A static screenshot just looks like a normal non-pie popup menu, so there's not much point, and animating it doesn't give a good impression of how it feels, since a large part of it is making sure the menus move at exactly the speed of the normal pointer behaviour, to preserve contiuity and not jar the user.
Relative to the stationary physical screen, the menus move and the pointer stays still (with the net effect the pointer is moving relative to the menus, but stays in the same place relative to the layer under the menus.).
Combined with pie menus, it could be nicer. Flying-Pie-menus?
I've tested it with the sun 1.3.1 and 1.4.0_01 jvms on linux and windows - it depends on the awt robot class to fake the mouse, so if you're using XFree your build must have the xtest extension (but almost all do) (use xdpyinfo to check what extensions you have.).
It is perfectly legal for you to fork your own Perl - this is open source, after all. The idea with open source is "you want it, you do the work, I'm not here to make you happy" [ This is deeper than it seems e.g. if you and me as geeks _want_ linux to have significant penetration into the desktop market, so that the movement then has political and market clout, it IS up to you and me to make user-friendly linux distros]
But I've yet to see a X Window system window manager that wasn't "only tabs" or "only ordinary windows". AFAIK KDE kwin and perhaps sawfish and some others can do Be-style title tabs - but the windows don't group together without laboriously grouping them, the tabs just keep the titles visible. I'd like to just drag arbitrary windows into and out of tabsets that move as a unit. The X Window System is certainly flexible enough to allow this to be written - but I don't have the time right now...
OS X GUI, even more so than earlier Mac GUIs, is optimised heavily for the "beginner" or "occasional" user, it seems. Virtual Desktops are definitely a "power user" feature. I don't like most X-style virtual desktops much anyway - I got used to Amiga pubscreens + MUI (where the association between the application and a particular, named, virtual desktop out of an unbounded number of virtual desktops was persistent across restarts)
Sorry - my previous comment (sibling of this one) might merit a bit more information:
While this flies in the face of conventional UI dogma - the mouse behaviour is "different" for the menus - It's not _very_ different, especially since the scrolling of the menus underneath makes it look like the mouse is moving as usual.
The alternative is post-menu warpback, but I tried that too, and found it much more annoying than the scrolling effect my example illustrates.
FlyMenu Here you can download a mockup of a proposal for scrolling menus, that would make using popup menus in art packages and the like a lot easier.
flymenu.jar (11K) Requires a 1.3 JVM Start with java -jar flymenu.jar
Explanation: _Current Situation:_ When you press RMB, a popup-menu appears. you move the mouse. """Moving the mouse causes the mouse pointer to move. You use this to select an entry from the menu. Menu then disappears and your action is carried out. """Mouse pointer is in a quite different position to where you left it before pressing RMB.
_Suggested Situation:_ When you press RMB, a popup-menu appears. you move the mouse. ***Moving the mouse causes popup-menu to scroll underneath the (stationary relative to physical screen) mouse pointer. You use this to select an entry from the menu. Menu then disappears and your action is carried out. ***Mouse pointer is exactly where you left it before pressing RMB.
Photogenics doesn't even try to compete with GIMP for image processing, but it is much better than GIMP for original composition. GIMP absolutely sucks if you are trying to draw a picture from scratch (that's why it's "image manipulation program")
Photogenics used in conjunction with Gimp on Linux is pretty good...
I find a deeper problem with removable disks on Linux and Windows: ranted about this at length on LKML a while back. I'm now trying to do something (possibly misguided) about it. The basic problem is that a disk is not the drive it is in.
both Unix and Windows, in general, assume it is. You don't copy a file to "disk xyzzy", you copy it to "A:" or "the filesystem mounted on/dev/fd0" -/dev/fd0 identifies a drive, not a disk!
The amiga got this right: a disk became part of the filesystem based on its label/id, if possible - so I could say "copy mfile.doc to xyzzy:mydocs", and if the disk xyzzy was unvailable, the system would prompt for it, while the copy process blocked waiting for it. If I put it back in a different drive, the system didn't care.
I'm currently casting an eye over the linux block device and filesystem code with a view to mangling into something vaguely amiga-like - but I'm not really even a C programmer (more of a Lisp guy), so I make take a while.
