GUI Toolkit Page, gtk-- alternative?
on
GTK-- vs. QT
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· Score: 1
http://www.atai.org/guitool/
provides a very informative matrix of available toolkits with notes about language/OS support, license, and more. The author claims Qt is "best".
I thought someone was doing an alternative (to gtk--) C++ gtk wrapper, but I can't find it now.
Most of your points are wise. Certainly, put the needs and abilities of the users first.
I think you may be wrong about Oracle on Linux however. What features (other than client GUIs, which can be run from anywhere) aren't available on Linux? A counter-example: clustering.
I suspect that even if they don't replace Windows in one stroke that they will find many opportunities to reduce costs with Linux.
Call up IBM, RedHat and local shops (quick search turned up Eolach and Bayridge). They all should have experience fighting for Microsoft-held accounts and bringing Linux into that environment, and can fulfill the external contract requirement.
However, one so-called freedom that we do not advocate is the "freedom to choose any license you want for software you write". We reject this because it is really a form of power, not a freedom.
Choosing GPL is still choosing a license, a form of power. The logical conclusion of the above is that we'll only obtain freedom when licenses, and hence the choice of license, become unenforceable and irrelevant -- when copyright is overturned and all code is public domain, no matter what anyone says.
"The GUI is server/client like X11 but communicate through the native messaging system and the protocol is private to the server and client library and entirely hidden from the applications."
I'd guess there are dozens of gnutella clients, maybe a dozen with active developers. Only thing I'd disagree with is that most aren't open source, but I see that changing as well. There's definite strength in gnutella's openness and diversity.
And you're right, Freenet is slowly improving (as is Mojonation). I'd estimate they're both a year or two from being ready for prime time, but that's not a terribly long time for innovative software to evolve.
In addition, robust and/or secure and/or anonymous P2P networks are a hot topic in academia now, which should translate into much improved systems (new ones and existing ones) in the next few years.
The future is very bright for gnutella and for open and hard to attack P2P protocols in general. I'm excited!:)
Yes, Fastrack has better features and content right now. Still, gnutella will always be around, and it's going to get better soon. Check out this writeup of the gnutella developer meeting at last week's O'Reilly P2P conference and also this one. With the addition of hash searches/results (which can enable swarm downloads) and supernodes, gnutella will be competitive with KaZaa and its Fasttrack cohorts.
The newspaper article contains the Java/Ruby example. The book Pragmatic Programmer was written before they got involved in Ruby, and has no Ruby. To muddy the waters even more, their Ruby book is subtitled The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide, but it doesn't have Java comparisons. Someone will have to write a "Ruby for Java Programmers" book.
Actually Andy and Dave's book has been available for nearly a year. O'Reilly is scheduled to publish Ruby in a Nutshell this month, and Matz is scheduled to publish another English tome early next year. Sheesh, even Sams is getting into the picture soon apparently.
It's also just a matter of time until the industry switches from fighting file trading to using it as a marketing tool.
Perhaps file trading companies will be driven out of business by the RIAA, MPAA, et al (have any been put out of business yet? Napster (the company) lives, Aimster (barely) lives...), but the practice will only grow.
Music production hasn't gone downhill. Whatever was popular at any given time sucked. You probably just think things have gone downhill because in years past you were younger and less critical, so the crap got past your filters and is now lodged in your brain, which mistakes it for being "good".
Perhaps in utopia artists "should" be able to make money for their work, but in this world very few do or ever have, at least not enough to avoid other work. That's before Napster, before record labels even. Art is like love and software: better when it's free.
If you want credit, you could claim it in a public metadata catalog keyed by file hash. That way, if someone obtains a file you created through a source that has no connection to/information about you (P2P trading obviously, but really any source other than your website), they can still find you based on the contents of the file itself.
So, ask yourselves, does file sharing -- the exchange of information on a scale far exceeding anything we have seen in human history -- promote the progress of science and the useful arts?
Absolutely. As file traders have more money (previously spent buying CDs) and time (previously spent earning to buy CDs) they have more money and time to buy the products of and learn and scientifickally improve useful arts such as agriculture, shipbuilding, textiles, navigation, and smithing, not to mention slavin' and Indian killin'. Churn tha' butter Britney! Put Eisner in the stocks! Drunk, in public, Wednesday mornin', can't that lad do any useful work?
