Frighteningly enough, that might actually be possible. If you were to port Emacs to Movitz Emacs could become an operating system in actuality rather than as a joke!
"If you want a common widget set below the toolkits, implement a common widget set which the various toolkits can all use from a library."
If you do that you might as well extend the X server protocals. Foreign Function Interfaces are painful and difficult - the byte communication method of X is far more promising because you get to ignore the quirks of translating between languages. What language would you write the library in so that all languages could use it?
I'm not into web work too much, but I think there are some other lisp guys that are. The UnCommon Web guys might be a good place to start: http://common-lisp.net/project/ucw/
I'm actually not so much into graphics, I just want a good backend for McCLIM so I can implement a portable lisp based GUI for Axiom. I get my X server ideas because FFIs are painful and the only real alternative is the low level clx. Hence, I wish we had a high level clx:-).
Been a while since I checked out PicoGUI. Had promise, but the focus didn't seem to be on challenging X so much. Too bad in a way.
You don't have to implement all widgets in the server - the same X primiatives and some higher level ones will be available same as always. I'm just talking about common elements - if everybody's doing the same thing, stick it in the server and do it once. Rather than replacing the low level X protocal (which I'm not suggesting) I'm suggesting we add other options for COMMON WIDGETS - stuff found in virtually every toolkit out there. Pull down menus, scrollbars, buttons, checklists, etc. Then, if the client's X server supports it, they can communicate at a MUCH higher level, saving both bandwidth and implementation logic in toolkits. Themeing can also be done at a server level. If an older server connects, the X server just sends it the same information in lower level language. Think of it as a form of compression - like pumping the X protocal through a compression algorithm before shipping it over the net. If the other end knows how to decompress it, it works great. If not, you can send the exact same information the same way, and since the server has full information it can do this translation no problem.
If someone wants a custom widget, that's fine - they just build it out of primitatives like normal, and that's how it gets sent. I'm not saying we should get rid of the current protocal, I'm saying we should expand it to handle things which are now established as staples in all toolkits and standardize them once and for all. Common look and feel, by way of the server.
I think he makes a good point that the clean solution is always better than trying to support older decisions that turned out to be less than ideal. But the problem is, users aren't interested in details. Details don't matter. They only want something to work, and keep working.
Most modern interface elements are implemented by most toolkits. I think a solution would be to take the concept of the X server, which implements low level functionality available via byte stream communications, and implement much higher level concepts using the same idea. Rather than linking in libraries (and tying your graphical concepts to one language - C for GTK, C++ + custom weirdness for QT) have an X server analog that can speak in terms of Menus, Canvas w/ Scrollbar, Button, Text Input, Text Output, etc. Instead of Xlib (or clx in Lisp) you would have a much, much higher level communication protocal. Language bindings for C, C++, what have you would build on the primatives and higher level widigets provided by this X-server plus, and themes and other details would no longer be different because of what language binding you happened to be using. Translating code between languages would also be much easier, since concept names in different languages could all build off of the standard in the server.
Look sometime at the problems people have writing Python bindings for QT. I think the idea of a high level graphical object server with server side theme configuration would take us a long way towards a common desktop look and feel.
As far as I can tell, what they are calling "bottles" is simply storing a "per application" Windows environment. Hopefully this will be implemented in Wine too, because it has tremendous possibilities. Configuration tweaks needed for each application can be bundled with its windows environment, conflicting applications that even a real Windows box couldn't run on the same machine could be made to work... amazing. Instead of hunting for an install CD for a 10 year old application, you could could just copy and paste the virtual Windows environment to another machine or off of a backup CD. No fuss, no missing install keys - it would all be there.
This might someday make Wine not just a way to migrate from Windows to Linux but a way to keep alive old Windows programs that have had all source code and other relevent information lost. Take the old Windows box, copy the binaries over to a Linux wine install, copy over whatever files and settings the application needs when you test it, make a copy of the old Windows hard drive in case you missed something, and you now have not just an old application stuck on a single unmaintainable machine but a "program in a box" scenario. Much worse than having a properly maintained program of course, but a way to keep vital software working much longer than would otherwise be possible. (Yes, I know - disk image mirrors and other proper backups and record storage can also be a big help, but things like that don't always go as planned.)
