I was really impressed with Qtopia and OPIE when I first saw them, but was immediately put off by the reliance on the QT toolkit and the framebuffer. Then I found GPE (which, by the way, can run many qtopia apps recompiled for QT/X11), which runs on a miniature X server (kdrive). This combined with a special window manager and desktop environment designed for small screens works really well. I like it better overall than OPIE, although it currently has some bugs, and Zaurus 5600 support is still not so good. It is amazing how well an X11-based environment works in an embedded environment. Although most X11s can't run well on such a small screen, I can easily adapt apps to run, whether they are qt, gtk, or whatever.
GSM is so wide spread throughout the world, that I'm glad the administration didn't let some greedy company muscle their own technology into Iraq, orphaning them from the rest of the networks in the region. To me the idea of having generic GSM phones connected to the network with a chip is brilliant. I can move networks and change phones with ease. I can take my trusty triband phone from here in the US and roam with ease. Better yet buy a local sim chip. GSM is open and implementable by anyone.
I'm glad there were a few people making decisions who were smart enough and honest enough to recognize this companies attempt to bully its way into a lucrative contract.
As for what takes over from GSM, we'll see. Just as in computers, patent-encumbered "standards" will do a world of harm. In this thing I think CDMA is very harmful.
Yes it is true that the Hindenberg had rocket fuel -coated skin, which did burn rapidly and transmitted the fire throughout the structure. However, recent research has hypothesized that the skin played little role in actually starting the fire. The probable cause is actually leaking fuel from the engine fuel tanks, due to previous damage caused when they were experimenting with catching and releasing airplanes from the underside. This leaked fuel would have got into the lower areas, near the hydrogen gas. Once the fire started, it spread rapidly through the damaged areas and eventually ignited the hydrogen bags. Apparently if you examine the footage, you'll find the fire starting out on the bottom of the ship.
Apparently the new Zepplin airship is due to be launched in the next few years. While it is helium-based (to satisfy the paranoid public), it is still three-times the size of the original Hindenberg. Should be a cool ship to see. If they could find a way to still use some hydrogen, though, they'd be able carry much more cargo, although the specs without hydrogen still allow it to carry 3 times the cargo of a 747.
I wouldn't worry a bit about hydrogen in cars for day to day driving. However, paramedics and accident response teams will have to be aware of procedures for dealing with these things, just like with electric cars.
The problem is that MS's terms for licensing their patents to specification implementors specifically forbids any use by GPL or similarly free licenses. See the GPL is MS's biggest enemy and they are trying to kill it on every front. For example, it is against the licensing conditions of Visual Studio 7 to produce GPL'd software with it. How did they manage this? By introducing a new standard C runtime library, MSVCR71.dll, which can only be distributed under MS' terms. Oh. And it won't be distributed with the OS anymore, so anyone using VC7 is forced to comply with the licensing terms of the runtime itself.
So the problem with patents is that MS *is* starting to mobilize them as offensive weapons against open source in general, and the GPL specifically.
Privoxy works well in this area and as an added bonus works for all my browsers, whether I'm using galeon, firefox, or IE. With privoxy, I've never had a reason to use adblock.
While this could be used for thin clients, most of the pdf actually deals with thick clients. IE laptops who need full installs, and then sync up when part of the network.
This kind of disconnected caching would be excellent. In some ways it's a kind of uber-sync.
What fedora is experimenting will work great on thin and thick clients. I think this is an exciting development, and even for maintaining just a few machines around the house would be nice to have that kind of capability.
Also, I would say that yes, thin clients are coming back into fashion. But thick clients are here to stay also.
Have you actually ever used Swing before? Swing is one of the best designed GUI *apis* out there. Just because the implementation of the drawing routines was slow and the look and feel out of place on any OS doesn't mean the API wasn't well-designed (has a few java-isms, though). GTK is object-oriented through and through. Its api is very clean and fast.
I remember reading once about a car that someone had been murdered in and his corpse left to rot for some time before it was discovered. The myth is that the car never could be cured of the aweful stench on the interior of the car that came out on warm days, even after completely stripping the car down to the bare metal.
