OLPC choose firefox over webkit not for technical reasons, but for political reasons. They wanted to increase the firefox market share through the millions of people using the OLPC. When webkit was brought up for its smaller footprint and its better match for the OLPC project it was shoot down from those on top.
Well before going to extreme removing everything useful (heck Netscape 3 had a history and I remember running it on really slow computers) why not first change the rendering engine to use webkit which uses a lot less memory? Why do you think phone companies are investing in it over mozilla?
So it looks like right now it mostly supports Qt with some gtk stuff coming along. Anyone else find that odd? Today you can compile your Qt apps on Linux, Mac and Windows and get native look and feel. Why would I want to wrap that with a vmmachine?
Just yesterday I ran across an app written in Qt for HDR imaging that is written with Qt and is for the mac, linux and windows.
With Vista sucking up ram just to boot and everyone recommending you start out with 2GB of ram this is a lot of indications that ram is going to be a big problem for windows users in the near future. You can only buy so much ram with 32bit systems and some laptops limited you to 2GB. Windows applications like to use ram and Windows LOVES to use ram. So to cram in a few more features that they think we want 64bit is the way to go.
Anytime you can take a problem that is hard for a computer and easy for a human and make a successful game out of it you have a winner. I for one wish them the best of luck. check out google image labeler for another example of this. Amazon with their mechanical Turk went in the other direction, trying to pay you 1 cent (or something small) for each thing you. Check out this entertaining video on Human computation presented by the guy who originally came up with the google image game.
A project that you can download and play with today is Trolltech's QtConcurrent. Given a task it will automatically manage creating threads and distributing the task among your cores.
From the project page:
The classes and functions available in the Qt Concurrent package allows you to write multi-threaded applications without having to use the basic threading synchronization primitives such as mutexes and wait conditions. This makes it easier to reason about and test parallel programs to make sure that they are correct. The Qt Concurrent components manage the threads they use automatically. Each application has a global thread counter, which limits the maximum number threads used at the same time. The maximum is scaled according to the number of CPU cores on the system at runtime. This means that programs written with Qt Concurrent today will continue to scale when deployed on many-core systems in the future.
In Qt's designer pull up the "About Qt Designer" dialog and draw a circle around the logo and then click the button that appears. You find a little game where you get to see everyone who worked on Qt.
This coming from a bank who's website frequently goes down and when clicking links within my accounts page will suddenly (and randomly) tell its users how they have "successfully logged out" without a link to the main page to re-login and continue. And lets not forget the determination to automagically remove bank statements after six months and yet at the same time keeps pestering its users to cancel their paper copies. I would have to say that Bank Of America is the perfect example of how not to run a banking website. Every time I call their tech support I am costing THEM money.
The real reason is pretty simple. Vista is coming out next year and it will come with IE7, not IE6, I doubt there will be a way to install IE6 on Vista. So here a lot of people are going to buy Vista with IE7 only to find out that there pet site doesn't work because it is for IE5.5 and better. For most people the internet has become what the computer is. If the internet experience is bad they will smite Vista as a bad operating system. The only way for Microsoft to fix that is to get IE7 in as many hands as possible *now* in the hopes that most sites will be fixed before Vista is released. I don't use Windows so for me this just means is that with the combined usage of IE7 and Firefox in a few short months I will be able to finally be able to use transparent png's without feeling guilty. The increase of standards is good.
It is a neat idea that puts a spin on monopoly other then themed boards. Notice how it costs more. The company is trying to come up with ways for you to buy the same game you already own. And it will probably work. When you go to buy a board game odds are that you will buy a game you have already played. That is why we have the same dozen games, but with 50 themes (trivial pursuit star wars!). The sad thing is that Monopoly was a great way for kids to learn about money.
I subscribed to Next-Generation from the first issue all the way to the end. When it switched to the MicrosoftBoughtMySoul XBox magazine it was little more then a marketing magazine and I promptly canceled and am glad I did. A few years ago I got rid of all but one, the issue where they showed off Unreal (which back then was suppose to come out before Quake) Here is the wikipedia link and on my website is a photo of most of them that I took a few years back: next-generation
Dr. Mario wins all around. First off you get to buy (if you don't already have) an old school system which you both probably played as kids. This has added benefits that she will probably remember (fondly) wasting too much time playing Mario one like most of us and look at the game system as fun rather then something 'I play'. Next the actual game of Dr. Mario is really simple and your skill set can't be too far apart and even if she can kick your butt in the two player mode you can set each of you to have different difficult levels. And the game only lasts ten minutes so you are more likely to play "just one game" then some forty hour RPG.
You still move your wrist so it wont cut it unless there is a trackball for the thumb. I have contemplated slapping some wood on a logitech trackball to have it be upright similar to this mouse and seeing just how good it can be.
Anyone else find it odd that they were going for size and yet they still included PS/2 ports? Besides being physically smaller they are two less ports that are needed these days and can be removed for sinerios like this.
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A nice laptop cpu if I ever saw one.
You might enjoy Uprising, a kick ass game where you were a tank, a first person rts http://videogames.yahoo.com/pc/3do-uprising/previe w-341345
For example check out some neat stuff that Zack has been doing in his spare time with webkit in Qt. http://zrusin.blogspot.com/2007/07/web-on-canvas-a nd-dashboard-widgets.html
OLPC choose firefox over webkit not for technical reasons, but for political reasons. They wanted to increase the firefox market share through the millions of people using the OLPC. When webkit was brought up for its smaller footprint and its better match for the OLPC project it was shoot down from those on top.
Well before going to extreme removing everything useful (heck Netscape 3 had a history and I remember running it on really slow computers) why not first change the rendering engine to use webkit which uses a lot less memory? Why do you think phone companies are investing in it over mozilla?
