... how much gnome sucked (was it ver 1.4?) and kde ruled. KDE was under an evil license back then, though.
Gnome was about to "take over the world" with their ingenious CORBA based "Bonobo", which is still around (though very little noise is made of it these days, c.f. Mono).
Now that I look at these pics in retrospect, I can recall the huge UI discrepancy Linux had with windows. Windows these days does not look much better than back in 2000, but boy, has Linux caught up.
Face it, most (by far) Americans are not going to fiddle with Linux, even if they're told it's free and superior, merely because they don't want to relearn anything that was hard enough to learn the first time, and they just want to use whatever is on their computer (Windows).
Microsoft's problems start when
- Windows is not what is on people's computer by default - People click on the firefox icon, notice that it firefox works just like on windows, and their wlan works. And there is nothing else they need to care about.
Basic consumer desktop is a commodity and the "added value" microsoft is providing is meaningless.
So, what's the basic difference between what we have in phantom and what can already be done with a library/framework in, say, linux?
The need for the wrapper. Remove the translation and you gain efficiency (in theory).
I wish the the fellow luck. I think it's about time that someone takes all the lessons learned in computer science from the past several decades and try to synthesis them at the OS level. I suppose it's human nature to grumble and nay-say paradigm shifts but of all people I cannot understand why geeks, whose very jobs demand adaptability and resilience to change are taking such strong tones regarding this guy's work.
Probably because working at the OS layer is the wrong way to approach the problem. Unless you have a way of integrating at least something that exists before, you are creating an island where nothing goes in and nothing comes out. Stuff like this could be done by creating a new implementation of Python interpreter, just to provide one example. Also, object databases like ZODB are here already.
This is clearly a research project, but the research could be targeted better to be of wider interest. Of course it's not up to me to determine what other people will/should do with their freetime.
The linked article was rather sparse with technical details. What's the window manager? What are the building blocks? Doesn't look like a vanilla gnome setup...
Python is an awful language to make performant, robust software in.
And what language isn't? Achieving these goals requires work, work, and work. And an unrelenting drive towards simplicity, which does speak for python as the application development language.
I'd wager that the highest mass of crappy software in active use today is still written in C.
Why would anyone care about install time? The only interesting part of the install is how much of your hardware works out of the box, and how much of it can be made to work easily.
Of course installation is the easiest feature to review, but this is 2009 - there is nothing interesting about OS installation anymore.
My mobile phone is due for an upgrade. It looks like Nokia join Sony-Ericcson on the blacklist; they can all get fucked.
You are not a frequent reader? In the last few weeks, Nokia put Qt out under LGPL. The good karma earned through that action alone should be enough for us to ignore strongarm political tactics (and small PR disasters) for a while.
So what are you saying, laws are for little people?
I'm saying: if nokia really thinks they need this, they can implement it inside their own IT infrastructure if they want. If that is the alternative to shipping the jobs to india / china, I'm all for it - because this scheme doesn't really hurt people who know how the system works, and can take precautions with mails they send. Amend this with "for personal emails use gmail", and it's as humane as needs to be.
Others might see it as a tyrant offering to leave.
Lawmakers, if you don't want to see your country on the leash of a business, stop worrying about your campaign losing its funding. Your job is to the people and their innate human rights.
Still, it's more important to keep our programmers fed and employed, rather than keeping the secrets about secretary's day lotion under lock and key.
The "true piracy hardcores" seem to be taking a break (anonymizers, etc), and now we are meddling with "soft" security. It's not the important kind of security, judging simply by the fact that anyone can get to that data if they wanted. I'm sure Nokia has had some bad exeriences with data leakage, and if they have the tools to home in on whoever did it, they should be able to use it... to partake in appropriate punitive measures.
Wouldn't it be insanely careless to leak information by sending suspicious emails from your corporate account anyway?
Also, does anyone who cares about privacy in any degree use corporate email for anything personal? I think it's reasonable to expect that your nokia.com account should only be used for your official nokia business. Also, corporate emails are typically much less convenient than e.g. gmail anyway, and with limited quotas. Do you really want to use them when you don't have to?
Specifically, Ruby blocks are a single great primitive that covers the ground of a number of separate, less powerful entities in Python.
Blocks are covered by generators and with-statement. They are separate, but certainly not less powerful (and most Python fans would argue they are more intuitive).
a = [3,4,5] a.each do |x|
Yeah,
for x in a:
print x
is so much less readble;-).
