Nope, there'll be a computer studies teacher. There's no guarantee that the computer studies teacher knows shit about the subject beyond teaching the kids how to use Word, Excel and Outlook.
When I was a lad (back in the "good old days") our computer studies teacher was a waste of space (and there was a lot of her occupying a lot of space!). The school computers back then were BBC B's - marvellous! Anyway, she knew shit about the whole thing, and basically had to be tutored from scratch on how to run a network by those of us pupils who knew about how it worked. I mean, not just unfamiliar with methods on that network, but with the whole concept.
More often than not, you'll find the computer studies teacher is someone who'd previously done maths or something at uni, and happens to know more than the other teachers about computers. This does not mean they're any damn good at it!
I realise I'm generalising here, but schools really can't afford a good sysadmin - hell, most can't afford teachers and books!
Book's got to be adapted, and we all know there's stuff that got cut. Spoilers would be saying exactly what was cut. Also which shots look fake (eg. in the Final Fantasy review telling ppl to keep looking at Aki's forearm/wrist - first person I've seen with square-sided arms!:-), etc. Basically stuff which'll spoil the film for ppl.
Even better. Take'em back, slap'em on the counter and say "These don't work". Enough ppl do this, the record shop will pass the word back, and either Universal will stop copy-protecting, or they'll die slowly. You can't sell CDs if no-one will buy them, never mind how good your hype machine is. If it ain't on the shelves in the shops in your town, you're not going to buy that CD, you'll get something else instead. Few ppl are keen enough on a singer (especially current pop stuff) that they're prepared to travel to find a shop which sells them. And if HMV, Virgin, WHSmith, Amazon etc all say "screw you, you're wasting our time and costing us money", that's gotta hurt.
Trouble with adding "token blacks" is that LotR is set in a medieval-type world. So there's not going to be a multi-ethnic Shire, any more than Britain in the Middle Ages was. The only way to cover this would be to make one of the major tribes black - elves, Riders of Rohan, whatever. But then note that black skin serves the single purpose of protection against sun, and the whole of LotR takes place in a cold-temperate area. For the sequel "Sauron does Africa", blacks certainly would feature. But for LotR, the only place they appear is amongst Sauron's crew (the Haradrim, IIRC).
You can't target something using satellite imaging. To hit this will require eyeball guidance, or laser illumination from a targetting device. Either a plane will have to have a continuous view of it to guide the missile in, or a ship will have to be within eyeball range and guide the fire in by eye. Makes it pretty difficult to hit.
And this is only going to be a proof-of-concept, remember. You reckon every last thing that Lckheed's Skunk Works comes up with is going into production? They'll try out lots of different stuff to see what works and learn lessons from that b4 they build one for real.
Also, please note that world politics have changed since 1950. The Russians are no longer automatically the enemies of the US. It's not necessary to have the strongest army in the world, you only need a stronger army than the person you think is most likely to attack you.
My credentials: I'm a software engineer writing code for car engine controllers, and before that I wrote code for power station control systems, and before that I was at uni with a final-year project writing a 2-D CAD package using Xt. So I'm not completely clueless. If I so chose, I could spend all my free time over the next few months learning how to put this stuff together from step 1.
Thing is, I don't so choose. My PC is a tool, in the same way as my soldering iron is. If I have the choice of spending every evening for the next 6 months learning how to do a kernel recompile, or spending the money and having time free to spend with my wife, I'll choose the MS option every time. Sorry, but I've got a life to live, and spending the time learning stuff that's ultimately irrelevant to my actual interests is less important to me than getting on with my other interests (for the record, my current spare-time project is an open-source, open-hardware universal chip programmer).
To take an example, is your car a kit car? If you buy a kit car from a manufacturer, you've got a box of bits which with the application of maybe 6 months work, you can turn into a serious performance sportscar that's incredibly reliable, and all for half the price of the real thing. If you're really dedicated, you can even buy yourself just a load of sheet metal and tubing and build it completely from scratch! But most ppl don't - they buy a Ford or a Honda or something like that. They're not paying for a better car, they're paying for a car which they can drive off the forecourt and will take them where they want to go. It depends whether your car is a way of life, and you're prepared to spend every waking hour underneath it getting your hands dirty, or whether it's just transport. Some production cars are a more pleasant means of transport, but it's still just a way of getting from A to B.