Apparently the myth was tested by some guys a few years ago using a rotting pig carcas, and they determined that it was true. They had all kinds of people try cleaning the car. They even stripped out the seat and the cloth parts. It still stank.
Umm, maybe because he has to in order to make something function the way he wants to? GTK has a clean inheritence tree, and I can, if I need to, grab methods out of the parent class in a completely sane and clear way. Honestly, I think GTK is better designed than Swing. It should be a model GUI api.
I don't know. If I was in his state and he didn't vote according to the popular vote then I'd feel very much like he stole from me personally my right to influence the election process. Doing what he proposes is morally questionable, to say nothing of legality. How can he, being an elected official, simply ignore the wishes of the citizens of his state who voted (should the vote come in favor of Bush).
It's not the drop shadows that I'm looking for. It's the new extensions that make window dragging silky smooth and speed up redraws. Really all these new features actually improve the speed of entire desktop. The drop shadows are a nice touch, however. They really do make a huge difference in the look. I'm also hoping that more and more themes will come out supporting alpha-blended widgets. I get tired of OS X-style gtk themes that have hard, aliased edges on the UI components. Another thing I noticed in the screenshots so far is that no one has made a metacity theme that has alpha-blended edges around the window border. Little improvements like that really do make the system look more professional and more comparable to what people expect a modern UI to look and feel like. No I'm not talking about making the interface more Windows-like or Mac-like.
Clearly these new extensions will make a Linux desktop much more able to actually make it. Some of the extensions are also for accessibility purposes. Screen magnifiers (real-time, not faked), event interception and injection (without using hacks), and other things. Definitely a huge step forward. With accelerated Cairo on the doors, the Linux desktop will be the first vector-based UI period.
The cheapest place I've ever seen to buy new batteries for just about anything, including UPS, is at: http://www.gotbatteries.com
They also have volume discounts. We were able to replace all 64 batteries in our APC UPS unit for around 9 dollars a piece. This is a fraction of the cost APC would have charged. At the time they didn't have the 7 Amp batteries we needed, so we got 8 Amp ones instead (I think that's what it was). Anyway, great deal. Brandname batteries too.
Re:Compositing is just the tip of the iceberg.
on
The Power of X
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Actually many normal operations appear much faster with composite on than off. Dragging windows, for example. The other extensions plus the off-screen rendering make X appear to be a lot smoother and faster. I remember running an early beta of xserver (kdrive) with the extensions using only the VESA driver. Without the composite manager on, the system was slow some things were just painful. Turn on the manager and normal operations appeared to be almost an order of magnitude faster. When the synchronization stuff is added into GTK and QT, resizing windows will also appear to be much much faster and smoother.
The point is, though, that the Cray supercomputers are vector supercomputers, whereas Linux clusters and other similar machines are not. Currently it seems to my that most clusters are very remeniscant of computers of old days where you run programs in batch mode. Cray is pointing out that running stuff in batch mode, even massively parallel, often cannot match the flexibility of the cray vector system.
Umm no it couldn't. The Hubble telescope is in a completely different orbit. I believe it's orbit, in addition to being on a completely different declination, is much higher. IIS is too low and at too weird an orbit to really be useful in the way you suggest.
With the nice gift of the Vera font family to the community, default fonts on most recent distros looks very nice, even preferrable to windows. For web page viewing, still prefer to install the MS core fonts, though. Maybe distro makers should have the webfonts.sh script run during install to fetch the fonts for you.
Fonts are much, much harder to do than simple software. I'd sooner not have cheap Times New Roman knockoffs in my distro, thank you very much. There are folks out there who make fonts, and some are very good. Maybe they will donate them, like bitstream did, to the community for use by all. Fonts are one of the last bastions of proprietarism, although in theory you can copy font shapes all you want.
From the screenshot I see one thing immediately that I absolutely can't stand: little volume knobs that you have to "turn" with the mouse pointer. There cannot be a more lame widget to try to use in a mouse-based user-interface. Sure you can probably use the scroll wheel.