The neat thing here is that it's easy and natural to implement your own custom version of each for your classes.
Yeah, and it's every bit as natural to implement python generators.
Now, Python provides for the special __iter__ method to allow user-defined classes to support iteration. But Ruby's block-based mechanism is fully general and available to the Ruby programmer.
... generators again...
Blocks' utility goes beyond iteration, into a wide variety of other cases where anonymous functions are useful. Some motivating examples may be helpful. Another one from Ruby's standard library: File.open('foo.txt','w') do |f|
f.write(some_content) end This illustrates the Ruby idiom for resource cleanup. Here we're guaranteed that the file will be closed after the block runs. The implementation of open isn't magic, it can be expressed (**simplified slightly) as:
This is why Python has "with" statement now. Can you bring up something that is *not* covered by with statement or generators? No?
I know this is a bad idea on ruby fanboy thread, but all of this post is just a strawman that is reminiscent of typical rubyhink (i.e. comparing ruby against an obsolete version of Python).
Ruby guys should stick to comparing ruby against Java, it will be a much easier crowd to attract. People familiar with Python are typically much less impressed by these antics.
Some people are just too dimwitted to quit. They get something for free, and get shocked, SHOCKED when they have problems. KDE4.0 discussion was an interesting drama piece in the beginning, but now it's just old.
Back in the day, people got excited about future promise of software, even if it was too buggy for daily use. Now, we are flooded with dimwits who don't really care about the tech, and want the whole world to know it.
Here's a tip: if it doesn't work, don't use it. There is no need to go around every forum on the net and whine, whine, whine.
As far as widgets go, Plasma does use subclasses of Qt widgets, just like the rest of KDE. I wasn't aware that this is considered weird or out of place however.
Can I draw a plasma widget in Qt designer? Can I drop my own QWidgets on plasma widgets?
I'm not trying to be confrontational here - I'm trying to find out how easy it is to leverare existing non-plasma stuff in plasma (if I don't feel like going for the low level stuff & graphics view).
I would rather have these programmers focus their efforts on Krusader ? It seriously needs some love.
Ah, again the myth that open source developers are a free workforce you can redirect between projects on your whim... It just doesn't go like that, people work on whatever happens to interest them at the time.
(this comes from another Krusader user btw - by the look of their web page, they seem to be doing alright)
Isn't the big news that Jaiku will be open sourced and...
I don't really care about the source code of a web service. I don't think they will be able to start taking in contributions just like that (imagine the security implications).
There still has to be a central place that actually runs the service, unless you want to set up your own microblogging servers inside your company's firewall.
Regarding google notebook - news like this suck a little bit, since they underline the fact that not even google services are immune to termination. I picked google notebook since
- I don't need to log in (I'm always logged in to gmail)
- I thought it would be around for the long haul
Perhaps exposing a "notes" oriented interface to google docs would be handy...
I've started writing gtk+ bindings for my small scripting language (lang2e.sourceforge.net), and all that was required was for me to add a callback mechanism (that is, a way to pass a pointer function written in the scripting language to a gtk function).
Why reimplement the wheel? Perhaps you could use something like the python virtual machine (interpreter) to host your language. Then, you could expose all the python stdlib (and 3rd party libs) to your own language.
Of course this will involve reading some docs and other people's C code, but will avoid leaving your own language as an isolated island.
I'm not a big fan of Qt. I kind of see it as an oversized, bloated library.
Now that it's LGPL, at least community has a chance to unbloat it:-).
Even pieces of the C++ standard that I'm sure Qt added on extra functionality in their equivalent, but it gets really hard for me to reason not using the standard libraries that are nearly (nearly because it does depend on what the implementation of the standard libraries on the system supports--not a problem if each platform goes for compliance with the standard, which I believe most go at least pretty damn close) guaranteed to work anywhere the standard libraries are present.
You can still use stdlib. Perhaps implement your app "model" with boost + stdlib, ans use Qt for GUI. Of course you will still be using stuff like QString to interface with the APIs.
Also, stuff like QString are actually better than C++ stdlib equivalents - providing reference counting, copy-on-write and unicode support. C++ stdlib is a compromise - it's intentionally "not a platform", which sort of holds it down. Being restricted by standards process doesn't help; even glib (which is a pure C lib) is better.
