Watson, or is it just jibbajabber?
Yeah, I noticed that spaces in filenames really cornfuse it. But I indeed do love TeXShop. However, I'm not exactly sure why it's much cooler than using emacs21+xdvi, like I do when I'm at school under Solaris. I suppose it's nice to have the tables of environments and commands in TeXShop. In any case, it's nice to have a solution that is consistent with OS X itself.
> Nor would there be computers. Or much of the
> industrialized world.
To an extent. The acedemic world came up with a large amount of the 'innovations' we use today. What else do you expect? Open software developers can innovate, certainly, but for the most part they choose to copy. No one can know what the world would be like with no corporations.
I don't miss the point, I think you do. I think you confuse the issue, and take "not innovative" to mean "crappy." A lot of people make that mistake, so it's not a big deal. That's not the case.
It doesn't matter if it's SMB, NFS, or anything else. An open source implementation of a standard created or propagated by some business isn't innovative. It's practical and cool, but it's nothing new.
Again, just because it's not innovative it doesn't mean it's not useful. Millions of people could use Samba- but what does that have to do with how innovative it is?
The post to which I replied was praising Samba as an example of how it doesn't just copy existing software/protocols, but that it innovates. Samba is not an example of this. It's a great example of software that works (and works better in many cases than the older commercial versions). That's important. Just because Samba does slightly better what someone else invented, it sure doesn't mean it's innovative.
Heh, ok. That makes sense then. :)
I'd love to think about it, but you didn't back yourself up. What do LVS Project or Beowulf do that's fundamentally different? What sets them apart other than that they're free? There would be something quite a bit different about a Neon with a fusion engine, indeed. But Kia making an $7000 SUV that uses the same ideas as a GMC SUV isn't an innovation, it's just cheaper.
Just out of curiousity, why did you buy it if you weren't planning on using it?
Christ. Are some moderators that jerky that they mark a guy as flamebait because he thinks it's difficult? Man, that's sad. And lame. But then again, this is Slashdot!
What else would you expect other than "if the files go away, so does your data?" You seem to criticize Quicken for keeping records in both memory and files. How else is there to do it? If I delete a Gnumeric spreadsheet file, the data is gone. How else would you have it?
Heh. Samba isn't an innovation. It is a typical case of "open source just copies the corporates." If it wasn't for "the corporates," there wouldn't be a need for Samba. Why would people be so hot about SMB compatibility if it weren't for MS's huge install base? They wouldn't be.
As far as the Linux Virtual Server Project and Beowulf, sorry to rain on your parade, but clustering was around for a long time before that. They're awesome projects, that bring clustering to us for free, but they do do anything that's really new.
We'll likely never see the same in the desktop market. Anything truly new innovative is usually dismissed, because it is different than the status quo. Joe Sixpack end-users don't want innovative, they want what they're used to. Which is why KDE and GNOME aim to be like Windows and to a lesser extent Mac OS. Again, this isn't a slam on them per se, they make Unix more accessible for a lot of people, but they are largely copies of old ideas. And that's fine. Because they make the old ideas Free and accessible, which is a good thing.
There are already innovative things out there, like Squeak and Self which use the Morphic GUI framework. Most people, especially most "open source" developers, dismiss it, because it's not like everything else they've used before it.
That's his point, speedy. :)
They were giving out 10.2 quietly for free, or are you talking about 10.1? They announced that 10.1 would be available in the retail stores, but if you're talking about 10.2, I find that hard to imagine, as I've not heard about anyone else picking one up there!
Just found a good link with some of this stuff... see this.
Not quite... I believe it was over other MS apps that they were creating for the new Mac OS. MS Word being one of them, that was quite popular, and existed only on the Mac at that time. But it may have been BASIC too, but by that year hadn't Apple's own AppleSoft BASIC become more popular?
Windows wasn't a misuse of Apple's GUI. It was a ripoff of it. "Misuse" implies that MS licensed it, and abused or overstepped their bounds for that license. But that isn't the case.
Apple didn't invent the GUI. Nor was it demonstrated by "some prof." The first GUI was created by Ivan Sutherland in 1963 while he was working on his PhD at MIT. By GUI, I'm talking about the first program with an interactive graphics display.
However, systems like Mac OS and the Windows GUI shell isn't just a GUI. What MS stole from Apple was the WIMP (windows, icons, menus and pointer), which is more than a babystep up for any sort of interactive graphics display.
The WIMP was first invented at XEROX Parc, as an internal research project as part of the development of the Smalltalk programming language. You can see a screenshot of a modern version of Smalltalk's similar environment here. The original looked pretty similar, but it had a BeOS-like tabbed window decoration, and was only in black and white. Incidentally, as a part of the Smalltalk project, OOP (the term, and the way we know it today- Simula had something similar a few years before). This was during the 70s, with the first commercially available WIMP system, Smalltalk-80 in 1980.
Apple didn't steal the WIMP, per se. They aquired engineers that worked on it from Xerox. Xerox didn't see it as commercially viable. It is a common misconception, that Apple stole it from Xerox, while Jobs snuck in covertly.
With them, Apple brought the first generally available commercial computer using a WIMP interface, the Lisa. Couple years later, MS had released Windows 1.0, a pretty substandard copy of Apple's aquired ideas, and what little they knew of Xerox's work.
Too bad you were marked as a troll. Because you've a valid concern. :( Must have some of his secret NRA agents snooping around with mod points...
Only for those who take what was said way out of proportion. Those same people have plenty of other things to get excited about, like "faces" and "pyramids" on Mars, that a little safety won't be much of a boon to them. How many initial space missions did they keep them in quarantine because they were afraid of cosmic moon virii?
Did not Einstein say something along those lines once?