Yet another discussion of LOTR on Slashdot made me think of something.
I've been reading the biography of Tolkein by Carpenter, and it becoms clear that Tolkein was a Luddite (in the nicer sense of the term). His favourite characters are Hobbits (personifying rural idyll) and Elves (personyfing art).
Anyway, who are the biggest cheerleaders for Tolkein these days ? The technologists....
An example, Tolkein never bought another car after wwII because he hated the way road development had ripped up Oxfordshire...
Anyway, the book is great -- lots of information on the origins of things like the word Gamgee (a midlands word for Cotton Wool!), Hobbit (possibly after a well known twenties book called Babbit (sp?) about a guys with a mid-life crisis:)) and so on. Its kind of easy reading.
One problem as far as I see it with GA's is that you need a decent ranking function to judge success... i.e. effectively you have to "know" the answer, AND know how to rank or grade non-or partial solutions with respect to it, before you learn the solution. Otherwise its basically just the regular Generate and Test algorithm which can never scale to large enough problems.
Hi,
Here's the DELL I was pointed to Latitude C400-- looks quite close -- but it comes with nothing for the $1800 base price. Sorry I can't grab a URL for a maxed out C400 -- just check the boxes yourself, and press update price. I think we are basically talking cross-purposes. No doubt you can get a maxed out chunky black box for $2500, but not a lightweight TiBook/VAIO style one. A lot of the extra cost is in the engineering to get it down that thin.
Follow the customization, give it 1 gig, a combo drive, a builtin wireless card etc. Delete XP, and put on cheapest M$ os, and take the 3 year warranty. Oh, and the disk should be set to 30Gig. It starts to add up. I don't know whether the -$200 for the 866 is
worth it, I would go with the 1.2ghz cpu anyway. That might outclass the G4 on my tasks (I dont have specialised code that would take advantage of the G4's//ization.
Nice try, but I'm a 38 year old software engineer with 20 odd years of computing experience, and a still warm PhD student Id. True the pay helps, but I also need the gig of ram so I can run experiments in hours rather than days.
If anyone wants to know why Engineers might want a powerbook, look at the specs of the Titanium Powerbook - 1 gig ram - and the fact there is a clean Nix underneath.
A few months ago I did an experiment with OSX 10.1 -- basically I got my company's entire tree built just fine in 2 days. No code changed, just a few softlinks needed to be set up (Perl for example was in usr/bin instead of usr/local/bin. This tree is normally only run on Linux or Solaris's box.My next laptop wil be a TiBook -- especially now they have the CDRW/DVD combo drive.
I have been evaluating getting a PC laptop -- I can't find anything close to the TiBook -- try finding a slim design, with a 15" display and 1 gig Ram -- Sony slim Vaios max out at 512 or 384. Toshiba at 256mb. Please will someone point me at an x86 with those kind of specs, and I might go with Linux instead. I'd be totally convinced if it came with the cinema-scope style screen (2 emacs sessions side by side).
Now, for Desktops a whole different story -- we just got a rack mounted box for $4k -- twice the power of a E420, at 10% of the cost (and a 1/4 of the footprint and weight). I just couldn't fit it in my rucksack (close though, maybe in my 70 litre one)
Winton
p.s. This isn't a troll. I want a laptop with a gig of RAM (we're doing some hard memory intensive work)
But its out of print according to Amazon, but they do have second hand copies. You might also get from B&N or elsewhere. Great Book.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/038798269 8/ qid=1008405307/sr=1-3/ref=sr_1_11_3/002-2623870-83 06446
Following on our thread, X-posted to/.
If you need the original hardcopy I guess
it could be obtained from Rockefeller or
maybe the NYker? JMC himself might have
a copy in his files (I don't know his current
Secretary at the moment, and don't want to bother
him again.
Cheers,
Winton
FORWARD FROM John McCarthy:
The proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation, in my files as
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartm ou th/dartmouth.html
for the summer project on artificial intelligence was August 1955.
Since they supported it, it would have been in their list of grants in
1955 or 1956. The New Yorker picked it up, perhaps from the list of
grants, and one of their bottom-of-the-column wisecracks said
something like "about time". That may be 1956 but could be later.
I thought that might be the case, but as others pointed out, it costs $350/pa to use the OED on-line, so I couldn't check whether they already had Artificial Intelligence expanded upon.