And that's how software is for most ppl - it's a tool to do a job. If the tool claims to do the job but doesn't (or if the tool is welded into the box!:-) then you're shooting yourself in the foot.
You own stock in Wendy's?! Now _there's_ a company busy screwing its customers.
I always thought Terry Pratchett had imagined the dreadful quality of Cut-My-Own-Throat Dibbler's merchanise. Then I ate at Wendy's, and realised that Pratchett had, if anything, understated the how bad it was...
But much of The Hobbit _is_ comedy. Bilbo's the resident clown, the dwarfs grumble and fight, Gandalf makes fun of everyone, and Bilbo and Smaug do a great double-act. Sure, there's plenty that's much darker as well, but there's a good deal of comedy in there. And the only time the dragon has to speak is when he's sparring with Bilbo, and that's funny enough. After that Smaug doesn't speak, he just whales on the mountain above the party and then on the village, and there's surely no problems getting an aggressive dragon animated.
You're right though, it would be a different movie, not part of the series. HP is basically designed for kids from 7-8 or so; LotR (from the look of it) will be 11+. I think The Hobbit would be more for the Harry Potter film's target age than the LotR group.
Grab.
Re:This is the sneaker of small vehicals...chill.
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 2
Sure, the low-speed bit is nice, but not essential. You want to stop on a bike, you take your foot off the pedals and put it on the ground. Problem solved.:-) I admit it's a nice solution for accessing library/storage stacks, and the whole gyro-and-active-control-system thing is way cool, but I still don't rate it for everyday transport.
Not having to step up? So it's the difference between a motor scooter and a proper motorbike? Big deal.
As for carrying, it simply isn't designed for that. Sure, you can carry 65lbs a long way in a rucksack - so can I (and have done, for weeks at a time). It's still a lot for someone to pull up a hill, especially if the hauler isn't particularly fit (and that's the target audience for this gizmo). And carrying 65lb up stairs with an unfriendly package is _difficult_. Could you hold your 65lb pack at arms-length whilst climbing up stairs? Bcos given the shape of this gadget, that's basically what you'd have to do. If you can then MUCH respect to you, but as someone who has obviously done some serious weights, you're not really representative of the typical population, are you? So train/subway into town and then scooter onwards isn't really an option, at least for stations with stairs. Escalators/elevators though would make this a more practical solution.
Writing code _should_ be a monkey job, given a decent design and a proper understanding of the language. That's why in large projects, the majority of ppl's time shouldn't be spent coding. I don't mean that they shouldn't _be_ _able_ to code, merely that they shouldn't have to hack their way out of trouble. To take an analogy, the best F1 mechanic is the one who never has to conduct emergency repairs on the car - he should only need to when someone else breaks it, and then he should be shit-hot.
Grab.
Re:This is the sneaker of small vehicals...chill.
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
If you're moving at 17mph, you're not a pedestrian. 17mph is a fair cycling speed. These are electrically-powered motor-scooters, and will be treated as such. If they currently manage to get through some loophole through being electrically-powered, chances are the loophole will be closed shortly. Or at least it will be after the first person is killed by some asshole riding at 17mph along a sidewalk - 65lbs of scooter and 150-200lbs of person travelling at 17mph don't just _stop_, even with gyros...
65lbs is _bloody_ _heavy_ - think typical all-up weight of gear carried by a soldier in one of those large rucksacks. You can't carry it in both hands for more distance than a quick stagger. Certainly carrying it up stairs is a non-starter.
Batteries won't last - it'll need an order of magnitude improvement in battery technology to crack that problem. This scooter will run out of power on the first hill. 17 miles on a level, smooth surface is no big deal - let's wait and see how much they get on a real surface, or on anything with an incline.
