According to this article, SWT will work with gcj. I haven't yet read that it works with CygWin, but I haven't researched it in the last couple of months. (The sidebar mentions that cross-compiling on a linux host for a Windows target should be possible.)
"The bottom line is however good your tools are, however much you code your layouts to be '75% of this, stretched out as far as possible, but with 5% padding on each side' it's the pixels that finally matter. Certainly you shouldn't be doing Widget.setWidth(100px) but the user sees the pixels, not the percentages, and if the pixels don't line up between certain widgets, the user isn't going to be all that impressed with the look of the app. My point was if you develop specifically for one platform you can be assured that it's going to look a certain way no matter who views it.
Wow; I'm glad you're not coding my web site. The situation you describe is very much like web programming, using HTML/CSS/Javascript/whatever. Many web sites were coded using the "develop specifically for one platform" method you describe, and they do in fact look great on that platform. On the other hand, they are frequently ugly or downright broken on other platforms. In almost every instance, this problem could have been avoided without sacrificing appearance or functionality, if the developer had used the available tools effectively.
My experience with cross platform application GUIs has been very similar. It may take a bit more care, and better understanding of the toolkit, but it can be done well.
I live in the 510 area code, near San Francisco, where Pacific Bell tried to force 11 digit dialing on us a while back. Their reasoning went something like this:
1. We need more phone numbers. 2. We'll add a new "overlay" area code, meaning that it covers the same geographical area as the existing area code. 3. People won't remember to dial the new 1+areacode, because they're used to dialing only the last 7 digits when calling within their own geographical area. 4. We should therefore force customers to dial 1+areacode with every call, even when it's technically unnecessary, to train them into using the extra digits.
This, of course, was offensive to those of us in the area who consider ourselves less stupid than Pac Bell assumes. Many of us are perfectly capable of dialing the extra digits when necessary, even for local numbers, and were annoyed at the prospect of having arbitrary inconvenience forced onto us. As I remember it, enough of us complained that Pac Bell got the message, and changed their policy.
Oh, hooray! Now that I can illuminate the gutters between my keys, I (as well as my friends and family) can see with perfect clarity all the dust and hair that builds up in there. How delightful!
"The artistic side of Burning Man is such bullshit.
I don't know whether you have actually been to Burning Man, but suffice it to say that I had a very different experience than the one you suggest. New friendships were forged, and old ones were strengthened. I found amazing works of art, clever uses of technology, beautiful dance performances, impressive hand-built structures... I could go on and on.
I suppose you could spend all your time in the desert on drugs and fucking if that's what you were looking for, but you would be missing so much great stuff! (And probably failing to contribute to the festival as well.)
"lots of old terry cloth towels, to wipe off the dust"
You wiped the dust off? Heck, I stopped bothering after the first day. One gets used to the ever-present dust after a while. In fact, I sort of missed it when I returned home.
Is this an issue with avi files encoded with dolby digital (ac3) audio? Or, is it only an issue for dolby surround? Do you have any links to more details on the matter?
This is great and all, but does it come with drivers that will let me play my Dolby Digital (AC3) DVDs and AVI files, in full surround, using my 4 channel soundblaster live? So far, I haven't found any linux drivers that support all four separate channels on this very popular sound card.
Have you ever heard Epiphany Radio? It's a shoutcast station I used to listen to, until I ran into a 12 user limit imposed because the broadcasters couldn't afford the bandwidth to support many users. Thanks to peer to peer technology (the Gnutella protocol), I can once again listen to this station, via their peercast stream.
"The complete OS+tools should be called GNU/Linux (as RMS insists)."
Hogwash. Adding "GNU/" when communicating on the subject of Linux does absolutely nothing to improve communication. It's well known that GNU tools are used with every common distribution of Linux. Prepending additional letters and symbols to the word "linux" needlessly complicates communication. I'll consider doing it when non-GNU tools become common enough with Linux distros to cause an ambiguity.
"The underlying claim from your argument is that P2P solves a technological problem - namely, bandwidth limitation."
Please don't put words in my mouth. Even if that's almost what I wrote, it is not exactly what I wrote.
"You are trying to justify a technology by mating it to a perceived, likely non-existent problem or future benefit of indeterminate nature."
Next time you want to make such an absolute statement, you might want to do the research first.
The problem exists. I will give one example here: Epiphany Radio. This is a shoutcast station I used to listen to, until I ran into a 12 user limit imposed because the broadcasters can't afford the bandwidth to support many users. However, thanks to peer to peer technology, I can once again listen to this station, via their peercast stream.
This is an example of p2p being used to solve a real problem, without copyright infringement. It is a fact, whether or not you were aware of it or want to acknowledge it. It is quite possible that we will see more examples as time and technology progress.
I am not trying to justify anything. I am simply pointing out an observation, and a possibile eventuality.
"I am curious to hear stories of anybody who has at any point used gnutella to do anything but transmit copyrighted material in any substantial way."