I've passed it on to JMC to see if he remembers the origin of the abbreviation.
Copy of a message I sent the editor:) I can't believe they couldn't predate 1971 for AI (see Sci Fi Word List)
Hi Mike,
Science predates Science Fiction:) Next time I see him [JM], I'll mention it:)
Winton
AI or Artificial Intelligence
Coined by John McCarthy [in a SCIENCE setting, not SCI-FI!], 1956. Seems to be fairly unanimous.... concept goes way back.
" He [JM] invited them to Vermont for "The Dartmouth summer research project on artificial intelligence." (reference)
1956 John McCarthy coined the term "artificial intelligence" as the topic of the Dartmouth Conference, the first conference devoted to the subject. (reference)
I'm a Mac and Linux zealot, hate Windows, but respect their Office and IE work (outlook sucks, but what can I say).
But I work in an all PC environment. My Mac saves me with Intra-Office crap, but it means that I have to have a Mac and Linux box...
Go for it. I hope that is part of the solution. Heck it did wonders for the Mac I think.
Have any of you actually used IE5 on OSX ?
It is glorious.
As for making them ship Java on XP, I think that is nice - actually I would go further and make them can any inroads into C# and the whole.NET business.
Hmmm, I don't think this breaks NP-Complete. Noone said NP-Complete problems can't be solved by 2^n computers. Using DNA they just made lots of very little computers. I'd imagine an order of magnitude or more scale up, which is *very cool*, and might get us to that order of magnitude, faster than say Quantum machines, which also AFAIK don't solve the set of NP-Complete problem (with SAT or Hamilton as a canonical versions).
Remember, NP-Complete means that a problem belongs to set the of problems to which it is *believed* there is no guarantee of solution short of guessing EVERY answer simultaneously (hmm, mixing apples and oranges in this description). Oh, and generally the number of answers is 2^n, where n is the degree of the problem (variables involved, Number of nodes etc).
I actually wish I knew more about how these problems scale up -- I have dealt with 2^2^n style problems (in machine learning), which seems like they should be in a class of their own. (explanation - SAT is find an assignation to n boolean variables such that satisfy a boolean formula (Dnf or Cnf, I forget, in Machin e Learning, the problem is given 2^n answers, there are 2^2^n possible functions, and you want to find that one).
heh, not a Mac audience here I know, but just curious (as I am a Mac/Linux zealot). This was my first 3D game I played ever (hmm, not counting a wireframe flight sim that ran on $30K workstations back in the late 80s:)).
I for one have started taking more and more pictures than I did before, because spending $15 only to keep 1 picture, sucked. With my Canon Elph, I can snap snap snap, download, done. More pictures for History:)
I also keep multiple backups of pictures.
Do I edit ? Sometimes, when my girlfriend really hates one:-)
I'm just shooting snaps at 1M resolution. But if you ask me, I'm recording more for history than I ever did.
As for the iBook -- Hmmm -- I found the keyboard/trackpad ergonomics kind of weird -- may be I should give it another go. The other thing wrong with it seems to be the underpowered graphics chip.
First off, this is slightly off-topic. I just wanted to relate my experience with 10.1 last week. I got a copy after months of procrastination and installed it on a G3 450mhz (the Blue and White type). I'd also like to note that I'm not really trying to start a flame war. I am a big fan of *nixes in general (I first worked on a PDP11 running some kind of Nix back in 82), I am also (strangely for a nix zealot) a huge Mac fan. I'm not a big fan of any Nix GUI nor of windows. Mainly I'm posting this because for the first time in several jaded years, something in mainstream Computing made me go "Wow!". Forget the iPod. The experience below hasjust made me decide that OSX is an incredible achievement.
The install was the easiest I have ever done, especially amazing considering there is a *Nix beneath. I went from 9.0 to 9.1, 9.1 to 10, 10 to 10.1 and finally upgraded the 9.1 to 9.2 The only hiccup was that I only got developer tools for 10.0 -- they don't work with 10.1 -- and although I bought a 10.1 Installation, that kit didnt come with 10.1 developers tools -- download from connect.apple.com.
So far so good -- it isn't rocket fast, but not slow enough to impair productivity at all.