But Gnome bindings to Python and C# are excellent and have good tools support, and that's probably what matters more these days.
PyQt is pretty great as well, and tool support is there (Qt Designer can be used just as for C++).
I don't know about C#, but who cares when you have Python and C++? C++ programming with Qt is not your grandfather's C++ programming (c.f. MFC, Symbian) - it's actually quite tolerable. And PyQt exposes all of Qt.
I think that whenever a group releases a new version of their language, they should strive to make it (mostly) backwards compatible.
That's why they keep releasing 2.x versions that are backwards compatible.
This means that very large projects have a lot of work to do to bring their project over to the new specification.
Very large projects can stay with the 2.x series (along with a big portion of users) just fine.
The question is: is this work worth the upgrade to python 3.0? I'd say on the whole, the changes do not contribute enough to the usability of the language to make it ultimately a worthwhile transition to make. I haven't seen really any compelling features in Python 3.0 that would provide enough incentive for me to spend hours of grunt work making all my code workable in Python 3.0.
And you shouldn't, since it would probably be a waste of work. 2.x is a rock-solid series that is years away from obsolescense, and new serious projects started right now should pick 2.5 / 2.6. Try starting to use Py3 for projects where it fits - your command line scripts, self-contained internal applications... and ramp up the stakes when new libraries are ported.
A programming language deserves a "cleanup" every now and then - this is such a thing. Hey, people have survived worse things, like gcc version changes, Qt3 => Qt4, Gtk 1 => Gtk2...
Slashdot Mirror
... how much gnome sucked (was it ver 1.4?) and kde ruled. KDE was under an evil license back then, though.
Gnome was about to "take over the world" with their ingenious CORBA based "Bonobo", which is still around (though very little noise is made of it these days, c.f. Mono).
Now that I look at these pics in retrospect, I can recall the huge UI discrepancy Linux had with windows. Windows these days does not look much better than back in 2000, but boy, has Linux caught up.
Face it, most (by far) Americans are not going to fiddle with Linux, even if they're told it's free and superior, merely because they don't want to relearn anything that was hard enough to learn the first time, and they just want to use whatever is on their computer (Windows).
Microsoft's problems start when
- Windows is not what is on people's computer by default
- People click on the firefox icon, notice that it firefox works just like on windows, and their wlan works. And there is nothing else they need to care about.
Basic consumer desktop is a commodity and the "added value" microsoft is providing is meaningless.
So, what's the basic difference between what we have in phantom and what can already be done with a library/framework in, say, linux?
The need for the wrapper. Remove the translation and you gain efficiency (in theory).
I wish the the fellow luck. I think it's about time that someone takes all the lessons learned in computer science from the past several decades and try to synthesis them at the OS level. I suppose it's human nature to grumble and nay-say paradigm shifts but of all people I cannot understand why geeks, whose very jobs demand adaptability and resilience to change are taking such strong tones regarding this guy's work.
Probably because working at the OS layer is the wrong way to approach the problem. Unless you have a way of integrating at least something that exists before, you are creating an island where nothing goes in and nothing comes out. Stuff like this could be done by creating a new implementation of Python interpreter, just to provide one example. Also, object databases like ZODB are here already.
This is clearly a research project, but the research could be targeted better to be of wider interest. Of course it's not up to me to determine what other people will/should do with their freetime.
So, what's the basic difference between what we have in phantom and what can already be done with a library/framework in, say, linux?
Because it's a lts release (long term support) meaning it has a longer support period than the other releases which is important for businesses.
And users that don't like fiddling too much.
Really, I wouldn't recommend 8.10 for people that can't tolerate a bit of breakage (a bit like Fedora releases - some has to be on the cutting edge).
The linked article was rather sparse with technical details. What's the window manager? What are the building blocks? Doesn't look like a vanilla gnome setup...
Python is an awful language to make performant, robust software in.
And what language isn't? Achieving these goals requires work, work, and work. And an unrelenting drive towards simplicity, which does speak for python as the application development language.
I'd wager that the highest mass of crappy software in active use today is still written in C.
Why would anyone care about install time? The only interesting part of the install is how much of your hardware works out of the box, and how much of it can be made to work easily.
Of course installation is the easiest feature to review, but this is 2009 - there is nothing interesting about OS installation anymore.