I can't help noticing a similarity between copyrighted material on p2p, and porn on home video. Just as porn drove home video technology into becoming an industry and commodity, copyrighted stuff seems to be driving file sharing network technology toward becoming a viable distribution method. Right now, p2p seems to be approaching an adolescent stage of development, as it begins to address scalability issues and alternative applications like efficient radio broadcasts. This technology is becoming more useful, and as it does, I expect it will used to solve more problems than just swapping MP3s.
In other words, don't assume just because you see copyright infringement now, that the tech won't be something we all rely on for legal activity in the future.
"People see Swing and the default look and feel and instantly "feel" that the app is slower than windows. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In all reality, it is probably running faster than the Windows app"
Really? Are you sure? Last time I checked, which wasn't more than a couple months ago, Swing apps devoured memory at a ridiculous rate. If that "faster" Swing app of yours was running on the average memory-starved desktop system, it would probably slow to a crawl as the OS started paging memory to disk. I realize that RAM is cheaper than it has been in past years, but I'm not about to ask users to upgrade their systems in order to run my software.
...unless you're interested in films that simply aren't available for purchase or rent where you live. To me, the nice thing about ripped and compressed movies is that they can make their way overseas even when the distributors have decided that there's no overseas market for them.
It's nice that Internet Explorer works properly in Xandros, but what about updates? IE is among those Microsoft applications that perpetually needs updating for the sake of security. The normal way to do this is by running patch executables (hotfixes) and by using the Windows Update IE plugin. Has anyone determined whether these methods work on a Xandros system?
"I really believe that if the Most Important Person in the World(tm) himself, ie: the head of the RIAA, were to post a link to DeCSS, the rest of the RIAA would go after him like a herd of rabid bunnies on crack."
DeCSS is about DVDs. The RIAA is most widely associated with the music industry. Has the RIAA demonstrated yet that they care about DVDs or DeCSS?
Um, even if your premises were solid, I'd still disagree with your conclusion. I think feature competition between Linux and BSD will more likely benefit both operating systems than harm either one.
While I agree that most home systems don't have much use for an SMP system, you are making an overly broad generalization. When you say "desktops", you're including a whole lot of computers and their users, many of whom do more with their systems than browse the web and play games. Compiling software is one task that my computers regularly perform, for both work and personal projects, and let me tell you, SMP can greatly reduce the number of hours per week I spend waiting for my computer to finish. Video encoding is another task that some of my friends do at both home and work, and it greatly benefits from a second CPU. I'm sure there are other such tasks that, while not mainstream activities that mom and dad would be doing in the living room, are certainly common.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone know why the Memorex mvd-2028 is no longer listed on the list of players that support divx files? When I looked a week ago, it was listed.
According to this article, SWT will work with gcj. I haven't yet read that it works with CygWin, but I haven't researched it in the last couple of months. (The sidebar mentions that cross-compiling on a linux host for a Windows target should be possible.)
Wow; I'm glad you're not coding my web site. The situation you describe is very much like web programming, using HTML/CSS/Javascript/whatever. Many web sites were coded using the "develop specifically for one platform" method you describe, and they do in fact look great on that platform. On the other hand, they are frequently ugly or downright broken on other platforms. In almost every instance, this problem could have been avoided without sacrificing appearance or functionality, if the developer had used the available tools effectively.
My experience with cross platform application GUIs has been very similar. It may take a bit more care, and better understanding of the toolkit, but it can be done well.
I live in the 510 area code, near San Francisco, where Pacific Bell tried to force 11 digit dialing on us a while back. Their reasoning went something like this:
1. We need more phone numbers.
2. We'll add a new "overlay" area code, meaning that it covers the same geographical area as the existing area code.
3. People won't remember to dial the new 1+areacode, because they're used to dialing only the last 7 digits when calling within their own geographical area.
4. We should therefore force customers to dial 1+areacode with every call, even when it's technically unnecessary, to train them into using the extra digits.
This, of course, was offensive to those of us in the area who consider ourselves less stupid than Pac Bell assumes. Many of us are perfectly capable of dialing the extra digits when necessary, even for local numbers, and were annoyed at the prospect of having arbitrary inconvenience forced onto us. As I remember it, enough of us complained that Pac Bell got the message, and changed their policy.
Oh, hooray! Now that I can illuminate the gutters between my keys, I (as well as my friends and family) can see with perfect clarity all the dust and hair that builds up in there. How delightful!
"The artistic side of Burning Man is such bullshit.
I don't know whether you have actually been to Burning Man, but suffice it to say that I had a very different experience than the one you suggest. New friendships were forged, and old ones were strengthened. I found amazing works of art, clever uses of technology, beautiful dance performances, impressive hand-built structures... I could go on and on.
I suppose you could spend all your time in the desert on drugs and fucking if that's what you were looking for, but you would be missing so much great stuff! (And probably failing to contribute to the festival as well.)
"lots of old terry cloth towels, to wipe off the dust"
You wiped the dust off? Heck, I stopped bothering after the first day. One gets used to the ever-present dust after a while. In fact, I sort of missed it when I returned home.
Is this an issue with avi files encoded with dolby digital (ac3) audio? Or, is it only an issue for dolby surround? Do you have any links to more details on the matter?