Basically, a disk contains a set of blocks. Some or all of those blocks may be accesible via a block device file. But you should be able to mount the filesystem "on the set of blocks of the disk", not the set of blocks currently accessible by a particular drive - disk partitioning schemes still have one or two fields to facilitate this, the disk label/name and/or a uniqueid.
If I have a disk labelled "peaches", I want it part of the filesystem at e.g./mnt/peaches, and if I have two drives, I don't want to have to care about what drive it is in!
Actually, I intend to install open-access cameras in my house. Problem is, I can only afford 1 crappy camera at the moment, not to mention the fact I'm behind a 33.6 modem line. Wait a couple of years.
Since, where I am (Ireland), camera-mobile-phones are just beginning to hit the stores, it's probable that in a few years everyone will have cameras anyway - camera mobile phones are actually useful, not for the idiotic "face to face" communicators that most western people seem to abhor, but for pointing at *something else*, and saying to your mates "here, take a look at this" - it'll probably alter society significantly, but subtly.
A state where everything is monitored and recorded may not be so bad - provided *everyone*, not just the police/government, has access to the monitors and recordings. See "The Transparent Society" by David Brin, or read Ian M. Banks' Culture novels.
I actually disklike "write only" language claims a lot - APL is/was one of my favorite languages - but, just as one does not expect to read Chinese without learning the language, one cannot read APL without learning the language - APL is a language based on familiar mathematical symbols, so it's not that hard (it's made much harder by (a) misguided attempts to ASCIIfy it and (b) non-APL keyboards)
Similarly, most perl is actually quite readable once you have learned the language If one where to replace every $foo %bar @baz with scalar_foo, hash_bar, array_baz, it might be initially more readable for english speakers - but for the few minutes it takes you to learn the meaning of the symbols, you can save a lot of typing and increase the brevity of your work. A few things did annoy me about perl syntax - I dislike -> instead of . for member access, but guess what?, it's being fixed in perl 6.0...
I find it most useful for "XWin -query mylinuxbox", which brings up the standard [gkx]dm login screen if you enable xdmcp on the linux box. There are few x clients that are much fun to slog through tweazking to compile under cygwin, so it's easier to use X across the network to a linux box.
It also worked fine for tunnelling X apps through ssh in the normal manner.
My main gripe is the fiddlyness of the keyboard - I end up having to manually xmodmap stuff into shape (I'm in Ireland, we tend to use UK keyboards rather than USA ones)
It's their site. They can post what they want. They're not here to keep your sheletered little MS-good, choice-bad worldview intact.
Or maybe for every 3 news stories saying that Al-Queda are up to no good, the news channels should cover the positive work for farmland renewal that Al-Queda are doing?
I'd be happy enough with the windows keys, if only they had "meta" written on them (and "menu" written on the menu key rather than a picture of a menu)- or even little pictures of penguins..
The JVM (basically a neutered Forth VM) can't do proper-tail-recursion the "easy" way- it lacks the required stack manipulation primitives, according to some people they left them out for security reasons at the time of design.
The fully-rnrs-scheme-compliant scheme, SISC on the JVM uses the JVM heap, not stack, where most schemes on real processors would use the processor's real stacks, munging them for tail-recursion.
Unfortunately, the subject matter of the article is XML, which is mainly an W3C and MS-hyped reimplementation of some 20-year-old+ Lisp concepts.
The article doesn't mention just how braindead XML actually is.
It's like a religion - if you start with the premise that XML is good, then it all fits together and the article is valuable to you, but just because the article is a good report on XML doesn't mean that XML itself is any good. This is a common mistake people make,. and this article furthers MS's goals of pushing the XML-religion. The author may himself by quite clever, but, just as many reasonably intelligent people fall for religions, he may be simply misguided.
Microsoft's Sharepoint Portal Server product does
MS-Office compatible docuement versioning. It is poised to
bring a new cycle of MS-dependence to companies.
Star Office lags behind, unfortunately, although, in
theory, sharepoint-like functionality should be easy to
whip up, given the open file format of Star/Open Office.
Re:Apple "invented" the beige Personal Computer...
on
Black Is The New Beige
·
· Score: 2
It really was great looking for its time, especially when you saw it in the "flesh" (that photo doesn't really do it justice). A contemporary PC next to it really looked like an eyesore.