The entire interface looks cluttered and not well-suited for use along side our current GUI apps. There are reasons why certain things are and aren't done in GUIs. We can't always make our programs look just like the physical objects we are trying to replace (ie the mixing board).
Actually Nokia has done a lot of research in to the keyboard layout of a phone. Then have found that the old standard of 4 rows of 3 equally-sized buttons is not optimal for one-thumb dialing.
Despite all the different-looking layouts from Nokia, they are all actually the same basic layout, which is optimized for use with one hand.
Nokia has also been able to standardize the basic phone case design, allowing mass-production of low-priced basic phones. I personally hate this idea of digital convergence. Just give me a phone with a decent user interface and address book. That is all I want.
I think qemu does have ppc on ppc support. How well it work I don't know. It does not do true virtualization but rather emulation, so it's bound to be a bit slow.
Go to www.linode.com and get yourself a linode machine. Full root access and everything. All for about $20 a month. Good for hosting, backup, and shell stuff.
Someone forgot to tell me. In what ways would you say mono is not quite ready yet? Mono is already very capable and I have seen quite a few interesting things done with it (including running java programs via the ikvm bytecode translator). Mono is pretty dang good and can stand on its own today.
Web app stuff is a little weak, but the poster of this topic was developing client apps, not web apps. While SWF on linux isn't at all there, GTK# is (and works really, really well). Not ideal, but if you practice good MVC coding, it would be trivial to support both SWF and GTK# if you so desired. Other than these two areas, mono is already mature and capable.
What are the problems and limitations you've experienced as you've implemented a fairly large app under mono?
Unfortunately due to the use of the NVidia GoForce 5 chipset in the PB 12", we will not see any linux support in the near future. This is because NVidia refuses to even release the specifications on how to wake the chip up from sleep. This means that on the PB 12", you cannot adjust the screen brightness nor can you sleep the laptop, which makes it pretty much useless as a linux laptop. This is really a shame, though, as the 12" would make a wonderful linux machine if we could get support.
In the meantime, you can always run linux on top of OS X using a virtual machine like Qemu. I have compiled all of my tools (including the full Gnome 2.4 and Mono and Monodevelop) with fink, so I don't really need linux on it.
These two benchmarks seem to be continuously confused by slashdotters over the years. Of course it is debatable which is really more important. I think OS X has definitely concentrated on perceived speed, which is good because that is what the user "feels" and sees as he interacts with the computer. This does in no way mean the whole OS is faster; it just feels faster.
OS X has definitely not improved dramatically in throughput and raw horsepower over the last few releases. In fact I'm sure it has decreased slightly. Sacrificing a little of that throughput for smoother rendering yields a significant percieved speedup that the users really like. I would say that every release of OS X has gotten a little heavier and is a little bit slower. A sacrifice I'm willing to make for my pretty Panther desktop, though.
Windows has gotten slower on both counts over the years.
Linux's throughput has actually increased fairly dramatically in the last year or two. Unfortunately as the weight of the desktop comes to bear, and due to current weaknesses in X11 and the toolkits (most notably the lack synchronized redraw which make resizing appear really slow), the perceived speed of linux has seemed to decrease with recent distros. The 2.6 kernel provided some speedup in this area (the interactive scheduler), but there is still much work to be done.
The experimental X server from www.freedesktop.org implements a lot of features that will lead to a perceived speedup. For example the damage and composite extension reduce redraws when windows are uncovered. Work is also being done to allow windows to resize smoothly (synchronizing the widget drawing and compressing events). Even with the vesa driver and no acceleration, it feels faster than normal accelerated X.org. Again perceived speed vs throughput. Give it a try. It's cool.
Fortunately I think Linux will deliver on both benchmarks. Expect exciting things over the next year from linux desktops.
See http://www.daltonlp.com/daltonlp.cgi?item_type=1&i tem_id=217 for how to get pngs to display transparency on IE 5.5 and IE 6. This is now a well-known technique that works pretty well universally. Combine with CSS or javascript and you should be able to use pngs entirely.