That's actually almost as interesting as the OS itself - I take it from your comment it can build itself? A completely separate toolchain from the normal Linux toolchain which is also minimalist and BSD licensed... wow. Is minix3 actually something you could scale up to "real world" usage or does its focus on being a teaching OS sort of limit that?
These are just three more text files unless they are used to release source code. Obviously the last one isn't of interest - will they ever use the other two for anything non-trivial?
Reading the article, I'm made aware of two things: 1) I lack the training to be able to argue about this properly 2) I would like to know why exactly "a 'method of compensating a manager' that involved several steps of calculating a proper compensation based on performance criteria and then transferring payment to the manager" is not an abstract idea? What exactly does constitute an abstract idea? This sounds like a particular application of mathematical and economic principles, which I wouldn't have thought patentable at all. Anybody have a link to some reference materials that might help with these questions, without requiriring several years obtaining a law degree?
Making the US healthcare industry and supporting industries a private, for profit enterprise was an epic disaster, particularly in the department of research and IP. Companies will only pursue solutions to medical problems they think they will be able to have exclusive control over, in order to ensure they can profit from them. PROFIT??? This is people's HEALTH we are talking about here! Profit shouldn't even be part of this discussion. It's about the people you are trying to help, period. End of discussion. Motivation problem solved. The only questions should be 1) what holds the best promise for helping people 2) how do we produce it safely and 3) how do we produce it inexpensively. National ownership and public right to all medical information should be an absolute no brainer. Don't give them the excuse of needing to make up research costs to have high prices. Fund all medical research Federally, and base it solely on potential healing merit and educational benefit. Peoples' health should not have a price tag on it - people are the only reason a society exists at all. That's like saying its not cost effective to evacuate poor people from a potential disaster area, since they aren't important to the economy and are easily replaced. (Note to the hysterical - that's an example of an argument as wrong on as many levels as I could make it wrong, not an actual argument I'm making.) We don't stand for that, and I don't think we should stand for medical research and production costs being dictated by profit potential analysis.
I have heard the arguments before that medical research moves faster because of the profit motive, but I don't believe it and would have to see hard evidence to believe it. Medical research is like anything else - individuals are motivated by a paycheck and perhaps the chances to help people/do interesting work. COMPANIES are motivated by profits, and I don't believe corporate thinking has been a net positive to the medical world in any sense. Quite the reverse, actually.
I don't know how I could sleep nights knowing I ran a company that had (for example) decided to pursue less promising but potentially profitable cures instead of building off of public domain but very promising work. As a human being it would haunt me.
Here are some examples of profit-motive-as-only-motive issues (I'm sure many more could be found in a few minutes):
And now patenting genes. Great. In case there weren't enough issues out there slowing things up, we now add potential patent litigation as yet another reason not to pursue ideas. Because, thanks to the profit motive we know that barring enormous financial resources people will avoid these areas rather than risk having to fork out for patent licensing fees. What a messed up system. Personally I think the nation's system needs to be totally ripped out, all the way from the admistrative system to the drug companies, and redone with one and ONLY one focus - how can they help those who need it. Individuals working in the system can still be paid well - individual incentive is fine since it draws smart people, but the companies contribute nothing beneficial to the people needing help and should be cut out of the loop.
"A well justified emotional reaction. If someone came to you and said, "You're a moron, so I'm going to start telling you what's true," don't you think you'd be a little upset?"
Probably, but in this context the proper response would be (to both parts) "prove it."
Has this gone through peer review yet? xxx.lanl.gov is not a peer review process. They do say it has been submitted to a journal, and for something of this importantance I think we should wait until the process has done its thing and checked whether or not this is sound.
I'm guessing no, at the moment. More to the point, and more interesting - would it be worth it for the former customers of Maya on $PLATFORM to pool their resources and hire enough developers to make Blender into what it needs to be to be a Maya killer?
It depends. I would have been more impressed if she refused to make an argument to (I'm assuming Microsoft was indeed at fault) bury the goal of justice in favor of a victory for her client. Maybe I'm wrong but I see a lawyer's first duty as the supporter of justice, and second to make the best argument for a client that is compatible with justice. I grant that this doesn't seem to be the current thought, but I regard that as a flaw in the system. Getting a guilty client off should be seen as shameful - it's a failure of the system, and the lawyer participated in it. People seem to think that the justice system is like an arena - you fight well enough and you can beat the law. That's a very scary way to view things, IMHO.