My mobile phone is due for an upgrade. It looks like Nokia join Sony-Ericcson on the blacklist; they can all get fucked.
You are not a frequent reader? In the last few weeks, Nokia put Qt out under LGPL. The good karma earned through that action alone should be enough for us to ignore strongarm political tactics (and small PR disasters) for a while.
So what are you saying, laws are for little people?
I'm saying: if nokia really thinks they need this, they can implement it inside their own IT infrastructure if they want. If that is the alternative to shipping the jobs to india / china, I'm all for it - because this scheme doesn't really hurt people who know how the system works, and can take precautions with mails they send. Amend this with "for personal emails use gmail", and it's as humane as needs to be.
Others might see it as a tyrant offering to leave.
Lawmakers, if you don't want to see your country on the leash of a business, stop worrying about your campaign losing its funding. Your job is to the people and their innate human rights.
Still, it's more important to keep our programmers fed and employed, rather than keeping the secrets about secretary's day lotion under lock and key.
The "true piracy hardcores" seem to be taking a break (anonymizers, etc), and now we are meddling with "soft" security. It's not the important kind of security, judging simply by the fact that anyone can get to that data if they wanted. I'm sure Nokia has had some bad exeriences with data leakage, and if they have the tools to home in on whoever did it, they should be able to use it... to partake in appropriate punitive measures.
Wouldn't it be insanely careless to leak information by sending suspicious emails from your corporate account anyway?
Also, does anyone who cares about privacy in any degree use corporate email for anything personal? I think it's reasonable to expect that your nokia.com account should only be used for your official nokia business. Also, corporate emails are typically much less convenient than e.g. gmail anyway, and with limited quotas. Do you really want to use them when you don't have to?
Specifically, Ruby blocks are a single great primitive that covers the ground of a number of separate, less powerful entities in Python.
Blocks are covered by generators and with-statement. They are separate, but certainly not less powerful (and most Python fans would argue they are more intuitive).
a = [3,4,5]
a.each do |x|
Yeah,
for x in a:
print x
is so much less readble ;-).
The neat thing here is that it's easy and natural to implement your own custom version of each for your classes.
Yeah, and it's every bit as natural to implement python generators.
Now, Python provides for the special __iter__ method to allow user-defined classes to support iteration. But Ruby's block-based mechanism is fully general and available to the Ruby programmer.
... generators again ...
Blocks' utility goes beyond iteration, into a wide variety of other cases where anonymous functions are useful. Some motivating examples may be helpful. Another one from Ruby's standard library:
File.open('foo.txt','w') do |f|
f.write(some_content)
end
This illustrates the Ruby idiom for resource cleanup. Here we're guaranteed that the file will be closed after the block runs. The implementation of open isn't magic, it can be expressed (**simplified slightly) as:
This is why Python has "with" statement now. Can you bring up something that is *not* covered by with statement or generators? No?
I know this is a bad idea on ruby fanboy thread, but all of this post is just a strawman that is reminiscent of typical rubyhink (i.e. comparing ruby against an obsolete version of Python).
Ruby guys should stick to comparing ruby against Java, it will be a much easier crowd to attract. People familiar with Python are typically much less impressed by these antics.
I think KDE gets quite enough criticism ;)
I agree. And every time, it's about KDE 4.0.
Some people are just too dimwitted to quit. They get something for free, and get shocked, SHOCKED when they have problems. KDE4.0 discussion was an interesting drama piece in the beginning, but now it's just old.
Back in the day, people got excited about future promise of software, even if it was too buggy for daily use. Now, we are flooded with dimwits who don't really care about the tech, and want the whole world to know it.
Here's a tip: if it doesn't work, don't use it. There is no need to go around every forum on the net and whine, whine, whine.
As far as widgets go, Plasma does use subclasses of Qt widgets, just like the rest of KDE. I wasn't aware that this is considered weird or out of place however.
Can I draw a plasma widget in Qt designer? Can I drop my own QWidgets on plasma widgets?
I'm not trying to be confrontational here - I'm trying to find out how easy it is to leverare existing non-plasma stuff in plasma (if I don't feel like going for the low level stuff & graphics view).
I would rather have these programmers focus their efforts on Krusader ? It seriously needs some love.
Ah, again the myth that open source developers are a free workforce you can redirect between projects on your whim... It just doesn't go like that, people work on whatever happens to interest them at the time.