Slashdot Mirror
I was really impressed with Qtopia and OPIE when I first saw them, but was immediately put off by the reliance on the QT toolkit and the framebuffer. Then I found GPE (which, by the way, can run many qtopia apps recompiled for QT/X11), which runs on a miniature X server (kdrive). This combined with a special window manager and desktop environment designed for small screens works really well. I like it better overall than OPIE, although it currently has some bugs, and Zaurus 5600 support is still not so good. It is amazing how well an X11-based environment works in an embedded environment. Although most X11s can't run well on such a small screen, I can easily adapt apps to run, whether they are qt, gtk, or whatever.
Give it a try. It's cool.
GSM is so wide spread throughout the world, that I'm glad the administration didn't let some greedy company muscle their own technology into Iraq, orphaning them from the rest of the networks in the region. To me the idea of having generic GSM phones connected to the network with a chip is brilliant. I can move networks and change phones with ease. I can take my trusty triband phone from here in the US and roam with ease. Better yet buy a local sim chip. GSM is open and implementable by anyone.
I'm glad there were a few people making decisions who were smart enough and honest enough to recognize this companies attempt to bully its way into a lucrative contract.
As for what takes over from GSM, we'll see. Just as in computers, patent-encumbered "standards" will do a world of harm. In this thing I think CDMA is very harmful.
Yes it is true that the Hindenberg had rocket fuel -coated skin, which did burn rapidly and transmitted the fire throughout the structure. However, recent research has hypothesized that the skin played little role in actually starting the fire. The probable cause is actually leaking fuel from the engine fuel tanks, due to previous damage caused when they were experimenting with catching and releasing airplanes from the underside. This leaked fuel would have got into the lower areas, near the hydrogen gas. Once the fire started, it spread rapidly through the damaged areas and eventually ignited the hydrogen bags. Apparently if you examine the footage, you'll find the fire starting out on the bottom of the ship.
Apparently the new Zepplin airship is due to be launched in the next few years. While it is helium-based (to satisfy the paranoid public), it is still three-times the size of the original Hindenberg. Should be a cool ship to see. If they could find a way to still use some hydrogen, though, they'd be able carry much more cargo, although the specs without hydrogen still allow it to carry 3 times the cargo of a 747.
I wouldn't worry a bit about hydrogen in cars for day to day driving. However, paramedics and accident response teams will have to be aware of procedures for dealing with these things, just like with electric cars.
The problem is that MS's terms for licensing their patents to specification implementors specifically forbids any use by GPL or similarly free licenses. See the GPL is MS's biggest enemy and they are trying to kill it on every front. For example, it is against the licensing conditions of Visual Studio 7 to produce GPL'd software with it. How did they manage this? By introducing a new standard C runtime library, MSVCR71.dll, which can only be distributed under MS' terms. Oh. And it won't be distributed with the OS anymore, so anyone using VC7 is forced to comply with the licensing terms of the runtime itself.
So the problem with patents is that MS *is* starting to mobilize them as offensive weapons against open source in general, and the GPL specifically.
Privoxy works well in this area and as an added bonus works for all my browsers, whether I'm using galeon, firefox, or IE. With privoxy, I've never had a reason to use adblock.
While this could be used for thin clients, most of the pdf actually deals with thick clients. IE laptops who need full installs, and then sync up when part of the network.
This kind of disconnected caching would be excellent. In some ways it's a kind of uber-sync.
What fedora is experimenting will work great on thin and thick clients. I think this is an exciting development, and even for maintaining just a few machines around the house would be nice to have that kind of capability.
Also, I would say that yes, thin clients are coming back into fashion. But thick clients are here to stay also.
Have you actually ever used Swing before? Swing is one of the best designed GUI *apis* out there. Just because the implementation of the drawing routines was slow and the look and feel out of place on any OS doesn't mean the API wasn't well-designed (has a few java-isms, though). GTK is object-oriented through and through. Its api is very clean and fast.
I remember reading once about a car that someone had been murdered in and his corpse left to rot for some time before it was discovered. The myth is that the car never could be cured of the aweful stench on the interior of the car that came out on warm days, even after completely stripping the car down to the bare metal.