Just a curosity question (I don't know much about the details of this process) but I was wondering if it might be more efficient to replace the battery component of a solar car with a fuel cell arrangement, and have any excess solar power available split water into hydrogen and oxygen? http://www.nrel.gov/hydrogen/proj_production_deliv ery.html#split I know batteries are a major source of weight issues, but I don't know how H2O splitting compares in terms of energy recovery to battery storage. Anybody happen to know if the tradeoff could be advantageous?
I don't know about Novell, so perhaps they do have too many people, but I must say I'm rather alarmed the article mentions R&D being overstaffed and no other department. Most companies don't go all out hiring R&D folks to begin with - that's one of the things that makes Google so unusual - so they don't tend to be overstocked in R&D in the first place. I wonder if this fits in with the recent trend in corporate America to view R&D as a luxury and money sinkhole. Since the benefits don't show up next quarter, chop them off to look better in short term costs. Never mind five or ten years down the road when you need new products to stay competitive and don't have any.
Does ANYBODY in the US think long term anymore and still have influence in corporate or government circles? Maybe they're all thinking that if everybody else is also dumping R&D, everyone will still be competitive, and it will only be the consumer that gets stuck with static technology and gradually decreasing quality. (Price wars with no quality differential do that, since consumers tend to be bad in the short term at distinguishing good products from bad.)
Will Cinelerra CVS update to work off of 2.0?
on
Cinelerra 2.0 Released
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· Score: 4, Informative
The default Cinelerra is quirky enough that gentoo doesn't want to install it by default - is this fixed in 2.0?
Cinelerra-cvs http://cvs.cinelerra.org/ is a fork which incorporates a variety of patches (apparently the original Cinelerra is developed by a single author, so cinelerra-cvs tries to avoid the bottlenecks that often result). cinelerra-cvs can be installed on gentoo, and once one switches to the Bluedot theme it's not half bad to look at:-).
as well as the more comedy oriented shows. I can't get into most of the comedy Adult Swim offerings (but then I don't really care even for Family Guy, sans Stewie - Futurama is about they only comedy I really go for) but I do enjoy a lot of their anime shows. I wonder if their contracts for distribution of anime limit what they can do here? Given how many episodes Inuyasha has I would have thought it would be a prime candidate to offer streams of - if you miss an episode it can be a looooong time before it repeats. BigO I would like to see return (although I did crack and get the DVDs for that one). Cowboy Bebop is an obvious one except I expect they know everyone will tune in to see it anyway (but for goodness sake get it out of the 1:30am timeslot! Even geeks sleep eventually.)
All in all, I must say I have been very pleasantly surprised by Adult Swim - it has definitely broadened my ideas about cartoons - they really AREN'T just for kids. I suppose that's obvious to this crowd, but I didn't know much about anime...
So anyway, hat's off to Adult Swim for daring to try something new and different in the US. Keep 'em coming!
Even if a "perfect" X server is implemented, that's not the end of the battle to give the Linux desktop a facelift. It's the beginning.
Toolkits running on top of X are just as important to Desktop Goodness as the Xserver is, and they can only be updated AFTER the X situation is stable. GTK and QT are the obvious ones, and I'm sure work will proceed on them, but I suspect such changes would be significant enough that they would warrant a major release, and lots of work to fully integrate new X features as opposed to just bolting them in.
Frankly, I think the best way to proceed would be to take the useful parts of Gnome and assorted GTK apps and port them over to the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, once they are stable. Enlightenment DR17 is probably the only environment available with the potential to pass itself off as a next generation desktop for Linux and make it stick. Can you imagine what Gimp would be like written on top of the EFLs? (drool). Of course, that's too much work to expect it to actually happen on a large scale, but it might be that Gnome's recent trend toward simplicity could make such a target easier to achieve.
QT I think is in good hands - trolltech has proven quite good at making good toolkits with increasing performance in each new release. I'm sure it's just my perception, but GTK widigets feel clunky to me and I really think a shift by the Gnome effort to the EFL base would rock the Linux desktop world. Of course, that's easy to say and hard to do, but major landscape changes are not made by minor efforts.