My long term aim is a Powerbook running my work development environment which is Dynamo and Weblogic based. I really dislike my Tecra 8100.
So, the rest of the afternoon I checked out our CVS tree -- all 300 Megs.... Yes -- I was able to switch to ZSH, and access CVS via SSH without installing a single piece of software (other than creating a zshenv with CVSROOT etc set).
Next day I started a build, and after a couple of minor hitches (differences with FIND and RM, and PERL in the wrong place (bin not local/bin), I had a clean build. Took a little while, but by the end of the afternoon I had a ATG Dynamo server running our web applications....
Amazingly simple. Everything just *WORKED*.
My only problem is that Java based disk access is *VERY SLOW*.
I did some basic benchmarks against my Toshiba Tecra (650 mhz). The Mac (450mhz) during Memory and CPU based processing ran about the same speed as the 650mhz.
However disk access was twice as slow as the laptop -- anyone got any ideas ? Recall I installed on a pre-existing HFS+ disk that had OS9.1 on it. Can anyone recommend a disk tuning utility ? Should I rebuild from scratch with a different disk format?
In Summary -- OS X 10.1 rocks if you want to use Java 1.3 in a Unix environment - project Builder looks sweet , though I haven't played with it. 2 easy days work and I had a new development environment. I think it took me a month or so with my Redhat 6.2 on that Tecra.
All I want now is a Quartz/Carbon based Emacs:) oh yeah, that and a Titanium powerbook so I can trash that fscking Tecra:-)
Heh, I bet neither Zhenan Bao and Hendrik Schon have a problem with Step 5 : She's the cutest looking real geek since Pattie Maes, and he's a poster boy for germanic Ski Instructors everywhere...
Winton
Mod this down, it deserves it, but I couldn't help it:)
I got this press release from Mac Dev -- I am quite surprised -- is this very new ? Does it
mean we'll be able to get lots of Linux Apps on
Mac OS X soon ? How many products are our there that use Qt exclusively ?
Winton
--For Release Monday, Oct. 15, 9am PST--
Trolltech Releases Qt/Mac for Mac OS X
2000/10/15 - Oslo, Norway - With its release of Qt/Mac, Trolltech has added
Apple Macintosh to the list of platforms supported by Qt, an emerging
industry standard in cross-platform software development. Application
developers using Qt can now target Mac OS X with the same ease, as they are
currently targeting Windows, Linux, Unix, and embedded Linux systems. Qt
allows developers to create a single source tree that will run on all these
major platforms.
There are numerous features included in Qt/Mac, and among these is an
extensive C++ framework for OS X, support for the Aqua look &feel, OpenGL
support, database support and rich text support. Qt/Mac runs native on Mac
OS X, of course, and is fully carbonised.
"With the introduction of Qt/Mac, we can offer benefits to both our
existing customers and to Mac users," says Haavard Nord, CEO of Trolltech.
"Qt developers now have millions of new users they can target with existing
Qt applications. And Mac users now has a completely new set of more than
ten thousand applications that can run on the Macintosh platform."
Eirik Eng, Trolltech's president, said Trolltech had taken pains to ensure
that Mac users would feel comfortable with Qt applications. "Qt/Mac has the
Aqua look and feel, so all Mac users will feel right at home with programs
developed with Qt," he said. "It is exciting to see Qt applications running
on Mac OS X. The Qt functionality integrated with the cool look and feel
the Aqua-style provides is impressive."
In addition to all the above-mentioned features, Qt/Mac has all the
elements of Qt 3.0. The database capability gives Mac developers the
ability to create applications that are both database- and
platform-independent. Qt Designer is now a fully-fledged GUI builder with
main-window development capability and, and an integrated C++ editor. Qt
Linguist provides easy translation of Qt GUIs to different languages. Qt
Assistant eases browsing and finding information in the Qt Documentation.
Qt/Mac is released under the following licences: The Qt Professional and
Enterprise Editions. Available for the development of
proprietary/commercial software on Windows, Linux, Unix and Mac OS X
The Qt Academic License. Allows schools and universities to acquire and use
Qt for free in relevant courses.
At least two companies built $250M worth of value from Lisp (Cadabra,Inc and Mergent Inc). I believe Paul Graham also sold a Shopping system built from Lisp.