This is great and all, but does it come with drivers that will let me play my Dolby Digital (AC3) DVDs and AVI files, in full surround, using my 4 channel soundblaster live? So far, I haven't found any linux drivers that support all four separate channels on this very popular sound card.
Have you ever heard Epiphany Radio? It's a shoutcast station I used to listen to, until I ran into a 12 user limit imposed because the broadcasters couldn't afford the bandwidth to support many users. Thanks to peer to peer technology (the Gnutella protocol), I can once again listen to this station, via their peercast stream.
"The complete OS+tools should be called GNU/Linux (as RMS insists)."
Hogwash. Adding "GNU/" when communicating on the subject of Linux does absolutely nothing to improve communication. It's well known that GNU tools are used with every common distribution of Linux. Prepending additional letters and symbols to the word "linux" needlessly complicates communication. I'll consider doing it when non-GNU tools become common enough with Linux distros to cause an ambiguity.
"The underlying claim from your argument is that P2P solves a technological problem - namely, bandwidth limitation."
Please don't put words in my mouth. Even if that's almost what I wrote, it is not exactly what I wrote."You are trying to justify a technology by mating it to a perceived, likely non-existent problem or future benefit of indeterminate nature."
Next time you want to make such an absolute statement, you might want to do the research first.The problem exists. I will give one example here: Epiphany Radio. This is a shoutcast station I used to listen to, until I ran into a 12 user limit imposed because the broadcasters can't afford the bandwidth to support many users. However, thanks to peer to peer technology, I can once again listen to this station, via their peercast stream.
This is an example of p2p being used to solve a real problem, without copyright infringement. It is a fact, whether or not you were aware of it or want to acknowledge it. It is quite possible that we will see more examples as time and technology progress.
I am not trying to justify anything. I am simply pointing out an observation, and a possibile eventuality.
"I am curious to hear stories of anybody who has at any point used gnutella to do anything but transmit copyrighted material in any substantial way."
I can't help noticing a similarity between copyrighted material on p2p, and porn on home video. Just as porn drove home video technology into becoming an industry and commodity, copyrighted stuff seems to be driving file sharing network technology toward becoming a viable distribution method. Right now, p2p seems to be approaching an adolescent stage of development, as it begins to address scalability issues and alternative applications like efficient radio broadcasts. This technology is becoming more useful, and as it does, I expect it will used to solve more problems than just swapping MP3s.In other words, don't assume just because you see copyright infringement now, that the tech won't be something we all rely on for legal activity in the future.
"So this is the best of all possible worlds."
Candide, anyone?"People see Swing and the default look and feel and instantly "feel" that the app is slower than windows. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In all reality, it is probably running faster than the Windows app"
Really? Are you sure? Last time I checked, which wasn't more than a couple months ago, Swing apps devoured memory at a ridiculous rate. If that "faster" Swing app of yours was running on the average memory-starved desktop system, it would probably slow to a crawl as the OS started paging memory to disk. I realize that RAM is cheaper than it has been in past years, but I'm not about to ask users to upgrade their systems in order to run my software....unless you're interested in films that simply aren't available for purchase or rent where you live. To me, the nice thing about ripped and compressed movies is that they can make their way overseas even when the distributors have decided that there's no overseas market for them.
"how long until we see a computer constructed using bong water?"
Maybe you should ask Ellen Feiss... rumor has it she's been using one.(Apologies to my Mac friends.)
"What I want to know is which DVD player he's using to view the [S]VCD's."
Several Apex, Sampo, and Pioneer models play CD-R(W) media.
It's nice that Internet Explorer works properly in Xandros, but what about updates? IE is among those Microsoft applications that perpetually needs updating for the sake of security. The normal way to do this is by running patch executables (hotfixes) and by using the Windows Update IE plugin. Has anyone determined whether these methods work on a Xandros system?
"I really believe that if the Most Important Person in the World(tm) himself, ie: the head of the RIAA, were to post a link to DeCSS, the rest of the RIAA would go after him like a herd of rabid bunnies on crack."
DeCSS is about DVDs. The RIAA is most widely associated with the music industry. Has the RIAA demonstrated yet that they care about DVDs or DeCSS?Um, even if your premises were solid, I'd still disagree with your conclusion. I think feature competition between Linux and BSD will more likely benefit both operating systems than harm either one.
While I agree that most home systems don't have much use for an SMP system, you are making an overly broad generalization. When you say "desktops", you're including a whole lot of computers and their users, many of whom do more with their systems than browse the web and play games. Compiling software is one task that my computers regularly perform, for both work and personal projects, and let me tell you, SMP can greatly reduce the number of hours per week I spend waiting for my computer to finish. Video encoding is another task that some of my friends do at both home and work, and it greatly benefits from a second CPU. I'm sure there are other such tasks that, while not mainstream activities that mom and dad would be doing in the living room, are certainly common.
When I first glanced at this one, I thought it was entitled P2P _Privacy_ Prevention Act. Heh. My mistake. :)
Oh, wait...
A quick Google search reveals these tidbits on DHT vulnerabilities:
Security Considerations for Peer-to-Peer Distributed Hash TablesAchilles Heel of the DHT
I get the same error with Internet Explorer. I suspect it's because I have persistent cookies disabled.