I'm not a sysadmin, but there are certain universal constants...
a) Get ahold of the standards that will actually be applied to test the system and what it actually needs to have/means to be in compliance. Understanding that comes first - make sure you understand it as well as you can (ideally at least as well as the vendor you're buying from.) A.K.A Operation Build BS Detector.;-)
b) Find out your responsibility - can you hand off responsibility for the computer being built to specs to the vendor, or will you ultimately catch the heat for it regardless of method of purchase? If you're in the hot seat you need to be very sure you can trust the vendor to do it right! In that situation perhaps doing it yourself might be the best way to be sure there are no unpleasant surprises in store, since you can make sure yourself you meet all requirements.
c) Is there some former sysadmin around who has been through purchasing a system that meets these particular specifications before? They may make a good resource - there's nothing like having been in the trenches to teach you all the mistakes and how to avoid them.
d) Do your department have performance reports compiled based on past performance of products purchased from your potential vendors? Also occasionally useful, particularly if you need hard data to justify a choice. This is not the way necessarily to pick the BEST system, but if you don't have the leeway to try a new vendor sometimes you have to go with the gold standard. (Microsoft built an empire based on this principle, and it's worse when you need something secure.) Indeed, I am surprised there isn't a vendor qualification process for something like secure computers, and "approved" vendors which constitute the only choices. If that IS the case, it's down to the usual questions when choosing between vendors - quality, price, performance, etc.
e) Perhaps you could look at uses of BRL-CAD? IIRC some of its uses are classified, so perhaps people using that system could give you some good pointers.
I'm assuming this computer is not networked, and physical security is the only criteria? If so operating system is not an issue, presumably.
Slashdot Mirror
And here I thought that the entire point of a community driven environment was that everyone benefited personally. How naive of me.
He just forgot the last part:No one should benefit personally in a community driven environment at the expence of the community
Frighteningly enough, that might actually be possible. If you were to port Emacs to Movitz Emacs could become an operating system in actuality rather than as a joke!
http://common-lisp.net/project/movitz/
Highly detailed image, well rendered, not at all garish, animal has geek significance... sublime.
;-) I smell a home business opportunity...
Perfect case mode for an Apple - it adds to it without really changing the essense of the Apple design or detracting from it.
Anybody know where to get one of those lasers used?
Upgrade the X server :-).
It will be backwards compatible after all, and X.org's implementation is free.
"If you want a common widget set below the toolkits, implement a common widget set which the various toolkits can all use from a library."
If you do that you might as well extend the X server protocals. Foreign Function Interfaces are painful and difficult - the byte communication method of X is far more promising because you get to ignore the quirks of translating between languages. What language would you write the library in so that all languages could use it?
I'm not into web work too much, but I think there are some other lisp guys that are. The UnCommon Web guys might be a good place to start: http://common-lisp.net/project/ucw/
:-).
I'm actually not so much into graphics, I just want a good backend for McCLIM so I can implement a portable lisp based GUI for Axiom. I get my X server ideas because FFIs are painful and the only real alternative is the low level clx. Hence, I wish we had a high level clx
Been a while since I checked out PicoGUI. Had promise, but the focus didn't seem to be on challenging X so much. Too bad in a way.
You don't have to implement all widgets in the server - the same X primiatives and some higher level ones will be available same as always. I'm just talking about common elements - if everybody's doing the same thing, stick it in the server and do it once. Rather than replacing the low level X protocal (which I'm not suggesting) I'm suggesting we add other options for COMMON WIDGETS - stuff found in virtually every toolkit out there. Pull down menus, scrollbars, buttons, checklists, etc. Then, if the client's X server supports it, they can communicate at a MUCH higher level, saving both bandwidth and implementation logic in toolkits. Themeing can also be done at a server level. If an older server connects, the X server just sends it the same information in lower level language. Think of it as a form of compression - like pumping the X protocal through a compression algorithm before shipping it over the net. If the other end knows how to decompress it, it works great. If not, you can send the exact same information the same way, and since the server has full information it can do this translation no problem.
If someone wants a custom widget, that's fine - they just build it out of primitatives like normal, and that's how it gets sent. I'm not saying we should get rid of the current protocal, I'm saying we should expand it to handle things which are now established as staples in all toolkits and standardize them once and for all. Common look and feel, by way of the server.
I think he makes a good point that the clean solution is always better than trying to support older decisions that turned out to be less than ideal. But the problem is, users aren't interested in details. Details don't matter. They only want something to work, and keep working.