Apparently the myth was tested by some guys a few years ago using a rotting pig carcas, and they determined that it was true. They had all kinds of people try cleaning the car. They even stripped out the seat and the cloth parts. It still stank.
So I don't think that you'll ever be successful.
Umm, maybe because he has to in order to make something function the way he wants to? GTK has a clean inheritence tree, and I can, if I need to, grab methods out of the parent class in a completely sane and clear way. Honestly, I think GTK is better designed than Swing. It should be a model GUI api.
I don't know. If I was in his state and he didn't vote according to the popular vote then I'd feel very much like he stole from me personally my right to influence the election process. Doing what he proposes is morally questionable, to say nothing of legality. How can he, being an elected official, simply ignore the wishes of the citizens of his state who voted (should the vote come in favor of Bush).
It's not the drop shadows that I'm looking for. It's the new extensions that make window dragging silky smooth and speed up redraws. Really all these new features actually improve the speed of entire desktop. The drop shadows are a nice touch, however. They really do make a huge difference in the look. I'm also hoping that more and more themes will come out supporting alpha-blended widgets. I get tired of OS X-style gtk themes that have hard, aliased edges on the UI components. Another thing I noticed in the screenshots so far is that no one has made a metacity theme that has alpha-blended edges around the window border. Little improvements like that really do make the system look more professional and more comparable to what people expect a modern UI to look and feel like. No I'm not talking about making the interface more Windows-like or Mac-like.
Clearly these new extensions will make a Linux desktop much more able to actually make it. Some of the extensions are also for accessibility purposes. Screen magnifiers (real-time, not faked), event interception and injection (without using hacks), and other things. Definitely a huge step forward. With accelerated Cairo on the doors, the Linux desktop will be the first vector-based UI period.
The cheapest place I've ever seen to buy new batteries for just about anything, including UPS, is at: http://www.gotbatteries.com
They also have volume discounts. We were able to replace all 64 batteries in our APC UPS unit for around 9 dollars a piece. This is a fraction of the cost APC would have charged. At the time they didn't have the 7 Amp batteries we needed, so we got 8 Amp ones instead (I think that's what it was). Anyway, great deal. Brandname batteries too.
Actually many normal operations appear much faster with composite on than off. Dragging windows, for example. The other extensions plus the off-screen rendering make X appear to be a lot smoother and faster. I remember running an early beta of xserver (kdrive) with the extensions using only the VESA driver. Without the composite manager on, the system was slow some things were just painful. Turn on the manager and normal operations appeared to be almost an order of magnitude faster. When the synchronization stuff is added into GTK and QT, resizing windows will also appear to be much much faster and smoother.
The point is, though, that the Cray supercomputers are vector supercomputers, whereas Linux clusters and other similar machines are not. Currently it seems to my that most clusters are very remeniscant of computers of old days where you run programs in batch mode. Cray is pointing out that running stuff in batch mode, even massively parallel, often cannot match the flexibility of the cray vector system.
Umm no it couldn't. The Hubble telescope is in a completely different orbit. I believe it's orbit, in addition to being on a completely different declination, is much higher. IIS is too low and at too weird an orbit to really be useful in the way you suggest.
With the nice gift of the Vera font family to the community, default fonts on most recent distros looks very nice, even preferrable to windows. For web page viewing, still prefer to install the MS core fonts, though. Maybe distro makers should have the webfonts.sh script run during install to fetch the fonts for you.
Fonts are much, much harder to do than simple software. I'd sooner not have cheap Times New Roman knockoffs in my distro, thank you very much. There are folks out there who make fonts, and some are very good. Maybe they will donate them, like bitstream did, to the community for use by all. Fonts are one of the last bastions of proprietarism, although in theory you can copy font shapes all you want.
From the screenshot I see one thing immediately that I absolutely can't stand: little volume knobs that you have to "turn" with the mouse pointer. There cannot be a more lame widget to try to use in a mouse-based user-interface. Sure you can probably use the scroll wheel.