Battery-assist bikes are a cool idea - they can give you some help up the hill whilst you still pedal, so you're still supplying over 50% of the energy, and even if the battery dies then you can still carry on under your own power. And if it really goes wrong, you've got 30lb of bike and batteries to push home, on large wheels designed to naturally cope with obstacles. But once this scooter runs out of batteries, you're screwed, stuck, dead-in-the-water, etc. And you have to push 65lb of scooter home up that hill, with little piddling wheels in a configuration which makes it naturally unstable.
In other words, this is a less-good version of existing battery-powered bikes. Innovation, schminnovation.
In many chemical groups, the further _down_ the table you go, the more reactive an element is. So potassium is more reactive than sodium is more reactive than lithium. Nitrogen is top line and further left than oxygen, but nitrogen is significantly more stable than oxygen (drop lighted matches into tubs of oxygen and nitrogen, you'll find that the nitrogen one goes out while the oxygen one explodes). So don't trust Chemistry 101 to teach you everything you need to know about reactivity.
Hydrogen is not particularly dangerous - no more so than any other flammable substance. The main problem is keeping it confined, since hydrogen molecules are very small and so hydrogen gas can migrate through slightly-less-than-perfect seals.
Your problem in the school radiators is not due to it exploding due to ignition, but exploding due to pressure. You get a big build-up of gas in a sealed system, something's going to blow. Common sense, right?
Oxygen also reacts with metal, and so do most other gases. But planes don't fall out of the sky bcos of this. And "creating explosive compounds" when reacting with the metal is just plain wrong.
Keep up to date. 60 years back, in the investigation of the accident, they knew it wasn't the hydrogen that burned in the Hindenburg. Yet every time someone mentions hydrogen as a power source, some wazzock always brings up the Hindenburg as a reason not to do it. Just mark it down to "great urban legends of our time", I guess.
Duh-squared. Who mentioned getting energy from the sun? Say it with me again, "Fuel. Cell." Hydrogen is stored in tanks, ready for use. Solar panels are completely absent.
I didn't realise there was a game option for the polar bear to piss himself on the way down... Or does Tux leave a _yellow_ groove in this version?
Grab.
Re:wxWindows (slightly OT)
on
GTK-- vs. QT
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· Score: 2
Thanks man. I didn't notice on my last look at TrollTech's site that you could use Qt on Windows without spending the megabucks - I thought their Windows version was spend-the-money only. The non-commercial version of Qt should do the job nicely. Cheers.
I guess the only downside is the "requires Visual Studio" gotcha. I've got v5, so I hope that works. If not, it may be wxWindows instead.
Yep. IMO, this is the _worst_ user interface idea ever. Non-intuitive, impossible to read, and basically dumb.
Suggestions for who'd use it - well, any luser who likes "flashy graphics" over actually doing any work. If you currently have an animated background in Windows, you'll probably love this. The rest of us will keep going with 100% higher productivity.
It's a classic example of ppl doing something without thinking "is this a good idea?".
Agreed. But (a) you don't have to be honest:-), and (b) you are getting a seriously good bit of kit for the exchange. Since this is the only freely-available (as in "pay no money") schematic capture program I know of, there ain't much choice.
Grab.
Re:wxWindows (slightly OT)
on
GTK-- vs. QT
·
· Score: 2
Have you used FLTK or FOX as well? Any recommendations on the best out of those? I'm writing myself a front end to control the parallel port for some electronics stuff I'm doing, and I'm getting pissed off with being stuck in DOS.:-) A free toolkit to write a decent GUI interface would be ideal for me, especially if it was cross-platform.
Since I can't afford the megabucks for a QT Windows license, I guess I'm stuck with GTK, wxWindows, FLTK or FOX. So which one to go for?
Also, do any of these make it easy to do user-customisation of menus, toolbars etc, similar to current MS Office apps? Or docking windows?