I think both white cases and black cases are much nicer than beige...
Note: I'm not in the US, but US decisions have a way of being passed off as law in the EU... so this still concernes me.
I'm a techie, AND I DON'T WANT "PRIVACY". I want _balance_. If someone has information about me, I want access to information on them. I DON'T want the RIAA/whoever to be able to make any deals with ANYONE behind closed doors.
Total Societal Transparency.
Let _everyone_ know everything, if they want to. If a corporation has data on its customers, then the corporation should not be allowed any meetings behind closed doors.
Extreme example for illustrative purposes: surveillance cameras everwhere. Oh no! people cry... BUT: make the network Public Access, so that anyone, not just a privileged few, can tap in and keep an eye on what people are doing - and don't forget, other people will be able to see you watching, so don't be a perv.... i.e. it's a self-correcting way to run a society.
See David Brin's book, "The Transparent Society: Will Technology for us to choose Between Freedom And Privacy?".
Chapter one is available on-line here - I suggest all Techies read it rather than believing Privacy is necessarily a good thing.
If the choice becomes "Privacy or Freedom", I'm for Freedom.
How far would the RIAA or the WTO get if every person on earth was potentially privy to every bit of their meetings? All they usually currently give out is what they say happened, after the fact...
Privacy is what gives them their political edge. We should be fighting to destroy privacy, not uphold it.
And to be fair, we shouldn't want to hold onto our own privacy either. Paraphrasing Brin: "People always want privacy for themselves and accountability from other people - some people, even quite well-meaning and intelligent people [me: EFF?], do not see that their own position is illogical, asking for greater openness from others, and privacy for themselves"
Maybe Hollings has cottoned on to that, and is chucking away at the naive techies right now...
Slashdot Mirror
A static screenshot just looks like a normal non-pie popup menu, so there's not much point, and animating it doesn't give a good impression of how it feels, since a large part of it is making sure the menus move at exactly the speed of the normal pointer behaviour, to preserve contiuity and not jar the user.
Relative to the stationary physical screen, the menus move and the pointer stays still (with the net effect the pointer is moving relative to the menus, but stays in the same place relative to the layer under the menus.).
Combined with pie menus, it could be nicer. Flying-Pie-menus?
I've tested it with the sun 1.3.1 and 1.4.0_01 jvms on linux and windows - it depends on the awt robot class to fake the mouse, so if you're using XFree your build must have the xtest extension (but almost all do) (use xdpyinfo to check what extensions you have.).
It is perfectly legal for you to fork your own Perl - this is open source, after all. The idea with open source is "you want it, you do the work, I'm not here to make you happy" [ This is deeper than it seems e.g. if you and me as geeks _want_ linux to have significant penetration into the desktop market, so that the movement then has political and market clout, it IS up to you and me to make user-friendly linux distros]
But I've yet to see a X Window system window manager that wasn't "only tabs" or "only ordinary windows". AFAIK KDE kwin and perhaps sawfish and some others can do Be-style title tabs - but the windows don't group together without laboriously grouping them, the tabs just keep the titles visible. I'd like to just drag arbitrary windows into and out of tabsets that move as a unit. The X Window System is certainly flexible enough to allow this to be written - but I don't have the time right now...
OS X GUI, even more so than earlier Mac GUIs, is optimised heavily for the "beginner" or "occasional" user, it seems. Virtual Desktops are definitely a "power user" feature. I don't like most X-style virtual desktops much anyway - I got used to Amiga pubscreens + MUI (where the association between the application and a particular, named, virtual desktop out of an unbounded number of virtual desktops was persistent across restarts)
Sorry - my previous comment (sibling of this one) might merit a bit more information:
While this flies in the face of conventional UI dogma - the mouse behaviour is "different" for the menus - It's not _very_ different, especially since the scrolling of the menus underneath makes it look like the mouse is moving as usual.
The alternative is post-menu warpback, but I tried that too, and found it much more annoying than the scrolling effect my example illustrates.
FlyMenu
Here you can download a mockup of a proposal for scrolling menus, that would make using popup menus in art packages and the like a lot easier.
flymenu.jar (11K)
Requires a 1.3 JVM
Start with java -jar flymenu.jar
Explanation:
_Current Situation:_
When you press RMB, a popup-menu appears. you move the mouse.