I was employed as a Lisp engineer for Cadabra (which was acquired by GOTO/Overture). However, our comparison shopping product is now in mothballs, and I'm coding Java for my bread.
Thoughts on LISPs problems:
(1)Very low volume, tight supply and demand of Lisp programmers of any degree of competency.
(2) Package and Build technology horribly non-standard. 1 and 2 Leading to:
(3) GUI, OS and Network support declining with respect to languages like Java and Perl (see 2).
Vicious cycle ? Do you agree ?
Secondly, there is virtually a commercial monopoly on Lisp, through Franz Inc (However we had a lot of success moving to CMUCL). What do you think Franz should try and do to ensure that Lisp or its successors enjoys the widespread deployment and usage it deserves ? Java has Sun as it's advocate.
Should we be looking for either LISP to change its syntax or for Java to absorb more and more of LISP's capabilities. McCarthy said that he always planned to move to M-expressions, but never got round to it:-) see this article
I would highly recommend Fischer Technik as well. I grew up with a friend who had quite a lot of this stuff, and although he was way brighter than me at math in general (probably a grade or 2), I remember him making simple robots with it at the age of 8 or 9. This was in the early 70s.
It is kind of expensive if I recall, but one fine day I plan to get some to see if I am smarrt enoughg to use it. The connectors are pretty funky and an IQ test in themself.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, its working:
:-)
:-)
Only 12% will not install Linux on a machine this year, whereas 65% will do so on both
Good work Slashdot
Winton
Yet another discussion of LOTR on Slashdot made me think of something.
:)) and so on. Its kind of easy reading.
:)
I've been reading the biography of Tolkein by Carpenter, and it becoms clear that Tolkein was a Luddite (in the nicer sense of the term). His favourite characters are Hobbits (personifying rural idyll) and Elves (personyfing art).
Anyway, who are the biggest cheerleaders for Tolkein these days ? The technologists....
An example, Tolkein never bought another car after wwII because he hated the way road development had ripped up Oxfordshire...
Anyway, the book is great -- lots of information on the origins of things like the word Gamgee (a midlands word for Cotton Wool!), Hobbit (possibly after a well known twenties book called Babbit (sp?) about a guys with a mid-life crisis
Just my 2 cents
Winton
One problem as far as I see it with GA's is that you need a decent ranking function to judge success... i.e. effectively you have to "know" the answer, AND know how to rank or grade non-or partial solutions with respect to it, before you learn the solution. Otherwise its basically just the regular Generate and Test algorithm which can never scale to large enough problems.
Winton
Hi,
//ization.
Here's the DELL I was pointed to Latitude C400-- looks quite close -- but it comes with nothing for the $1800 base price. Sorry I can't grab a URL for a maxed out C400 -- just check the boxes yourself, and press update price. I think we are basically talking cross-purposes. No doubt you can get a maxed out chunky black box for $2500, but not a lightweight TiBook/VAIO style one. A lot of the extra cost is in the engineering to get it down that thin.
Follow the customization, give it 1 gig, a combo drive, a builtin wireless card etc. Delete XP, and put on cheapest M$ os, and take the 3 year warranty. Oh, and the disk should be set to 30Gig. It starts to add up. I don't know whether the -$200 for the 866 is
worth it, I would go with the 1.2ghz cpu anyway. That might outclass the G4 on my tasks (I dont have specialised code that would take advantage of the G4's
For Apple go here: Take the TOP END configuration Here, hope this works
Incidentally, you are working on old data. The high end TiBook is 667 mhz.
Winton
Sorry this is a late reply, out to LOTR for the second time.
Nice try, but I'm a 38 year old software engineer with 20 odd years of computing experience, and a still warm PhD student Id. True the pay helps, but I also need the gig of ram so I can run experiments in hours rather than days.
Winton
See my request earlier for a TiBook Equivalent x86 box. The closest I could get from DELL (thanks to a follow on post), came out at this price.
$3,795.00 (combo/drive, internal wireless, 1gig RAM). Maybe if I didnt have to pay the dumb Windows fee it might be cheaper.
However, this is with a 12.1 inch screen...
Apple, I can get the same for $3,948.00 -- and this is with the 15" cinema scope...
$200 bucks difference ? I have an Educational discount which wil bring this down to the same price (3700).
