I wonder if there's any chance at all of persuading IBM to release the source code for the OS/2 Workplace Shell... I gather that it's really rather nice. Substitute Rexx with Guile, keep the object model, add metadata in the filesystem in the same way as GNOME, and presto. No harm in feeding the changes back into the OS/2 version -- that'd maybe make it worth IBM's while?
[...the Broadway licensing debacle...]
XFree86 has become more important than any of the proprietary X servers, and its implementation would have become the defacto standard.
I wish I thought this was true. I think you're wrong though. People in the Linux and (to a lesser extent) the remainder of the `Free Software' movement seem to have a rather blinkered view on many X related things. Here are some examples:
Motif is the standard X toolkit (toolkits, I suppose). There's no getting away from it. GTK may look nice and be nicer to code, but Motif offers a whole lot more. JWZ posted a rant here some time about it (back in the days when it was possible to read all of slashdot...), and I think that he knows what he's talking about in this arena.
CDE is the standard desktop. Personally I think GNOME and/or KDE stands a fighting chance of taking this crown (ever tried adding an icon to the control panel on CDE? Yuck.)
XFree86 is important, but it's not that important. Even amongst Linux/*BSD users AcceleratedX and MetroX are very popular products. Move outside that, and you've got a huge number of different implementations. Neither Sun, Digital^WCompaq nor anyone else is going to be shipping anything `XFree86 compatible' any time soon: they're going to implement whatever the Open Group says is standard.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not doing down the importance of free software here. I'm trying to inject a bit of realism. Motif is better than you think it is (resources, anyone?). Thinking about it, XFree86 might just have a wider distribution than any other single X server, and I bet it'd be more likely to get upgraded than the rest of the X servers combined: they'll probably only get upgraded in sync with OS upgrades if at all. Nevertheless there is a huge inertia behind the installed base of non-Free X machines out there, and it wouldn't do to get carried away.
I seem to be rambling now, so I'll stop. Does anything I've said make any sense?
[...]
[the X window System] is an exception, but it's almost free and where's the choice? [...]
Hmm. Well, the X protocol standards are free, as far as I'm aware. There also happens to be some example implementation code out there, and some other stuff licenced under all sorts of agreements. There's nothing that I know of to stop someone from reimplementing X under any license that they please (although the Open Group briefly tried to take this right away with the Broadway release), but the consensus seems to be that the XFree86 implementation is free enough.
ObNameFlame: it's not `XWindows', it's `X', `X11' or the `X Window System', blah blah, read the X man page, etc.
I guess that had to go when MCOM disappeared -- didn't the logo have a big `M' on one of the panels? I'd have to agree though: apart from the purply colours it was a great spinner. In fact, that must be where the name `spinner' comes from: none of the other logos exactly spin, do they?
wavy lines of reminiscence
Ah, the good old days -- who remembers mcom.com now..? There's a web site somewhere with a large collection of old Netscrapes: I occasionally spark up one of the old ones to check pages look OK. Hey, and that's an interface widget I miss -- what about the button you could press to load images? That's come in very handy when I'm on the dialup.
[...]
The term comes from Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" via the famous paper "On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace" by Danny Cohen, USC/ISI IEN 137, 1980-04-01. [...]
I want to know how their special 3D instructions are going to help my shoddy internet connection. [...]
If you were foolish enough to have bought^W been sold a WinModem you might find that the addition of some DSP-ish `3D' instructions to your processor would significantly speed up your computer while you were using the net. snork
One thing all Unix have in common is a C compiler [...]
It's an option on recent Solaris releases. Which brings me on to another gripe: whenever I start work on a new Solaris box the first thing I have to do is spend time installing a decent toolset: a grep that doesn't break on lines longer than 4k, a vi that doesn't have all of the antique bugs, gcc, less, etc. One of the really nice things about Linux (and the BSDs, for that matter) is that the distributors take the time to keep the tools reasonably current.
Um, it annoys me too, and it's definitely ugly, but you might want to check out the references in a similar spelling flamewar on the Mozillazine -- Dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster both say it's a valid spelling. Personally I'm particularly irritated by `loose' used where the correct word is `lose'. Ob-spelling-mistake: so htere.
[...]
oh wait, FreeBSD doesn't run on an Alpha [...]