I think soundscan has made the 'real' charts much less amenable to manipulation. Not that I care about anything that makes it on to a chart...
You compile a list of top gnutella queries (no visualization required), but that would be more of a buzz index, wouldn't tell you what people were actually downloading or listening to.
You could track (voluntarily I'd hope) users' media player actions and compile top lists. I'd guess that playlist sharing companies like Uplister have or will do this, though I haven't seen it. Companies like Kick and MoodLogic may also be positioned to do something like this.
Finally, Bitzi (disclaimer: I'm involved) has an ugly most reported/highest ranked type page, though it bears no resemblance to the real world yet due to low traffic.
I can't wait for record labels to start promoting their wares on p2p networks and helpers like Bitzi -- hopefully that'd mean they'd have at least partially accepted the value of decentralized/uncontrolled distribution.
I don't know what mp3.com is making in advertising/page view, but I highly doubt it's enough to pay ~$.03/listen + bandwidth and hosting.
In any case, I almost never download more than two songs of an artist through mp3.com or similar sites. The click-click-click-click for each song interfaces are a pain. If I find I like a band I'll do quite a bit of searching on gnutella et al before I tediously download from mp3.com.
The search/select/download interface that all P2P filesharing clients more or less have is just much more convenient. KaZaa/MusicCity and various gnutella clients are a pleasure to use.
The pain of downloading from the web might be worth it if the download web site actually contained a wealth of ancilliary information that placed the tracks in context, but it almost never does. Certainly not mp3.com artist sites. A low quality image and occasionally a silly description doesn't do it.
I do have a solution, which means I'm horribly biased.:-) P2P distribution is the way to go: low cost, high usability. An external metadata catalog is the way to get context: find out more about the files you've downloaded or are considering downloading, whether there are better versions available, the artist's web site, etc.
An external metadata catalog can also provide a near universal point of reintermediation, connecting the artist/publisher with the listener regardless of where the latter obtained the file -- a file metadata catalog can be keyed by a deterministic calculated file identifier, so that if two people have the same file, they get the same catalog record, and can interact with each other, and with the file's creator.
To get a hint of what I'm talking about, check out Bitzi. It's targeted at developers right now, but if you're a super smart creator/publisher you should be able to figure out where we're going. If you're aren't that smart (just kidding, if you can't figure it out it's our fault), I'd be happy to explain.
Source code availability does not open source make. No more than not requiring purchase makes free software. Perhaps it was halfway "shared source" before (but even that's being unfair to "shared source").
Congratulations to LimeWire for releasing an excellent libre software application!
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Nevermind, I was probably thinking of Inti::Gtk, which seems moribund. Found in a Gnome bindings matrix.
I thought someone was doing an alternative (to gtk--) C++ gtk wrapper, but I can't find it now.
I think you may be wrong about Oracle on Linux however. What features (other than client GUIs, which can be run from anywhere) aren't available on Linux? A counter-example: clustering.
I suspect that even if they don't replace Windows in one stroke that they will find many opportunities to reduce costs with Linux.
BTW, another hopeful article about StarOffice concerning how well it handles MSOffice documents.
Replacing MSOffice looks like the biggest hurdle to me. StarOffice is really the only complete alternative available. Maybe StarOffice 6 will actually be good enough.
And you're right, Freenet is slowly improving (as is Mojonation). I'd estimate they're both a year or two from being ready for prime time, but that's not a terribly long time for innovative software to evolve.
In addition, robust and/or secure and/or anonymous P2P networks are a hot topic in academia now, which should translate into much improved systems (new ones and existing ones) in the next few years.
The future is very bright for gnutella and for open and hard to attack P2P protocols in general. I'm excited! :)
Yes, Fastrack has better features and content right now. Still, gnutella will always be around, and it's going to get better soon. Check out this writeup of the gnutella developer meeting at last week's O'Reilly P2P conference and also this one. With the addition of hash searches/results (which can enable swarm downloads) and supernodes, gnutella will be competitive with KaZaa and its Fasttrack cohorts.
I also appreciated the GhostScript link. Hopefully when they post audio of the sessions they'll use ogg.
The newspaper article contains the Java/Ruby example. The book Pragmatic Programmer was written before they got involved in Ruby, and has no Ruby. To muddy the waters even more, their Ruby book is subtitled The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide, but it doesn't have Java comparisons. Someone will have to write a "Ruby for Java Programmers" book.