Most modern interface elements are implemented by most toolkits. I think a solution would be to take the concept of the X server, which implements low level functionality available via byte stream communications, and implement much higher level concepts using the same idea. Rather than linking in libraries (and tying your graphical concepts to one language - C for GTK, C++ + custom weirdness for QT) have an X server analog that can speak in terms of Menus, Canvas w/ Scrollbar, Button, Text Input, Text Output, etc. Instead of Xlib (or clx in Lisp) you would have a much, much higher level communication protocal. Language bindings for C, C++, what have you would build on the primatives and higher level widigets provided by this X-server plus, and themes and other details would no longer be different because of what language binding you happened to be using. Translating code between languages would also be much easier, since concept names in different languages could all build off of the standard in the server.
Look sometime at the problems people have writing Python bindings for QT. I think the idea of a high level graphical object server with server side theme configuration would take us a long way towards a common desktop look and feel.
As far as I can tell, what they are calling "bottles" is simply storing a "per application" Windows environment. Hopefully this will be implemented in Wine too, because it has tremendous possibilities. Configuration tweaks needed for each application can be bundled with its windows environment, conflicting applications that even a real Windows box couldn't run on the same machine could be made to work... amazing. Instead of hunting for an install CD for a 10 year old application, you could could just copy and paste the virtual Windows environment to another machine or off of a backup CD. No fuss, no missing install keys - it would all be there.
This might someday make Wine not just a way to migrate from Windows to Linux but a way to keep alive old Windows programs that have had all source code and other relevent information lost. Take the old Windows box, copy the binaries over to a Linux wine install, copy over whatever files and settings the application needs when you test it, make a copy of the old Windows hard drive in case you missed something, and you now have not just an old application stuck on a single unmaintainable machine but a "program in a box" scenario. Much worse than having a properly maintained program of course, but a way to keep vital software working much longer than would otherwise be possible. (Yes, I know - disk image mirrors and other proper backups and record storage can also be a big help, but things like that don't always go as planned.)
That's actually almost as interesting as the OS itself - I take it from your comment it can build itself? A completely separate toolchain from the normal Linux toolchain which is also minimalist and BSD licensed... wow. Is minix3 actually something you could scale up to "real world" usage or does its focus on being a teaching OS sort of limit that?
These are just three more text files unless they are used to release source code. Obviously the last one isn't of interest - will they ever use the other two for anything non-trivial?
Reading the article, I'm made aware of two things: 1) I lack the training to be able to argue about this properly 2) I would like to know why exactly "a 'method of compensating a manager' that involved several steps of calculating a proper compensation based on performance criteria and then transferring payment to the manager" is not an abstract idea? What exactly does constitute an abstract idea? This sounds like a particular application of mathematical and economic principles, which I wouldn't have thought patentable at all. Anybody have a link to some reference materials that might help with these questions, without requiriring several years obtaining a law degree?
Making the US healthcare industry and supporting industries a private, for profit enterprise was an epic disaster, particularly in the department of research and IP. Companies will only pursue solutions to medical problems they think they will be able to have exclusive control over, in order to ensure they can profit from them. PROFIT??? This is people's HEALTH we are talking about here! Profit shouldn't even be part of this discussion. It's about the people you are trying to help, period. End of discussion. Motivation problem solved. The only questions should be 1) what holds the best promise for helping people 2) how do we produce it safely and 3) how do we produce it inexpensively. National ownership and public right to all medical information should be an absolute no brainer. Don't give them the excuse of needing to make up research costs to have high prices. Fund all medical research Federally, and base it solely on potential healing merit and educational benefit. Peoples' health should not have a price tag on it - people are the only reason a society exists at all. That's like saying its not cost effective to evacuate poor people from a potential disaster area, since they aren't important to the economy and are easily replaced. (Note to the hysterical - that's an example of an argument as wrong on as many levels as I could make it wrong, not an actual argument I'm making.) We don't stand for that, and I don't think we should stand for medical research and production costs being dictated by profit potential analysis.
r ch_near_standstill_for_childhood_cancer_drugsp ?scntid=31720021644339&contenttype=PARA&
I have heard the arguments before that medical research moves faster because of the profit motive, but I don't believe it and would have to see hard evidence to believe it. Medical research is like anything else - individuals are motivated by a paycheck and perhaps the chances to help people/do interesting work. COMPANIES are motivated by profits, and I don't believe corporate thinking has been a net positive to the medical world in any sense. Quite the reverse, actually.