Yes it does. Ask Paul. Just because you can't buy it on a CD-ROM doesn't mean it's not running on someone's processor somewhere. No graphics support yet, mind you, but then you were talking about a server, weren't you..?
If you live in the UK you can do something about these ridiculously boneheaded proposals (`duh, if we can't think of anything we'll, er, um, we'll just take the stupidest option...') -- register at stand.org.uk and prepare to lobby your MP. If it's good enough for Alan Cox surely it's good enough for you?
Um, no. FOLDOC says that it comes from the ed (Ed is the Standard Editor!) command `"g/re/p", where re stands for a regular expression, to Globally search for the Regular Expression and Print the lines containing matches to it'. Some Unix commands are poorly named -- that's why most shells have support for aliasing./p> -- W.A.S.T.E.
So it doesn't mean very much without the graphics and that vital table, does it? Oh well, never mind. There's an interesting article in there on `two-photon microfabrication' which has been allegedly `used to demonstrate a scheme for three-dimensional [optical] data storage which permits fluorescent and refractive read-out, and the fabrication of three-dimensional micro-optical and micromechanical structures, including photonic-bandgap-type structures' (my emphasis), so it's worth buying anyway.
PS I tried all of their suggested knots last night, and the only one I could make look half-way decent was the good old four-in-hand. *shrug*
This is an extract of the full article, which is online at Nature's web site. Unfortunately you'll need a subscription to see it there, so why not try your local newsagent? The equations, tables, and a substantial (the most interesting) chunk have been removed from this version.
The simplest of conventional tie knots, the four-in-hand, has its origins in late-nineteenth-century England. The Duke of Windsor, as King Edward VIII became after abdicating in 1936, is credited with introducing what is now known as the Windsor knot, from which its smaller derivative, the half-Windsor, evolved. In 1989, the Pratt knot, the first new knot to appear in fifty years, was revealed on the front page of The New York Times.
Rather than wait another half-century for the next sartorial advance, we have taken a more formal approach. We have developed a mathematical model of tie knots, and provide a map between tie knots and persistent random walks on a triangular lattice. We classify knots according to their size and shape, and quantify the number of knots in each class. The optimal knot in a class is selected by the proposed aesthetic conditions of symmetry and balance. Of the 85 knots that can be tied with a conventional tie, we recover the four knots that are in widespread use and introduce six new aesthetically pleasing knots.
A tie knot is started by bringing the wide (active) end to the left and either over or under the narrow (passive) end, dividing the space into right (R), centre (C) and left (L) regions (Fig. 1a). The knot is continued by subsequent half-turns, or moves, of the active end from one region to another (Fig. 1b) such that its direction alternates between out of the shirt ( ) and into the shirt (). To complete a knot, the active end must be wrapped from the right (or left) over the front to the left (or right), underneath to the centre and finally through (denoted T but not considered a move) the front loop just made.
[...the main body of the article was here: go and buy this week's Nature if you want to read it...]
The symmetry of a knot, which is our first aesthetic constraint, is determined by the number of moves to the right minus the number of moves to the left,
where xi=1 if the ith step is , -1 if the ith step is and 0 otherwise. Because asymmetric knots disrupt human bilateral symmetry, we consider the most symmetric knots from each class, that is, the ones that minimize s.
Whereas the centre number and the symmetry s specify the move composition of a knot, balance relates to the distribution of these moves; it corresponds to the extent to which the moves are mixed. A balanced knot is tightly bound and keeps its shape. We use this as our second aesthetic constraint. The balance b may be expressed as
[...equation elided...]
and the winding direction i(i, i+1)=1, where i represents the ith step of the walk, if the transition from i to i+1 is clockwise, say, and -1 otherwise. Of those knots that are optimally symmetric, we desire that knot which minimizes b.
The ten canonical knot classes {h, } and the corresponding most aesthetic knots are listed in Table 1. The four named knots are the only ones, to our knowledge, to have received widespread attention, either published or through tradition. Here we introduce some unnamed knots.
The first four columns of Table 1 describe the knot class {h, }, whereas the remainder relate to the corresponding most aesthetic knot. The centre fraction/h provides a guide to the shape of a knot, with higher fractions corresponding to broader knots; along with the size h, it should be used in selecting a knot.