Winton
Much appreciated, will take a look!
Looks promising.
Winton
Hi,
If anyone wants to know why Engineers might want a powerbook, look at the specs of the Titanium Powerbook - 1 gig ram - and the fact there is a clean Nix underneath.
A few months ago I did an experiment with OSX 10.1 -- basically I got my company's entire tree built just fine in 2 days. No code changed, just a few softlinks needed to be set up (Perl for example was in usr/bin instead of usr/local/bin. This tree is normally only run on Linux or Solaris's box.My next laptop wil be a TiBook -- especially now they have the CDRW/DVD combo drive.
I have been evaluating getting a PC laptop -- I can't find anything close to the TiBook -- try finding a slim design, with a 15" display and 1 gig Ram -- Sony slim Vaios max out at 512 or 384. Toshiba at 256mb. Please will someone point me at an x86 with those kind of specs, and I might go with Linux instead. I'd be totally convinced if it came with the cinema-scope style screen (2 emacs sessions side by side).
Now, for Desktops a whole different story -- we just got a rack mounted box for $4k -- twice the power of a E420, at 10% of the cost (and a 1/4 of the footprint and weight). I just couldn't fit it in my rucksack (close though, maybe in my 70 litre one)
Winton
p.s. This isn't a troll. I want a laptop with a gig of RAM (we're doing some hard memory intensive work)
But its out of print according to Amazon, but they do have second hand copies. You might also get from B&N or elsewhere. Great Book.
9 8/ qid=1008405307/sr=1-3/ref=sr_1_11_3/002-2623870-83 06446
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/03879826
Regards,
Winton
Hi Mike,
/.
a rtmouth.html
m ou th/dartmouth.html
Following on our thread, X-posted to
If you need the original hardcopy I guess
it could be obtained from Rockefeller or
maybe the NYker? JMC himself might have
a copy in his files (I don't know his current
Secretary at the moment, and don't want to bother
him again.
Cheers,
Winton
FORWARD FROM John McCarthy:
The proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation, in my files as
href=http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/d
(and in HTML form)
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dart
for the summer project on artificial intelligence was August 1955.
Since they supported it, it would have been in their list of grants in
1955 or 1956. The New Yorker picked it up, perhaps from the list of
grants, and one of their bottom-of-the-column wisecracks said
something like "about time". That may be 1956 but could be later.
I thought that might be the case, but as others pointed out, it costs $350/pa to use the OED on-line, so I couldn't check whether they already had Artificial Intelligence expanded upon.
I've passed it on to JMC to see if he remembers the origin of the abbreviation.
Cheers,
Winton
Copy of a message I sent the editor :) I can't believe they couldn't predate 1971 for AI (see Sci Fi Word List)
:) Next time I see him [JM], I'll mention it :)
Hi Mike,
Science predates Science Fiction
Winton
AI or Artificial Intelligence
Coined by John McCarthy [in a SCIENCE setting, not SCI-FI!], 1956. Seems to be fairly unanimous.... concept goes way back.
" He [JM] invited them to Vermont for "The Dartmouth summer research project on artificial intelligence." (reference)
1956 John McCarthy coined the term "artificial intelligence" as the topic of the Dartmouth Conference, the first conference devoted to the subject. (reference)
I'm a Mac and Linux zealot, hate Windows, but respect their Office and IE work (outlook sucks, but what can I say).
.NET business.
But I work in an all PC environment. My Mac saves me with Intra-Office crap, but it means that I have to have a Mac and Linux box...
Go for it. I hope that is part of the solution. Heck it did wonders for the Mac I think.
Have any of you actually used IE5 on OSX ?
It is glorious.
As for making them ship Java on XP, I think that is nice - actually I would go further and make them can any inroads into C# and the whole
Winton
Hmmm, I don't think this breaks NP-Complete. Noone said NP-Complete problems can't be solved by 2^n computers. Using DNA they just made lots of very little computers. I'd imagine an order of magnitude or more scale up, which is *very cool*, and might get us to that order of magnitude, faster than say Quantum machines, which also AFAIK don't solve the set of NP-Complete problem (with SAT or Hamilton as a canonical versions).