When running Mozilla on my old P233, I could literally see the space for a menu blocked out, then the lines of text for menu options drawn to the screen one after the other. The only other time I've experienced anything with a user interface this slow is when I'm running X applications on servers in the States from our offices in the UK. Mozilla is simply unacceptably slow.
Seriously, I'm interested in this myself - I'm working on a universal chip programmer and I need a toolkit to do this. I'd rather not use VC!:-)
Grab.
Re:By your silly definition, Mr. Editor,
on
Freedom or Power?
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· Score: 2
I don't agree that you can dictate _all_ licensing terms. For example, "no resale" or "cannot be transferred to another machine" is just plain wrong.
But how to release it, that's absolutely up to the creator. If I release compiled code and someone wants to go through the trouble of reverse-engineering it, then they're free to try. But there's no reason for me to be forced to give out source code as well. I am currently working on something for which I have had to sign an NDA, so I am legally compelled to keep the source closed. If RMS becomes World President and chooses to make NDAs illegal then I may reconsider; until then, this will stay closed.
Don't you reckon it's all too obvious that RMS has never worked in a commercial environment? Sure, he's a fine programmer, but he's been in academia too long and got institutionalised. He's obviously lacking any experience of the outside world, I'm afraid.
Maybe so, but you need to be able to devote the same amount of time to your studies as a full-time software engineer would.
And who says that open-source projects are any good anyway? They may have good publicity, they may even work 100% of the time, but that doesn't make them good examples of software design. Nor is everyone who calls themselves a good software engineer actually worth listening to.
To learn on your own, you'll need many, many good books. A lecture course is distilled from many books about recent advances, from history of the subject, and from the the lecturer's experience. How can you be sure, as a beginner, that there isn't some essential area you've missed?
A doctor only requires a good mind as well, and an in-depth knowledge of illnesses and biology which can all be acquired from books. Your opinions on me offering medical advice without an MD after my name?
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, there'll be a computer studies teacher. There's no guarantee that the computer studies teacher knows shit about the subject beyond teaching the kids how to use Word, Excel and Outlook.
When I was a lad (back in the "good old days") our computer studies teacher was a waste of space (and there was a lot of her occupying a lot of space!). The school computers back then were BBC B's - marvellous! Anyway, she knew shit about the whole thing, and basically had to be tutored from scratch on how to run a network by those of us pupils who knew about how it worked. I mean, not just unfamiliar with methods on that network, but with the whole concept.
More often than not, you'll find the computer studies teacher is someone who'd previously done maths or something at uni, and happens to know more than the other teachers about computers. This does not mean they're any damn good at it!
I realise I'm generalising here, but schools really can't afford a good sysadmin - hell, most can't afford teachers and books!
Grab.
Book's got to be adapted, and we all know there's stuff that got cut. Spoilers would be saying exactly what was cut. Also which shots look fake (eg. in the Final Fantasy review telling ppl to keep looking at Aki's forearm/wrist - first person I've seen with square-sided arms! :-), etc. Basically stuff which'll spoil the film for ppl.
Grab.
Indeed, and for the same reason. We didn't fight them bcos of who they are, we fought them for what they did.
Grab.
Even better. Take'em back, slap'em on the counter and say "These don't work". Enough ppl do this, the record shop will pass the word back, and either Universal will stop copy-protecting, or they'll die slowly. You can't sell CDs if no-one will buy them, never mind how good your hype machine is. If it ain't on the shelves in the shops in your town, you're not going to buy that CD, you'll get something else instead. Few ppl are keen enough on a singer (especially current pop stuff) that they're prepared to travel to find a shop which sells them. And if HMV, Virgin, WHSmith, Amazon etc all say "screw you, you're wasting our time and costing us money", that's gotta hurt.
Grab.
"Black", usually.
Trouble with adding "token blacks" is that LotR is set in a medieval-type world. So there's not going to be a multi-ethnic Shire, any more than Britain in the Middle Ages was. The only way to cover this would be to make one of the major tribes black - elves, Riders of Rohan, whatever. But then note that black skin serves the single purpose of protection against sun, and the whole of LotR takes place in a cold-temperate area. For the sequel "Sauron does Africa", blacks certainly would feature. But for LotR, the only place they appear is amongst Sauron's crew (the Haradrim, IIRC).