Some readers may notice the use of knots whose sequences are equivalent to those shown in Table 1 apart from transpositions of , groups, such as the use of LRCRLCT in place of the half-Windsor (T. P. Harte and L. S. G. E. Howard, personal communication); some will argue that this is the half-Windsor. Such ambiguity follows from the variable width of conventional ties (the earliest ties were uniformly wide). This makes some transpositions arguably favourable, namely the last , group in the knots {5, 2}, {6, 2}, {7, 2}, {8, 3} and {9, 3} in Table 1. We do not attempt to distinguish between these knots and their counterparts; this much we leave to the sartorial discretion of the reader.
Thomas M. Fink, Yong Mao Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge CB3 0HE, UK e-mail: tmf20@cus.cam.ac.uk
Motif is the standard. There's no getting away from it. Does GTK support X resources properly? Check out Netscape.ad some time to see how & why that sort of thing is useful. I'm not saying GTK isn't good, mind you, but there's a pre-existing wheel, and it's a wheel that's been attached to Unix's axles for a while now. Personally I don't really care: I primarily want Mozilla because there's no decent browser on Linux/Alpha yet.
[...]
All I ever get is a bunch of libraries with no executable. I just don't get it.
Go to the binaries area of mozilla.org and download a build. Look for apprunner, like the FAQ/README/whatever it's called, says. Run it. Presto, Mozilla. Well, sort of, anyway. If you still have trouble, try asking someone for an exact file to download, and exact commands to run.
Oh yeah, another thing, it might be a good idea to make a special Mozilla user: that way your existing Netscrape bookmarks, etc. can't get screwed up.
Hmm. It'll be interesting to compare Mozilla/GNOME to Opera/KDE in terms of resource usage. Somehow I doubt either of them's going to run on my 486/33 8Mb laptop, more's the pity. Perhaps I'll buy a Thinkpad (once IBM come up with a Windows-not-included package).
[...]
Some time has to be fixed as the standard, after all.
Typically, UTC (Universal Coordinated Time, a very close approximation to GMT) is taken as the standard time. I gather astronomers prefer sidereal time, possibly even in America. HTH.
They're at ae.pcd.usr.com. Does anyone have any USR speakerphone stuff working on Alpha Linux, by the way? It seems like it should be straightforward (in tcl/tk, for example), but I can't see anything on the net.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if there's any chance at all of persuading IBM to release the source code for the OS/2 Workplace Shell... I gather that it's really rather nice. Substitute Rexx with Guile, keep the object model, add metadata in the filesystem in the same way as GNOME, and presto. No harm in feeding the changes back into the OS/2 version -- that'd maybe make it worth IBM's while?
--
W.A.S.T.E.
I found a copy of that paper -- it's interesting reading: "On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace" by Danny Cohen, USC/ISI IEN 137, 1980-04-01.
--
W.A.S.T.E.
I wish I thought this was true. I think you're wrong though. People in the Linux and (to a lesser extent) the remainder of the `Free Software' movement seem to have a rather blinkered view on many X related things. Here are some examples:
Don't get me wrong: I'm not doing down the importance of free software here. I'm trying to inject a bit of realism. Motif is better than you think it is (resources, anyone?). Thinking about it, XFree86 might just have a wider distribution than any other single X server, and I bet it'd be more likely to get upgraded than the rest of the X servers combined: they'll probably only get upgraded in sync with OS upgrades if at all. Nevertheless there is a huge inertia behind the installed base of non-Free X machines out there, and it wouldn't do to get carried away.
I seem to be rambling now, so I'll stop. Does anything I've said make any sense?
--
W.A.S.T.E.
Hmm. Well, the X protocol standards are free, as far as I'm aware. There also happens to be some example implementation code out there, and some other stuff licenced under all sorts of agreements. There's nothing that I know of to stop someone from reimplementing X under any license that they please (although the Open Group briefly tried to take this right away with the Broadway release), but the consensus seems to be that the XFree86 implementation is free enough.
ObNameFlame: it's not `XWindows', it's `X', `X11' or the `X Window System', blah blah, read the X man page, etc.
--
W.A.S.T.E.
I guess that had to go when MCOM disappeared -- didn't the logo have a big `M' on one of the panels? I'd have to agree though: apart from the purply colours it was a great spinner. In fact, that must be where the name `spinner' comes from: none of the other logos exactly spin, do they?
wavy lines of reminiscence
Ah, the good old days -- who remembers mcom.com now..? There's a web site somewhere with a large collection of old Netscrapes: I occasionally spark up one of the old ones to check pages look OK. Hey, and that's an interface widget I miss -- what about the button you could press to load images? That's come in very handy when I'm on the dialup.