Remember, NP-Complete means that a problem belongs to set the of problems to which it is *believed* there is no guarantee of solution short of guessing EVERY answer simultaneously (hmm, mixing apples and oranges in this description). Oh, and generally the number of answers is 2^n, where n is the degree of the problem (variables involved, Number of nodes etc).
I actually wish I knew more about how these problems scale up -- I have dealt with 2^2^n style problems (in machine learning), which seems like they should be in a class of their own. (explanation - SAT is find an assignation to n boolean variables such that satisfy a boolean formula (Dnf or Cnf, I forget, in Machin e Learning, the problem is given 2^n answers, there are 2^2^n possible functions, and you want to find that one).
Winton
heh, not a Mac audience here I know, but just curious (as I am a Mac/Linux zealot). This was my first 3D game I played ever (hmm, not counting a wireframe flight sim that ran on $30K workstations back in the late 80s :)).
Regards, and have a happy thanksgiving !
Winton
I for one have started taking more and more pictures than I did before, because spending $15 only to keep 1 picture, sucked. With my Canon Elph, I can snap snap snap, download, done. More pictures for History :)
:-)
I also keep multiple backups of pictures.
Do I edit ? Sometimes, when my girlfriend really hates one
I'm just shooting snaps at 1M resolution. But if you ask me, I'm recording more for history than I ever did.
Winton
Thanks both of you! I'll check out Speed disk!
As for the iBook -- Hmmm -- I found the keyboard/trackpad ergonomics kind of weird -- may be I should give it another go. The other thing wrong with it seems to be the underpowered graphics chip.
I do like its weight/size though..
Cheers,
Winton
Hi,
:) oh yeah, that and a Titanium powerbook so I can trash that fscking Tecra :-)
First off, this is slightly off-topic. I just wanted to relate my experience with 10.1 last week. I got a copy after months of procrastination and installed it on a G3 450mhz (the Blue and White type). I'd also like to note that I'm not really trying to start a flame war. I am a big fan of *nixes in general (I first worked on a PDP11 running some kind of Nix back in 82), I am also (strangely for a nix zealot) a huge Mac fan. I'm not a big fan of any Nix GUI nor of windows. Mainly I'm posting this because for the first time in several jaded years, something in mainstream Computing made me go "Wow!". Forget the iPod. The experience below hasjust made me decide that OSX is an incredible achievement.
The install was the easiest I have ever done, especially amazing considering there is a *Nix beneath. I went from 9.0 to 9.1, 9.1 to 10, 10 to 10.1 and finally upgraded the 9.1 to 9.2 The only hiccup was that I only got developer tools for 10.0 -- they don't work with 10.1 -- and although I bought a 10.1 Installation, that kit didnt come with 10.1 developers tools -- download from connect.apple.com.
So far so good -- it isn't rocket fast, but not slow enough to impair productivity at all.
My long term aim is a Powerbook running my work development environment which is Dynamo and Weblogic based. I really dislike my Tecra 8100.
So, the rest of the afternoon I checked out our CVS tree -- all 300 Megs.... Yes -- I was able to switch to ZSH, and access CVS via SSH without installing a single piece of software (other than creating a zshenv with CVSROOT etc set).
Next day I started a build, and after a couple of minor hitches (differences with FIND and RM, and PERL in the wrong place (bin not local/bin), I had a clean build. Took a little while, but by the end of the afternoon I had a ATG Dynamo server running our web applications....
Amazingly simple. Everything just *WORKED*.
My only problem is that Java based disk access is *VERY SLOW*.
I did some basic benchmarks against my Toshiba Tecra (650 mhz). The Mac (450mhz) during Memory and CPU based processing ran about the same speed as the 650mhz.
However disk access was twice as slow as the laptop -- anyone got any ideas ? Recall I installed on a pre-existing HFS+ disk that had OS9.1 on it. Can anyone recommend a disk tuning utility ? Should I rebuild from scratch with a different disk format?
In Summary -- OS X 10.1 rocks if you want to use Java 1.3 in a Unix environment - project Builder looks sweet , though I haven't played with it. 2 easy days work and I had a new development environment. I think it took me a month or so with my Redhat 6.2 on that Tecra.
All I want now is a Quartz/Carbon based Emacs
Winton
Simpsons episode a while back.