Grab.
You can't target something using satellite imaging. To hit this will require eyeball guidance, or laser illumination from a targetting device. Either a plane will have to have a continuous view of it to guide the missile in, or a ship will have to be within eyeball range and guide the fire in by eye. Makes it pretty difficult to hit.
And this is only going to be a proof-of-concept, remember. You reckon every last thing that Lckheed's Skunk Works comes up with is going into production? They'll try out lots of different stuff to see what works and learn lessons from that b4 they build one for real.
Also, please note that world politics have changed since 1950. The Russians are no longer automatically the enemies of the US. It's not necessary to have the strongest army in the world, you only need a stronger army than the person you think is most likely to attack you.
Grab.
I guess I'll let myself be trolled...
:-) then you're shooting yourself in the foot.
My credentials: I'm a software engineer writing code for car engine controllers, and before that I wrote code for power station control systems, and before that I was at uni with a final-year project writing a 2-D CAD package using Xt. So I'm not completely clueless. If I so chose, I could spend all my free time over the next few months learning how to put this stuff together from step 1.
Thing is, I don't so choose. My PC is a tool, in the same way as my soldering iron is. If I have the choice of spending every evening for the next 6 months learning how to do a kernel recompile, or spending the money and having time free to spend with my wife, I'll choose the MS option every time. Sorry, but I've got a life to live, and spending the time learning stuff that's ultimately irrelevant to my actual interests is less important to me than getting on with my other interests (for the record, my current spare-time project is an open-source, open-hardware universal chip programmer).
To take an example, is your car a kit car? If you buy a kit car from a manufacturer, you've got a box of bits which with the application of maybe 6 months work, you can turn into a serious performance sportscar that's incredibly reliable, and all for half the price of the real thing. If you're really dedicated, you can even buy yourself just a load of sheet metal and tubing and build it completely from scratch! But most ppl don't - they buy a Ford or a Honda or something like that. They're not paying for a better car, they're paying for a car which they can drive off the forecourt and will take them where they want to go. It depends whether your car is a way of life, and you're prepared to spend every waking hour underneath it getting your hands dirty, or whether it's just transport. Some production cars are a more pleasant means of transport, but it's still just a way of getting from A to B.
And that's how software is for most ppl - it's a tool to do a job. If the tool claims to do the job but doesn't (or if the tool is welded into the box!
Grab.
You own stock in Wendy's?! Now _there's_ a company busy screwing its customers.
I always thought Terry Pratchett had imagined the dreadful quality of Cut-My-Own-Throat Dibbler's merchanise. Then I ate at Wendy's, and realised that Pratchett had, if anything, understated the how bad it was...
Grab.
But much of The Hobbit _is_ comedy. Bilbo's the resident clown, the dwarfs grumble and fight, Gandalf makes fun of everyone, and Bilbo and Smaug do a great double-act. Sure, there's plenty that's much darker as well, but there's a good deal of comedy in there. And the only time the dragon has to speak is when he's sparring with Bilbo, and that's funny enough. After that Smaug doesn't speak, he just whales on the mountain above the party and then on the village, and there's surely no problems getting an aggressive dragon animated.
You're right though, it would be a different movie, not part of the series. HP is basically designed for kids from 7-8 or so; LotR (from the look of it) will be 11+. I think The Hobbit would be more for the Harry Potter film's target age than the LotR group.
Grab.
Sure, the low-speed bit is nice, but not essential. You want to stop on a bike, you take your foot off the pedals and put it on the ground. Problem solved. :-) I admit it's a nice solution for accessing library/storage stacks, and the whole gyro-and-active-control-system thing is way cool, but I still don't rate it for everyday transport.
Not having to step up? So it's the difference between a motor scooter and a proper motorbike? Big deal.