--
W.A.S.T.E.
FOLDOC says:
--
W.A.S.T.E.
If you were foolish enough to have bought^W been sold a WinModem you might find that the addition of some DSP-ish `3D' instructions to your processor would significantly speed up your computer while you were using the net. snork
s/dorks/weasels/
--
W.A.S.T.E.
Is There A Chapter Missing, Bill? BY CHRIS TAYLOR
--
W.A.S.T.E.
That you, pots?
--
W.A.S.T.E.
It's an option on recent Solaris releases. Which brings me on to another gripe: whenever I start work on a new Solaris box the first thing I have to do is spend time installing a decent toolset: a grep that doesn't break on lines longer than 4k, a vi that doesn't have all of the antique bugs, gcc, less, etc. One of the really nice things about Linux (and the BSDs, for that matter) is that the distributors take the time to keep the tools reasonably current.
--
W.A.S.T.E.
Um, it annoys me too, and it's definitely ugly, but you might want to check out the references in a similar spelling flamewar on the Mozillazine -- Dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster both say it's a valid spelling. Personally I'm particularly irritated by `loose' used where the correct word is `lose'. Ob-spelling-mistake: so htere.
--
W.A.S.T.E.
The distribution names come from characters in Toy Story, presumably because Bruce Perens works for Pixar.
--
W.A.S.T.E.
Oh, bugger it, Paul is at originative.co.uk , not originative.com. Still, he'll probably be thankful to not be spam-botted.
--
W.A.S.T.E.
Yes it does. Ask Paul. Just because you can't buy it on a CD-ROM doesn't mean it's not running on someone's processor somewhere. No graphics support yet, mind you, but then you were talking about a server, weren't you..?
--
W.A.S.T.E.
If you live in the UK you can do something about these ridiculously boneheaded proposals (`duh, if we can't think of anything we'll, er, um, we'll just take the stupidest option...') -- register at stand.org.uk and prepare to lobby your MP. If it's good enough for Alan Cox surely it's good enough for you?
--
W.A.S.T.E.
Um, no. FOLDOC says that it comes from the ed (Ed is the Standard Editor!) command `"g/re/p", where re stands for a regular expression, to Globally search for the Regular Expression and Print the lines containing matches to it'. Some Unix commands are poorly named -- that's why most shells have support for aliasing./p>
--
W.A.S.T.E.
So it doesn't mean very much without the graphics and that vital table, does it? Oh well, never mind. There's an interesting article in there on `two-photon microfabrication' which has been allegedly `used to demonstrate a scheme for three-dimensional [optical] data storage which permits fluorescent and refractive read-out, and the fabrication of three-dimensional micro-optical and micromechanical structures, including photonic-bandgap-type structures' (my emphasis), so it's worth buying anyway.
PS I tried all of their suggested knots last night, and the only one I could make look half-way decent was the good old four-in-hand. *shrug*
--
W.A.S.T.E.
The simplest of conventional tie knots, the four-in-hand, has its origins in late-nineteenth-century England. The Duke of Windsor, as King Edward VIII became after abdicating in 1936, is credited with introducing what is now known as the Windsor knot, from which its smaller derivative, the half-Windsor, evolved. In 1989, the Pratt knot, the first new knot to appear in fifty years, was revealed on the front page of The New York Times.
Rather than wait another half-century for the next sartorial advance, we have taken a more formal approach. We have developed a mathematical model of tie knots, and provide a map between tie knots and persistent random walks on a triangular lattice. We classify knots according to their size and shape, and quantify the number of knots in each class. The optimal knot in a class is selected by the proposed aesthetic conditions of symmetry and balance. Of the 85 knots that can be tied with a conventional tie, we recover the four knots that are in widespread use and introduce six new aesthetically pleasing knots.
A tie knot is started by bringing the wide (active) end to the left and either over or under the narrow (passive) end, dividing the space into right (R), centre (C) and left (L) regions (Fig. 1a). The knot is continued by subsequent half-turns, or moves, of the active end from one region to another (Fig. 1b) such that its direction alternates between out of the shirt ( ) and into the shirt (). To complete a knot, the active end must be wrapped from the right (or left) over the front to the left (or right), underneath to the centre and finally through (denoted T but not considered a move) the front loop just made.