Heh, I bet neither Zhenan Bao and Hendrik Schon have a problem with Step 5 : She's the cutest looking real geek since Pattie Maes, and he's a poster boy for germanic Ski Instructors everywhere...
:)
Winton
Mod this down, it deserves it, but I couldn't help it
I got this press release from Mac Dev -- I am quite surprised -- is this very new ? Does it
mean we'll be able to get lots of Linux Apps on
Mac OS X soon ? How many products are our there that use Qt exclusively ?
Winton
--For Release Monday, Oct. 15, 9am PST--
Trolltech Releases Qt/Mac for Mac OS X
2000/10/15 - Oslo, Norway - With its release of Qt/Mac, Trolltech has added
Apple Macintosh to the list of platforms supported by Qt, an emerging
industry standard in cross-platform software development. Application
developers using Qt can now target Mac OS X with the same ease, as they are
currently targeting Windows, Linux, Unix, and embedded Linux systems. Qt
allows developers to create a single source tree that will run on all these
major platforms.
There are numerous features included in Qt/Mac, and among these is an
extensive C++ framework for OS X, support for the Aqua look &feel, OpenGL
support, database support and rich text support. Qt/Mac runs native on Mac
OS X, of course, and is fully carbonised.
"With the introduction of Qt/Mac, we can offer benefits to both our
existing customers and to Mac users," says Haavard Nord, CEO of Trolltech.
"Qt developers now have millions of new users they can target with existing
Qt applications. And Mac users now has a completely new set of more than
ten thousand applications that can run on the Macintosh platform."
Eirik Eng, Trolltech's president, said Trolltech had taken pains to ensure
that Mac users would feel comfortable with Qt applications. "Qt/Mac has the
Aqua look and feel, so all Mac users will feel right at home with programs
developed with Qt," he said. "It is exciting to see Qt applications running
on Mac OS X. The Qt functionality integrated with the cool look and feel
the Aqua-style provides is impressive."
In addition to all the above-mentioned features, Qt/Mac has all the
elements of Qt 3.0. The database capability gives Mac developers the
ability to create applications that are both database- and
platform-independent. Qt Designer is now a fully-fledged GUI builder with
main-window development capability and, and an integrated C++ editor. Qt
Linguist provides easy translation of Qt GUIs to different languages. Qt
Assistant eases browsing and finding information in the Qt Documentation.
Qt/Mac is released under the following licences: The Qt Professional and
Enterprise Editions. Available for the development of
proprietary/commercial software on Windows, Linux, Unix and Mac OS X
The Qt Academic License. Allows schools and universities to acquire and use
Qt for free in relevant courses.
.... some Trolltech stuff at end
Hi,
:-) see this article
Some comments and background first:
At least two companies built $250M worth of value from Lisp (Cadabra,Inc and Mergent Inc). I believe Paul Graham also sold a Shopping system built from Lisp.
I was employed as a Lisp engineer for Cadabra (which was acquired by GOTO/Overture). However, our comparison shopping product is now in mothballs, and I'm coding Java for my bread.
Thoughts on LISPs problems:
(1)Very low volume, tight supply and demand of Lisp programmers of any degree of competency.
(2) Package and Build technology horribly non-standard. 1 and 2 Leading to:
(3) GUI, OS and Network support declining with respect to languages like Java and Perl (see 2).
Vicious cycle ? Do you agree ?
Secondly, there is virtually a commercial monopoly on Lisp, through Franz Inc (However we had a lot of success moving to CMUCL). What do you think Franz should try and do to ensure that Lisp or its successors enjoys the widespread deployment and usage it deserves ? Java has Sun as it's advocate.
Should we be looking for either LISP to change its syntax or for Java to absorb more and more of LISP's capabilities. McCarthy said that he always planned to move to M-expressions, but never got round to it
Winton
actually I'd prefer to send Paul Reiser if its ok with you :)
Winton
I would highly recommend Fischer Technik as well. I grew up with a friend who had quite a lot of this stuff, and although he was way brighter than me at math in general (probably a grade or 2), I remember him making simple robots with it at the age of 8 or 9. This was in the early 70s.
It is kind of expensive if I recall, but one fine day I plan to get some to see if I am smarrt enoughg to use it. The connectors are pretty funky and an IQ test in themself.
Cheers,
Winton
Think of the ad revenue!
Winton