I don't know how I could sleep nights knowing I ran a company that had (for example) decided to pursue less promising but potentially profitable cures instead of building off of public domain but very promising work. As a human being it would haunt me.
Here are some examples of profit-motive-as-only-motive issues (I'm sure many more could be found in a few minutes):
http://news.yahoo.com/s/acs/20050928/hl_acs/resea
http://www.accessmed-msf.org/prod/publications.as
And now patenting genes. Great. In case there weren't enough issues out there slowing things up, we now add potential patent litigation as yet another reason not to pursue ideas. Because, thanks to the profit motive we know that barring enormous financial resources people will avoid these areas rather than risk having to fork out for patent licensing fees. What a messed up system. Personally I think the nation's system needs to be totally ripped out, all the way from the admistrative system to the drug companies, and redone with one and ONLY one focus - how can they help those who need it. Individuals working in the system can still be paid well - individual incentive is fine since it draws smart people, but the companies contribute nothing beneficial to the people needing help and should be cut out of the loop.
"A well justified emotional reaction. If someone came to you and said, "You're a moron, so I'm going to start telling you what's true," don't you think you'd be a little upset?"
Probably, but in this context the proper response would be (to both parts) "prove it."
Microsoft is a monopoly, Apple isn't. Pure and simple. There are different sets of rules for a monopoly, and for good reason.
Has this gone through peer review yet? xxx.lanl.gov is not a peer review process. They do say it has been submitted to a journal, and for something of this importantance I think we should wait until the process has done its thing and checked whether or not this is sound.
I'm guessing no, at the moment. More to the point, and more interesting - would it be worth it for the former customers of Maya on $PLATFORM to pool their resources and hire enough developers to make Blender into what it needs to be to be a Maya killer?
"Are 'we' going to fault her for that ?"
It depends. I would have been more impressed if she refused to make an argument to (I'm assuming Microsoft was indeed at fault) bury the goal of justice in favor of a victory for her client. Maybe I'm wrong but I see a lawyer's first duty as the supporter of justice, and second to make the best argument for a client that is compatible with justice. I grant that this doesn't seem to be the current thought, but I regard that as a flaw in the system. Getting a guilty client off should be seen as shameful - it's a failure of the system, and the lawyer participated in it. People seem to think that the justice system is like an arena - you fight well enough and you can beat the law. That's a very scary way to view things, IMHO.
Just a curosity question (I don't know much about the details of this process) but I was wondering if it might be more efficient to replace the battery component of a solar car with a fuel cell arrangement, and have any excess solar power available split water into hydrogen and oxygen? http://www.nrel.gov/hydrogen/proj_production_deliv ery.html#split I know batteries are a major source of weight issues, but I don't know how H2O splitting compares in terms of energy recovery to battery storage. Anybody happen to know if the tradeoff could be advantageous?
I don't know about Novell, so perhaps they do have too many people, but I must say I'm rather alarmed the article mentions R&D being overstaffed and no other department. Most companies don't go all out hiring R&D folks to begin with - that's one of the things that makes Google so unusual - so they don't tend to be overstocked in R&D in the first place. I wonder if this fits in with the recent trend in corporate America to view R&D as a luxury and money sinkhole. Since the benefits don't show up next quarter, chop them off to look better in short term costs. Never mind five or ten years down the road when you need new products to stay competitive and don't have any.
Does ANYBODY in the US think long term anymore and still have influence in corporate or government circles? Maybe they're all thinking that if everybody else is also dumping R&D, everyone will still be competitive, and it will only be the consumer that gets stuck with static technology and gradually decreasing quality. (Price wars with no quality differential do that, since consumers tend to be bad in the short term at distinguishing good products from bad.)
The default Cinelerra is quirky enough that gentoo doesn't want to install it by default - is this fixed in 2.0?
:-).