The symmetry of a knot, which is our first aesthetic constraint, is determined by the number of moves to the right minus the number of moves to the left,
where xi=1 if the ith step is , -1 if the ith step is and 0 otherwise. Because asymmetric knots disrupt human bilateral symmetry, we consider the most symmetric knots from each class, that is, the ones that minimize s.
Whereas the centre number and the symmetry s specify the move composition of a knot, balance relates to the distribution of these moves; it corresponds to the extent to which the moves are mixed. A balanced knot is tightly bound and keeps its shape. We use this as our second aesthetic constraint. The balance b may be expressed as
and the winding direction i(i, i+1)=1, where i represents the ith step of the walk, if the transition from i to i+1 is clockwise, say, and -1 otherwise. Of those knots that are optimally symmetric, we desire that knot which minimizes b.
The ten canonical knot classes {h, } and the corresponding most aesthetic knots are listed in Table 1. The four named knots are the only ones, to our knowledge, to have received widespread attention, either published or through tradition. Here we introduce some unnamed knots.
The first four columns of Table 1 describe the knot class {h, }, whereas the remainder relate to the corresponding most aesthetic knot. The centre fraction /h provides a guide to the shape of a knot, with higher fractions corresponding to broader knots; along with the size h, it should be used in selecting a knot.
Some readers may notice the use of knots whose sequences are equivalent to those shown in Table 1 apart from transpositions of , groups, such as the use of LRCRLCT in place of the half-Windsor (T. P. Harte and L. S. G. E. Howard, personal communication); some will argue that this is the half-Windsor. Such ambiguity follows from the variable width of conventional ties (the earliest ties were uniformly wide). This makes some transpositions arguably favourable, namely the last , group in the knots {5, 2}, {6, 2}, {7, 2}, {8, 3} and {9, 3} in Table 1. We do not attempt to distinguish between these knots and their counterparts; this much we leave to the sartorial discretion of the reader.
Thomas M. Fink, Yong Mao
Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge CB3 0HE, UK
e-mail: tmf20@cus.cam.ac.uk
--
W.A.S.T.E.
Motif is the standard. There's no getting away from it. Does GTK support X resources properly? Check out Netscape.ad some time to see how & why that sort of thing is useful. I'm not saying GTK isn't good, mind you, but there's a pre-existing wheel, and it's a wheel that's been attached to Unix's axles for a while now. Personally I don't really care: I primarily want Mozilla because there's no decent browser on Linux/Alpha yet.
--
W.A.S.T.E.
Go to the binaries area of mozilla.org and download a build. Look for apprunner, like the FAQ/README/whatever it's called, says. Run it. Presto, Mozilla. Well, sort of, anyway. If you still have trouble, try asking someone for an exact file to download, and exact commands to run.
Oh yeah, another thing, it might be a good idea to make a special Mozilla user: that way your existing Netscrape bookmarks, etc. can't get screwed up.
--
W.A.S.T.E.
Hmm. It'll be interesting to compare Mozilla/GNOME to Opera/KDE in terms of resource usage. Somehow I doubt either of them's going to run on my 486/33 8Mb laptop, more's the pity. Perhaps I'll buy a Thinkpad (once IBM come up with a Windows-not-included package).
--
W.A.S.T.E.
I hope so, because that's the primary reason I'm trying it out. The fact that it's easy to separate free from non-free software also appeals.
I'm also encouraged to see this release put back: remember Red Hat 5.1? I certainly remember the bloody thing.
--
W.A.S.T.E.
Typically, UTC (Universal Coordinated Time, a very close approximation to GMT) is taken as the standard time. I gather astronomers prefer sidereal time, possibly even in America. HTH.
Oh yeah, this conversion table might come in handy some time.
--
W.A.S.T.E.
Well, you've already got Control, Shift and Alt on the keyboard, so the obvious use for the pedals is as Meta, Myper and Super modifiers.
M-x 1000 praise-emacs
Of course, if you've got one of those dodgy Windows keyboards you can always use those wacky extra keys instead -- remember, xkeycaps is your friend.
--
W.A.S.T.E.
They're at ae.pcd.usr.com. Does anyone have any USR speakerphone stuff working on Alpha Linux, by the way? It seems like it should be straightforward (in tcl/tk, for example), but I can't see anything on the net.
--
W.A.S.T.E.