More interesting might be slides from last month's Ruby conference as well as a nice writeup with pictures. Wish I could've been there!
I just noticed today (in part due to this /. story) that a paper that was seminal in the development of my thinking on IP is now online: Intellectual Property: A Non-Posnerian Law and Economics Approach. The same author has another interesting paper up called Are Patents and Copyrights Morally Justified?: The Philosophy of Property Rights and Ideal Objects. I've been recommending the first to people for nearly a decade, so I'm very pleased to find it out of the law library and online.
I'll require a GPS receiver with that, the the audio portion better handle ogg vorbis. ssh access would be nice too.
Till then, I'll remain gadgetless.
Perhaps file trading companies will be driven out of business by the RIAA, MPAA, et al (have any been put out of business yet? Napster (the company) lives, Aimster (barely) lives...), but the practice will only grow.
Music production hasn't gone downhill. Whatever was popular at any given time sucked. You probably just think things have gone downhill because in years past you were younger and less critical, so the crap got past your filters and is now lodged in your brain, which mistakes it for being "good".
No, no, Ogg Vorbis please. Now you may have a cookie.
Perhaps in utopia artists "should" be able to make money for their work, but in this world very few do or ever have, at least not enough to avoid other work. That's before Napster, before record labels even. Art is like love and software: better when it's free.
There's no reason to fear downloading any content from anywhere so long as your checksum is secure.
If you want credit, you could claim it in a public metadata catalog keyed by file hash. That way, if someone obtains a file you created through a source that has no connection to/information about you (P2P trading obviously, but really any source other than your website), they can still find you based on the contents of the file itself.
I usually download stuff from the web as well, but if I could trust the files, P2P searching and downloading is awfully convenient.
Absolutely. As file traders have more money (previously spent buying CDs) and time (previously spent earning to buy CDs) they have more money and time to buy the products of and learn and scientifickally improve useful arts such as agriculture, shipbuilding, textiles, navigation, and smithing, not to mention slavin' and Indian killin'. Churn tha' butter Britney! Put Eisner in the stocks! Drunk, in public, Wednesday mornin', can't that lad do any useful work?
You compile a list of top gnutella queries (no visualization required), but that would be more of a buzz index, wouldn't tell you what people were actually downloading or listening to.
You could track (voluntarily I'd hope) users' media player actions and compile top lists. I'd guess that playlist sharing companies like Uplister have or will do this, though I haven't seen it. Companies like Kick and MoodLogic may also be positioned to do something like this.
Finally, Bitzi (disclaimer: I'm involved) has an ugly most reported/highest ranked type page, though it bears no resemblance to the real world yet due to low traffic.
I can't wait for record labels to start promoting their wares on p2p networks and helpers like Bitzi -- hopefully that'd mean they'd have at least partially accepted the value of decentralized/uncontrolled distribution.
In any case, I almost never download more than two songs of an artist through mp3.com or similar sites. The click-click-click-click for each song interfaces are a pain. If I find I like a band I'll do quite a bit of searching on gnutella et al before I tediously download from mp3.com.
The search/select/download interface that all P2P filesharing clients more or less have is just much more convenient. KaZaa/MusicCity and various gnutella clients are a pleasure to use.
The pain of downloading from the web might be worth it if the download web site actually contained a wealth of ancilliary information that placed the tracks in context, but it almost never does. Certainly not mp3.com artist sites. A low quality image and occasionally a silly description doesn't do it.
I do have a solution, which means I'm horribly biased. :-) P2P distribution is the way to go: low cost, high usability. An external metadata catalog is the way to get context: find out more about the files you've downloaded or are considering downloading, whether there are better versions available, the artist's web site, etc.
An external metadata catalog can also provide a near universal point of reintermediation, connecting the artist/publisher with the listener regardless of where the latter obtained the file -- a file metadata catalog can be keyed by a deterministic calculated file identifier, so that if two people have the same file, they get the same catalog record, and can interact with each other, and with the file's creator.
To get a hint of what I'm talking about, check out Bitzi. It's targeted at developers right now, but if you're a super smart creator/publisher you should be able to figure out where we're going. If you're aren't that smart (just kidding, if you can't figure it out it's our fault), I'd be happy to explain.
Congratulations to LimeWire for releasing an excellent libre software application!