And here is another map reduce implimenation, but written for C++: QtConcurrent
Well on the qtfpsgui download page there is binaries for linux, windows and OS X. Amarok recently was made to work on Windows http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/374-Amarok2-bu ilds-on-Windows.html As for Konversation, Kopete and K3b they will also be available on OS X and windows once KDE 4 is out.
So it looks like right now it mostly supports Qt with some gtk stuff coming along. Anyone else find that odd? Today you can compile your Qt apps on Linux, Mac and Windows and get native look and feel. Why would I want to wrap that with a vmmachine? Just yesterday I ran across an app written in Qt for HDR imaging that is written with Qt and is for the mac, linux and windows.
A KDE developer used it and made a patch for arts on his blog. I look forward to what other developers find and fix.
With Vista sucking up ram just to boot and everyone recommending you start out with 2GB of ram this is a lot of indications that ram is going to be a big problem for windows users in the near future. You can only buy so much ram with 32bit systems and some laptops limited you to 2GB. Windows applications like to use ram and Windows LOVES to use ram. So to cram in a few more features that they think we want 64bit is the way to go.
Anytime you can take a problem that is hard for a computer and easy for a human and make a successful game out of it you have a winner. I for one wish them the best of luck. check out google image labeler for another example of this. Amazon with their mechanical Turk went in the other direction, trying to pay you 1 cent (or something small) for each thing you. Check out this entertaining video on Human computation presented by the guy who originally came up with the google image game.
A project that you can download and play with today is Trolltech's QtConcurrent. Given a task it will automatically manage creating threads and distributing the task among your cores.
From the project page:
The classes and functions available in the Qt Concurrent package allows you to write multi-threaded applications without having to use the basic threading synchronization primitives such as mutexes and wait conditions. This makes it easier to reason about and test parallel programs to make sure that they are correct.
The Qt Concurrent components manage the threads they use automatically. Each application has a global thread counter, which limits the maximum number threads used at the same time. The maximum is scaled according to the number of CPU cores on the system at runtime. This means that programs written with Qt Concurrent today will continue to scale when deployed on many-core systems in the future.
Very cool.
In Qt's designer pull up the "About Qt Designer" dialog and draw a circle around the logo and then click the button that appears. You find a little game where you get to see everyone who worked on Qt.
This coming from a bank who's website frequently goes down and when clicking links within my accounts page will suddenly (and randomly) tell its users how they have "successfully logged out" without a link to the main page to re-login and continue. And lets not forget the determination to automagically remove bank statements after six months and yet at the same time keeps pestering its users to cancel their paper copies. I would have to say that Bank Of America is the perfect example of how not to run a banking website. Every time I call their tech support I am costing THEM money.
I know several people who have turned down Google. Best part was for some of them it wasn't even the money.
If you are using KDE your state will be saved and reloaded the next time you log in.
The real reason is pretty simple. Vista is coming out next year and it will come with IE7, not IE6, I doubt there will be a way to install IE6 on Vista. So here a lot of people are going to buy Vista with IE7 only to find out that there pet site doesn't work because it is for IE5.5 and better. For most people the internet has become what the computer is. If the internet experience is bad they will smite Vista as a bad operating system. The only way for Microsoft to fix that is to get IE7 in as many hands as possible *now* in the hopes that most sites will be fixed before Vista is released. I don't use Windows so for me this just means is that with the combined usage of IE7 and Firefox in a few short months I will be able to finally be able to use transparent png's without feeling guilty. The increase of standards is good.
-Benjamin Meyer
It is a neat idea that puts a spin on monopoly other then themed boards. Notice how it costs more. The company is trying to come up with ways for you to buy the same game you already own. And it will probably work. When you go to buy a board game odds are that you will buy a game you have already played. That is why we have the same dozen games, but with 50 themes (trivial pursuit star wars!). The sad thing is that Monopoly was a great way for kids to learn about money.
I subscribed to Next-Generation from the first issue all the way to the end. When it switched to the MicrosoftBoughtMySoul XBox magazine it was little more then a marketing magazine and I promptly canceled and am glad I did. A few years ago I got rid of all but one, the issue where they showed off Unreal (which back then was suppose to come out before Quake) Here is the wikipedia link and on my website is a photo of most of them that I took a few years back: next-generation
So rather then spending more then two hours getting the game engine to work you will spend a year or so making an engine?
Dr. Mario wins all around. First off you get to buy (if you don't already have) an old school system which you both probably played as kids. This has added benefits that she will probably remember (fondly) wasting too much time playing Mario one like most of us and look at the game system as fun rather then something 'I play'. Next the actual game of Dr. Mario is really simple and your skill set can't be too far apart and even if she can kick your butt in the two player mode you can set each of you to have different difficult levels. And the game only lasts ten minutes so you are more likely to play "just one game" then some forty hour RPG.
-Benjamin Meyer
You still move your wrist so it wont cut it unless there is a trackball for the thumb. I have contemplated slapping some wood on a logitech trackball to have it be upright similar to this mouse and seeing just how good it can be.
How about: ...
Content Interface
Topic Manager
Type Organizer
Theme Manager
There are no good choices, trust me I looked.
-Benjamin Meyer
Qt3 support has not been discontinued. In fact 3.3.5 was just released and will be up online soon. The changelog is already up here: http://www.trolltech.com/developer/changes/changes -3.3.5.html
Anyone else find it odd that they were going for size and yet they still included PS/2 ports? Besides being physically smaller they are two less ports that are needed these days and can be removed for sinerios like this.
-Benjamin Meyer