(this comes from another Krusader user btw - by the look of their web page, they seem to be doing alright)
Isn't the big news that Jaiku will be open sourced and...
I don't really care about the source code of a web service. I don't think they will be able to start taking in contributions just like that (imagine the security implications).
There still has to be a central place that actually runs the service, unless you want to set up your own microblogging servers inside your company's firewall.
Regarding google notebook - news like this suck a little bit, since they underline the fact that not even google services are immune to termination. I picked google notebook since
- I don't need to log in (I'm always logged in to gmail)
- I thought it would be around for the long haul
Perhaps exposing a "notes" oriented interface to google docs would be handy...
I may have to reevaluate now in light of LGPL Qt and GPL PyQt.
Expect PyQt to go LGPL soon (it's mostly autogenerated stuff anyway) for ultimate goodness.
How about people who don't want to use that monstrosity of a Frankenstein language known as c++ and prefer to program in c instead?
... and reimplement all the complexity explicitly in C?
It's not like you can't do
g_return_if_fail(my_business_object_init(MY_BUSINESS_OBJECT(self), 23))
in C++.
I've started writing gtk+ bindings for my small scripting language (lang2e.sourceforge.net), and all that was required was for me to add a callback mechanism (that is, a way to pass a pointer function written in the scripting language to a gtk function).
Why reimplement the wheel? Perhaps you could use something like the python virtual machine (interpreter) to host your language. Then, you could expose all the python stdlib (and 3rd party libs) to your own language.
Of course this will involve reading some docs and other people's C code, but will avoid leaving your own language as an isolated island.
I'm not a big fan of Qt. I kind of see it as an oversized, bloated library.
Now that it's LGPL, at least community has a chance to unbloat it :-).
Even pieces of the C++ standard that I'm sure Qt added on extra functionality in their equivalent, but it gets really hard for me to reason not using the standard libraries that are nearly (nearly because it does depend on what the implementation of the standard libraries on the system supports--not a problem if each platform goes for compliance with the standard, which I believe most go at least pretty damn close) guaranteed to work anywhere the standard libraries are present.
You can still use stdlib. Perhaps implement your app "model" with boost + stdlib, ans use Qt for GUI. Of course you will still be using stuff like QString to interface with the APIs.
Also, stuff like QString are actually better than C++ stdlib equivalents - providing reference counting, copy-on-write and unicode support. C++ stdlib is a compromise - it's intentionally "not a platform", which sort of holds it down. Being restricted by standards process doesn't help; even glib (which is a pure C lib) is better.
But Gnome bindings to Python and C# are excellent and have good tools support, and that's probably what matters more these days.
PyQt is pretty great as well, and tool support is there (Qt Designer can be used just as for C++).
I don't know about C#, but who cares when you have Python and C++? C++ programming with Qt is not your grandfather's C++ programming (c.f. MFC, Symbian) - it's actually quite tolerable. And PyQt exposes all of Qt.
can you make it not depend on whitespace? I'm sure it won't take that much more effort.
It would be easy to create a preprocessor to do that, but life's too short. I'll leave the excercise to someone that cares enough.
Yes.
Example program:
class MyClass(object): #{
def myfunction(self, arg1, arg2): #{
for i in range(arg1): #{
print i
# whoops, forgot to close that bracket!
#}
#}
I think that whenever a group releases a new version of their language, they should strive to make it (mostly) backwards compatible.
That's why they keep releasing 2.x versions that are backwards compatible.
This means that very large projects have a lot of work to do to bring their project over to the new specification.
Very large projects can stay with the 2.x series (along with a big portion of users) just fine.
The question is: is this work worth the upgrade to python 3.0? I'd say on the whole, the changes do not contribute enough to the usability of the language to make it ultimately a worthwhile transition to make. I haven't seen really any compelling features in Python 3.0 that would provide enough incentive for me to spend hours of grunt work making all my code workable in Python 3.0.
And you shouldn't, since it would probably be a waste of work. 2.x is a rock-solid series that is years away from obsolescense, and new serious projects started right now should pick 2.5 / 2.6. Try starting to use Py3 for projects where it fits - your command line scripts, self-contained internal applications... and ramp up the stakes when new libraries are ported.
A programming language deserves a "cleanup" every now and then - this is such a thing. Hey, people have survived worse things, like gcc version changes, Qt3 => Qt4, Gtk 1 => Gtk2...