The entire interface looks cluttered and not well-suited for use along side our current GUI apps. There are reasons why certain things are and aren't done in GUIs. We can't always make our programs look just like the physical objects we are trying to replace (ie the mixing board).
Actually Nokia has done a lot of research in to the keyboard layout of a phone. Then have found that the old standard of 4 rows of 3 equally-sized buttons is not optimal for one-thumb dialing.
Despite all the different-looking layouts from Nokia, they are all actually the same basic layout, which is optimized for use with one hand.
Nokia has also been able to standardize the basic phone case design, allowing mass-production of low-priced basic phones. I personally hate this idea of digital convergence. Just give me a phone with a decent user interface and address book. That is all I want.
I think qemu does have ppc on ppc support. How well it work I don't know. It does not do true virtualization but rather emulation, so it's bound to be a bit slow.
Michael
Go to www.linode.com and get yourself a linode machine. Full root access and everything. All for about $20 a month. Good for hosting, backup, and shell stuff.
Someone forgot to tell me. In what ways would you say mono is not quite ready yet? Mono is already very capable and I have seen quite a few interesting things done with it (including running java programs via the ikvm bytecode translator). Mono is pretty dang good and can stand on its own today.
Web app stuff is a little weak, but the poster of this topic was developing client apps, not web apps. While SWF on linux isn't at all there, GTK# is (and works really, really well). Not ideal, but if you practice good MVC coding, it would be trivial to support both SWF and GTK# if you so desired. Other than these two areas, mono is already mature and capable.
What are the problems and limitations you've experienced as you've implemented a fairly large app under mono?
Unfortunately due to the use of the NVidia GoForce 5 chipset in the PB 12", we will not see any linux support in the near future. This is because NVidia refuses to even release the specifications on how to wake the chip up from sleep. This means that on the PB 12", you cannot adjust the screen brightness nor can you sleep the laptop, which makes it pretty much useless as a linux laptop. This is really a shame, though, as the 12" would make a wonderful linux machine if we could get support.
In the meantime, you can always run linux on top of OS X using a virtual machine like Qemu. I have compiled all of my tools (including the full Gnome 2.4 and Mono and Monodevelop) with fink, so I don't really need linux on it.
Not so. Use mono and develop on and for both platforms. Clearly a win win. And if you happen to like Linux better then you haven't lost anything.
These two benchmarks seem to be continuously confused by slashdotters over the years. Of course it is debatable which is really more important. I think OS X has definitely concentrated on perceived speed, which is good because that is what the user "feels" and sees as he interacts with the computer. This does in no way mean the whole OS is faster; it just feels faster.
OS X has definitely not improved dramatically in throughput and raw horsepower over the last few releases. In fact I'm sure it has decreased slightly. Sacrificing a little of that throughput for smoother rendering yields a significant percieved speedup that the users really like. I would say that every release of OS X has gotten a little heavier and is a little bit slower. A sacrifice I'm willing to make for my pretty Panther desktop, though.
Windows has gotten slower on both counts over the years.
Linux's throughput has actually increased fairly dramatically in the last year or two. Unfortunately as the weight of the desktop comes to bear, and due to current weaknesses in X11 and the toolkits (most notably the lack synchronized redraw which make resizing appear really slow), the perceived speed of linux has seemed to decrease with recent distros. The 2.6 kernel provided some speedup in this area (the interactive scheduler), but there is still much work to be done.
The experimental X server from www.freedesktop.org implements a lot of features that will lead to a perceived speedup. For example the damage and composite extension reduce redraws when windows are uncovered. Work is also being done to allow windows to resize smoothly (synchronizing the widget drawing and compressing events). Even with the vesa driver and no acceleration, it feels faster than normal accelerated X.org. Again perceived speed vs throughput. Give it a try. It's cool.
Fortunately I think Linux will deliver on both benchmarks. Expect exciting things over the next year from linux desktops.
See http://www.daltonlp.com/daltonlp.cgi?item_type=1&i tem_id=217 for how to get pngs to display transparency on IE 5.5 and IE 6. This is now a well-known technique that works pretty well universally. Combine with CSS or javascript and you should be able to use pngs entirely.