As for carrying, it simply isn't designed for that. Sure, you can carry 65lbs a long way in a rucksack - so can I (and have done, for weeks at a time). It's still a lot for someone to pull up a hill, especially if the hauler isn't particularly fit (and that's the target audience for this gizmo). And carrying 65lb up stairs with an unfriendly package is _difficult_. Could you hold your 65lb pack at arms-length whilst climbing up stairs? Bcos given the shape of this gadget, that's basically what you'd have to do. If you can then MUCH respect to you, but as someone who has obviously done some serious weights, you're not really representative of the typical population, are you? So train/subway into town and then scooter onwards isn't really an option, at least for stations with stairs. Escalators/elevators though would make this a more practical solution.
Grab.
Writing code _should_ be a monkey job, given a decent design and a proper understanding of the language. That's why in large projects, the majority of ppl's time shouldn't be spent coding. I don't mean that they shouldn't _be_ _able_ to code, merely that they shouldn't have to hack their way out of trouble. To take an analogy, the best F1 mechanic is the one who never has to conduct emergency repairs on the car - he should only need to when someone else breaks it, and then he should be shit-hot.
Grab.
If you're moving at 17mph, you're not a pedestrian. 17mph is a fair cycling speed. These are electrically-powered motor-scooters, and will be treated as such. If they currently manage to get through some loophole through being electrically-powered, chances are the loophole will be closed shortly. Or at least it will be after the first person is killed by some asshole riding at 17mph along a sidewalk - 65lbs of scooter and 150-200lbs of person travelling at 17mph don't just _stop_, even with gyros...
65lbs is _bloody_ _heavy_ - think typical all-up weight of gear carried by a soldier in one of those large rucksacks. You can't carry it in both hands for more distance than a quick stagger. Certainly carrying it up stairs is a non-starter.
Batteries won't last - it'll need an order of magnitude improvement in battery technology to crack that problem. This scooter will run out of power on the first hill. 17 miles on a level, smooth surface is no big deal - let's wait and see how much they get on a real surface, or on anything with an incline.
Battery-assist bikes are a cool idea - they can give you some help up the hill whilst you still pedal, so you're still supplying over 50% of the energy, and even if the battery dies then you can still carry on under your own power. And if it really goes wrong, you've got 30lb of bike and batteries to push home, on large wheels designed to naturally cope with obstacles. But once this scooter runs out of batteries, you're screwed, stuck, dead-in-the-water, etc. And you have to push 65lb of scooter home up that hill, with little piddling wheels in a configuration which makes it naturally unstable.
In other words, this is a less-good version of existing battery-powered bikes. Innovation, schminnovation.
Grab.
This post is entirely incorrect.
In many chemical groups, the further _down_ the table you go, the more reactive an element is. So potassium is more reactive than sodium is more reactive than lithium. Nitrogen is top line and further left than oxygen, but nitrogen is significantly more stable than oxygen (drop lighted matches into tubs of oxygen and nitrogen, you'll find that the nitrogen one goes out while the oxygen one explodes). So don't trust Chemistry 101 to teach you everything you need to know about reactivity.
Hydrogen is not particularly dangerous - no more so than any other flammable substance. The main problem is keeping it confined, since hydrogen molecules are very small and so hydrogen gas can migrate through slightly-less-than-perfect seals.
Your problem in the school radiators is not due to it exploding due to ignition, but exploding due to pressure. You get a big build-up of gas in a sealed system, something's going to blow. Common sense, right?
Oxygen also reacts with metal, and so do most other gases. But planes don't fall out of the sky bcos of this. And "creating explosive compounds" when reacting with the metal is just plain wrong.
Grab.
Keep up to date. 60 years back, in the investigation of the accident, they knew it wasn't the hydrogen that burned in the Hindenburg. Yet every time someone mentions hydrogen as a power source, some wazzock always brings up the Hindenburg as a reason not to do it. Just mark it down to "great urban legends of our time", I guess.
Grab.