Cinelerra-cvs http://cvs.cinelerra.org/ is a fork which incorporates a variety of patches (apparently the original Cinelerra is developed by a single author, so cinelerra-cvs tries to avoid the bottlenecks that often result). cinelerra-cvs can be installed on gentoo, and once one switches to the Bluedot theme it's not half bad to look at
Also of interest are LiVES http://www.xs4all.nl/~salsaman/lives/ and Jahshaka http://www.jahshaka.org/ - there's also Kdenlive but that seems to not be actively developed any more: http://kdenlive.sourceforge.net/index.html
as well as the more comedy oriented shows. I can't get into most of the comedy Adult Swim offerings (but then I don't really care even for Family Guy, sans Stewie - Futurama is about they only comedy I really go for) but I do enjoy a lot of their anime shows. I wonder if their contracts for distribution of anime limit what they can do here? Given how many episodes Inuyasha has I would have thought it would be a prime candidate to offer streams of - if you miss an episode it can be a looooong time before it repeats. BigO I would like to see return (although I did crack and get the DVDs for that one). Cowboy Bebop is an obvious one except I expect they know everyone will tune in to see it anyway (but for goodness sake get it out of the 1:30am timeslot! Even geeks sleep eventually.)
All in all, I must say I have been very pleasantly surprised by Adult Swim - it has definitely broadened my ideas about cartoons - they really AREN'T just for kids. I suppose that's obvious to this crowd, but I didn't know much about anime...
So anyway, hat's off to Adult Swim for daring to try something new and different in the US. Keep 'em coming!
"but those of you who mess around with audio software on Linux probably know me as the author of both JACK and Ardour."
I think I speak for the open source community when I say I'm very impressed with your work and wish to thank you for making it available.
Even if a "perfect" X server is implemented, that's not the end of the battle to give the Linux desktop a facelift. It's the beginning.
Toolkits running on top of X are just as important to Desktop Goodness as the Xserver is, and they can only be updated AFTER the X situation is stable. GTK and QT are the obvious ones, and I'm sure work will proceed on them, but I suspect such changes would be significant enough that they would warrant a major release, and lots of work to fully integrate new X features as opposed to just bolting them in.
Frankly, I think the best way to proceed would be to take the useful parts of Gnome and assorted GTK apps and port them over to the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, once they are stable. Enlightenment DR17 is probably the only environment available with the potential to pass itself off as a next generation desktop for Linux and make it stick. Can you imagine what Gimp would be like written on top of the EFLs? (drool). Of course, that's too much work to expect it to actually happen on a large scale, but it might be that Gnome's recent trend toward simplicity could make such a target easier to achieve.
QT I think is in good hands - trolltech has proven quite good at making good toolkits with increasing performance in each new release. I'm sure it's just my perception, but GTK widigets feel clunky to me and I really think a shift by the Gnome effort to the EFL base would rock the Linux desktop world. Of course, that's easy to say and hard to do, but major landscape changes are not made by minor efforts.
I'm not a sysadmin, but there are certain universal constants...
;-)
a) Get ahold of the standards that will actually be applied to test the system and what it actually needs to have/means to be in compliance. Understanding that comes first - make sure you understand it as well as you can (ideally at least as well as the vendor you're buying from.) A.K.A Operation Build BS Detector.
b) Find out your responsibility - can you hand off responsibility for the computer being built to specs to the vendor, or will you ultimately catch the heat for it regardless of method of purchase? If you're in the hot seat you need to be very sure you can trust the vendor to do it right! In that situation perhaps doing it yourself might be the best way to be sure there are no unpleasant surprises in store, since you can make sure yourself you meet all requirements.
c) Is there some former sysadmin around who has been through purchasing a system that meets these particular specifications before? They may make a good resource - there's nothing like having been in the trenches to teach you all the mistakes and how to avoid them.
d) Do your department have performance reports compiled based on past performance of products purchased from your potential vendors? Also occasionally useful, particularly if you need hard data to justify a choice. This is not the way necessarily to pick the BEST system, but if you don't have the leeway to try a new vendor sometimes you have to go with the gold standard. (Microsoft built an empire based on this principle, and it's worse when you need something secure.) Indeed, I am surprised there isn't a vendor qualification process for something like secure computers, and "approved" vendors which constitute the only choices. If that IS the case, it's down to the usual questions when choosing between vendors - quality, price, performance, etc.
e) Perhaps you could look at uses of BRL-CAD? IIRC some of its uses are classified, so perhaps people using that system could give you some good pointers.
I'm assuming this computer is not networked, and physical security is the only criteria? If so operating system is not an issue, presumably.
Best of luck!