"""Moving the mouse causes the mouse pointer to move.
You use this to select an entry from the menu. Menu then disappears and your action is carried out.
"""Mouse pointer is in a quite different position to where you left it before pressing RMB.
_Suggested Situation:_
When you press RMB, a popup-menu appears. you move the mouse.
***Moving the mouse causes popup-menu to scroll underneath the (stationary relative to physical screen) mouse pointer.
You use this to select an entry from the menu. Menu then disappears and your action is carried out.
***Mouse pointer is exactly where you left it before pressing RMB.
Have a play with this "FlyMenu" example I wrote one time.
Photogenics doesn't even try to compete with GIMP for image processing, but it is much better than GIMP for original composition. GIMP absolutely sucks if you are trying to draw a picture from scratch (that's why it's "image manipulation program")
Photogenics used in conjunction with Gimp on Linux is pretty good...
I somehow doubt Sun Java will ever be GPLed while a certain J. Gosling is still alive - read up on your Emacs history to find out why...
I find a deeper problem with removable disks on Linux and Windows: ranted about this at length on LKML a while back. I'm now trying to do something (possibly misguided) about it. The basic problem is that a disk is not the drive it is in.
/dev/fd0" - /dev/fd0 identifies a drive, not a disk!
/mnt/peaches, and if I have two drives, I don't want to have to care about what drive it is in!
both Unix and Windows, in general, assume it is. You don't copy a file to "disk xyzzy", you copy it to "A:" or "the filesystem mounted on
The amiga got this right:
a disk became part of the filesystem based on its label/id, if possible -
so I could say "copy mfile.doc to xyzzy:mydocs", and if the disk xyzzy was unvailable, the system would prompt for it, while the copy process blocked waiting for it. If I put it back in a different drive, the system didn't care.
I'm currently casting an eye over the linux block device and filesystem code with a view to mangling into something vaguely amiga-like - but I'm not really even a C programmer (more of a Lisp guy), so I make take a while.
Basically, a disk contains a set of blocks. Some or all of those blocks may be accesible via a block device file. But you should be able to mount the filesystem "on the set of blocks of the disk", not the set of blocks currently accessible by a particular drive - disk partitioning schemes still have one or two fields to facilitate this, the disk label/name and/or a uniqueid.
If I have a disk labelled "peaches", I want it part of the filesystem at e.g.
Actually, I intend to install open-access cameras in my house. Problem is, I can only afford 1 crappy camera at the moment, not to mention the fact I'm behind a 33.6 modem line. Wait a couple of years.
Since, where I am (Ireland), camera-mobile-phones are just beginning to hit the stores, it's probable that in a few years everyone will have cameras anyway - camera mobile phones are actually useful, not for the idiotic "face to face" communicators that most western people seem to abhor, but for pointing at *something else*, and saying to your mates "here, take a look at this" - it'll probably alter society significantly, but subtly.
A state where everything is monitored and recorded may not be so bad - provided *everyone*, not just the police/government, has access to the monitors and recordings. See "The Transparent Society" by David Brin, or read Ian M. Banks' Culture novels.
I actually disklike "write only" language claims a lot - APL is/was one of my favorite languages -
but, just as one does not expect to read Chinese without learning the language, one cannot read APL
without learning the language - APL is a language based on familiar mathematical symbols, so it's not that hard (it's made much harder by (a) misguided attempts to ASCIIfy it and (b) non-APL keyboards)
Similarly, most perl is actually quite readable once you have learned the language
If one where to replace every $foo %bar @baz with scalar_foo, hash_bar, array_baz, it might be initially more readable for english speakers - but for the few minutes it takes you to learn the meaning of the symbols, you can save a lot of typing and increase the brevity of your work. A few things did annoy me about perl syntax - I dislike -> instead of . for member access, but guess what?, it's
being fixed in perl 6.0...
My point was that Al-Queda aren't doing any positive farmland renewal work
I find it most useful for "XWin -query mylinuxbox", which brings up the standard [gkx]dm login screen if you enable xdmcp on the linux box. There are few x clients that are much fun to slog through tweazking to compile under cygwin, so it's easier to use X across the network to a linux box.