Duh-squared. Who mentioned getting energy from the sun? Say it with me again, "Fuel. Cell." Hydrogen is stored in tanks, ready for use. Solar panels are completely absent.
Grab.
"Don't eat yellow snow"?
I didn't realise there was a game option for the polar bear to piss himself on the way down... Or does Tux leave a _yellow_ groove in this version?
Grab.
Thanks man. I didn't notice on my last look at TrollTech's site that you could use Qt on Windows without spending the megabucks - I thought their Windows version was spend-the-money only. The non-commercial version of Qt should do the job nicely. Cheers.
I guess the only downside is the "requires Visual Studio" gotcha. I've got v5, so I hope that works. If not, it may be wxWindows instead.
Grab.
Yep. IMO, this is the _worst_ user interface idea ever. Non-intuitive, impossible to read, and basically dumb.
Suggestions for who'd use it - well, any luser who likes "flashy graphics" over actually doing any work. If you currently have an animated background in Windows, you'll probably love this. The rest of us will keep going with 100% higher productivity.
It's a classic example of ppl doing something without thinking "is this a good idea?".
Grab.
Well, what else is there to do in Wales? Fighting, singing, in-breeding and sheep pretty much covers your entertainment options... ;-)
(hope the moderators don't look this deep in the nesting! *grin*)
Grab.
Agreed. But (a) you don't have to be honest :-), and (b) you are getting a seriously good bit of kit for the exchange. Since this is the only freely-available (as in "pay no money") schematic capture program I know of, there ain't much choice.
Grab.
Have you used FLTK or FOX as well? Any recommendations on the best out of those? I'm writing myself a front end to control the parallel port for some electronics stuff I'm doing, and I'm getting pissed off with being stuck in DOS. :-) A free toolkit to write a decent GUI interface would be ideal for me, especially if it was cross-platform.
Since I can't afford the megabucks for a QT Windows license, I guess I'm stuck with GTK, wxWindows, FLTK or FOX. So which one to go for?
Also, do any of these make it easy to do user-customisation of menus, toolbars etc, similar to current MS Office apps? Or docking windows?
Grab.
When running Mozilla on my old P233, I could literally see the space for a menu blocked out, then the lines of text for menu options drawn to the screen one after the other. The only other time I've experienced anything with a user interface this slow is when I'm running X applications on servers in the States from our offices in the UK. Mozilla is simply unacceptably slow.
Grab.
Is this my first first post? ;-)
:-)
Seriously, I'm interested in this myself - I'm working on a universal chip programmer and I need a toolkit to do this. I'd rather not use VC!
Grab.
I don't agree that you can dictate _all_ licensing terms. For example, "no resale" or "cannot be transferred to another machine" is just plain wrong.
But how to release it, that's absolutely up to the creator. If I release compiled code and someone wants to go through the trouble of reverse-engineering it, then they're free to try. But there's no reason for me to be forced to give out source code as well. I am currently working on something for which I have had to sign an NDA, so I am legally compelled to keep the source closed. If RMS becomes World President and chooses to make NDAs illegal then I may reconsider; until then, this will stay closed.
Don't you reckon it's all too obvious that RMS has never worked in a commercial environment? Sure, he's a fine programmer, but he's been in academia too long and got institutionalised. He's obviously lacking any experience of the outside world, I'm afraid.
Grab.
Maybe so, but you need to be able to devote the same amount of time to your studies as a full-time software engineer would.
And who says that open-source projects are any good anyway? They may have good publicity, they may even work 100% of the time, but that doesn't make them good examples of software design. Nor is everyone who calls themselves a good software engineer actually worth listening to.
To learn on your own, you'll need many, many good books. A lecture course is distilled from many books about recent advances, from history of the subject, and from the the lecturer's experience. How can you be sure, as a beginner, that there isn't some essential area you've missed?
A doctor only requires a good mind as well, and an in-depth knowledge of illnesses and biology which can all be acquired from books. Your opinions on me offering medical advice without an MD after my name?
Grab.