It also worked fine for tunnelling X apps through ssh in the normal manner.
My main gripe is the fiddlyness of the keyboard - I end up having to manually xmodmap stuff into shape (I'm in Ireland, we tend to use UK keyboards rather than USA ones)
Why?
It's their site. They can post what they want. They're not here to keep your sheletered little MS-good, choice-bad worldview intact.
Or maybe for every 3 news stories saying that Al-Queda are up to no good, the news channels should cover the positive work for farmland renewal that Al-Queda are doing?
Oh, they're not? - See how absurd you are being?
Re Lisp:
Several Schemes now accept [ and ] as a substitute for ( and ).
Personally, I just xmodmap ( and ) to where [ and ] usually are...
I'd be happy enough with the windows keys, if only they had "meta" written on them (and "menu" written on the menu key rather than a picture of a menu)- or even little pictures of penguins..
Java is formally pass-by-value - it's just that just most values *are* object references. This is not quite the same as true pass-by-reference.
The JVM (basically a neutered Forth VM) can't do proper-tail-recursion the "easy" way- it lacks the required stack manipulation primitives, according to some people they left them out for security reasons at the time of design.
The fully-rnrs-scheme-compliant scheme, SISC on the JVM uses the JVM heap, not stack, where most schemes on real processors would use the processor's real stacks, munging them for tail-recursion.
Yes, but that language already existed (Lisp), so the w3c felt they had to invent a baroque monstrosity instead.
Unfortunately, the subject matter of the article is XML, which is mainly an W3C and MS-hyped reimplementation of some 20-year-old+ Lisp concepts.
The article doesn't mention just how braindead XML actually is.
It's like a religion - if you start with the premise that XML is good, then it all fits together and the article is valuable to you, but just because the article is a good report on XML doesn't mean that XML itself is any good. This is a common mistake people make,. and this article furthers MS's goals of pushing the XML-religion. The author may himself by quite clever, but, just as many reasonably intelligent people fall for religions, he may be simply misguided.
Microsoft's Sharepoint Portal Server product does MS-Office compatible docuement versioning. It is poised to bring a new cycle of MS-dependence to companies.
Star Office lags behind, unfortunately, although, in theory, sharepoint-like functionality should be easy to whip up, given the open file format of Star/Open Office.
A4000T photo
It really was great looking for its time, especially when you saw it in the "flesh" (that photo doesn't really do it justice). A contemporary PC next to it really looked like an eyesore.
I think both white cases and black cases are much nicer than beige...
Note: I'm not in the US, but US decisions have a way of being passed off as law in the EU... so this still concernes me.
I'm a techie, AND I DON'T WANT "PRIVACY". I want _balance_. If someone has information about me, I want access to information on them. I DON'T want the RIAA/whoever to be able to make any deals with ANYONE behind closed doors.
Total Societal Transparency.
Let _everyone_ know everything, if they want to. If a corporation has data on its customers, then the corporation should not be allowed any meetings behind closed doors.
Extreme example for illustrative purposes: surveillance cameras everwhere. Oh no! people cry... BUT: make the network Public Access, so that anyone, not just a privileged few, can tap in and keep an eye on what people are doing - and don't forget, other people will be able to see you watching, so don't be a perv.... i.e. it's a self-correcting way to run a society.
See David Brin's book, "The Transparent Society: Will Technology for us to choose Between Freedom And Privacy?".
Chapter one is available on-line here - I suggest all Techies read it rather than believing Privacy is necessarily a good thing.
If the choice becomes "Privacy or Freedom", I'm for Freedom.
How far would the RIAA or the WTO get if every person on earth was potentially privy to every bit of their meetings? All they usually currently give out is what they say happened, after the fact...
Privacy is what gives them their political edge. We should be fighting to destroy privacy, not uphold it.
And to be fair, we shouldn't want to hold onto our own privacy either. Paraphrasing Brin: "People always want privacy for themselves and accountability from other people - some people, even quite well-meaning and intelligent people [me: EFF?], do not see that their own position is illogical, asking for greater openness from others, and privacy for themselves"
Maybe Hollings has cottoned on to that, and is chucking away at the naive techies right now...
By your definition and my experience, then, moral factors do not exist.