It's just Creation v. Evolution. There is no "debate". In Genesis, God created birds (not eggs); meanwhile, the fossil records clearly shows creatures all the way back to the oceanic ancestors of chickens laying eggs long before any birds, let alone specifically chickens. Any scientist who is still "pondering" this should go hang out with Paul Davies or some other Templeton Prize winning fool.
Yes, so really, the population of an "advanced economy" is 10 times lower because of this factor, thus each one should be allocated 10 times the carbon emissions budget (which they can then spend on powering computers and other intelligence-multipliers like AC units and Plasma TVs). Indeed, each computer I have churning away running SETI@home is doing the work of 1000 mathematicians that never needed to be born! And my Tic-tac-toe game is simulating the minds of 10,000 politicians than never needed to be born! Talk about carbon credits!
Creators want to punish you for playing or even trying competitors' games. The only reason you stop any given hobby is because something else takes your time/interest. Directly rewarding playtime is so effective that it can force you to play at a time or in a way that you don't even *want* to - grinding.
It's a sad, sorry way for a game to succeed, but it works on many people.
I can't see the target image in any sequence... because it's a low-contrast image. The fire hydrant and the farm house however, stand way out, contradicting the thesis.
Agreed. That's what I did: got a cheap ($50 second hand) NCD X terminal, 19" monochrome is perfect for technical drawings, etc.
By using a terminal off your main machine, it's easy to do design work etc. in the more comfortable environment of your main machine. It also means that when the terminal DOES die, you'll have lost no data.
The Qt C++ library is available for X11 under the terms of the GPL. This permits the free development of Free Software. Qt is also available under a commercial license. This additionally permits commercial software to be written.
The GNOME and GTk C libraries are available under the terms of the LGPL, this permits the development of open and closed software development.
Both projects are assisted by a community of open source and Free software developers.
The difference is that GNOME/Gtk requires donations from Sun, etc. to support its development, while Qt is funded by the commercial customers that have supported Trolltech and which Trolltech has supported in return.
The future will tell which business model works, and which business model commercial software developers are willing to risk their businesses on.
The power management facilities at the kernel level just don't cut it: eg. the SL5000D has an option where you are prompted for a passcode at startup. That sort of thing is messy an insecure if the system can poer up and down without the GUI's knowledge. It could be done of course, but the framework just doesn't exist yet, so Qt Palmtop has to do all the work itself.
If PM issues exist on the iPAQ, it's only because we (Trolltech developers) have spent so much time lately working with the SL5000D rather than the iPAQ.
Let's see: you could borrow $1950 at say 10% to buy the full Qt Enterprise license. That loan would cost you $200/year to maintain.
By using Qt, your shareware will be better quality, so you'll get more sales. Surely at least $200 worth of sales per year?
If your shareware isn't making far more than $200/year, then you should consider either releasing it as freeware (and living off the adoration from users), or if you really believe in it's commercial value, investing more to commercializing it (eg. advertise, contact publishers, distributors, etc., etc.)
I produced shareware at first (find STrabble for example), and made a little money from it. When I did work on NetHack its licensing meant I had to switch to freeware. In the end I was very happy (especially after Trolltech had seen my code and given me a call).
Releasing freeware or buying Qt are different ways to invest in your future, and Trolltech supports both of those ways as best we can.
Indeed, another poster here with a 20000 project had to change just 1 line. Generally the compiler will lead you to these lines - when we broke anything we tried to make it break in an obvious way, and there is a porting guide to help you.
Because the idea is to use less memory and to be more efficient. Adding 1M for GGI is pointless: on an iPAQ you only have the framebuffer, so there is little use is the abstraction layer that also lets you re-target to X or MS-Windows.
GGI is appropriate for heavy environments as a way of layering simple graphics on top of diverse displays. Qt/Embedded is for when you want sophisticated GUI on a simple display.
X is not the problem. It's Xserver + Xlibs + client libs that is the problem, as well as the aging technology upon which X is based.
Just look at fonts: the QPE version of 12pt Helvetica is 7K and is read-only mmap()'ed directly into client memory and thus is shared by all clients, with only the pages containing the characters you use paged in. By comparison, the PCF version in X is 15K, and the fontmetrics alone take 3K of RAM, in every running client and in the server). A web page with 10 fonts is typical - that's 210K just in fonts on X11, or about 20K with Qt/Embedded (with the generous assumption that 1/3 of the 256 characters are used from every font).
Start doing i18n and X gets even more crazy, with years of Unix history behind it. Qt/Embedded just uses Unicode, so all the multibyte encoding code that Jim Gettys strips from X is not even needed.
Don't get me wrong: X is just great on the desktop, where you really need things like remote font servers, backward compatibility into the old comp.source.unix archives, accelerated 3D video cards, gigs of RAM and ROM, etc.; I'm not an X-hater - it's an excellent protocol for Unix workstations that has stood the test of time. On workstations.
The entire iPAQ environment exists because Compaq (a company just like Trolltech) see value in supporting Linux and Open Source on their hardware.
They have done a supreme job of supporting Linux on the iPAQ, regardless of my biased opinion of the GUI they ship with.
It's companies like Trolltech and Compaq who make the effort to find ways to earn income while supporting Open Source that allow people like me to work on Open Source projects and get paid to do it, thereby keeping projects alive.
Without such efforts, Open Source is just something students do before they go into the "real world". Is that all you ever want Open Source to be?
--
Warwick
- The application launcher button (the "Q")
- Anyone who has used a Palm and tried
the App/DA launcher knows that Palm
made a mistake not having such a button.
- The input methods (the keyboard icons)
- Again, anyone who has used a Palm and
added the hacks that show graffiti as
you draw it know that Palm made a mistake
by not extending the LCD down into
the input area.
- A clock
- As a Palm user, I hate having to leave my
app just to see the time. Again, the
Clock D/A hack was added on Palm.
Everything else is up to the application writer. Qt allows them to make mistakes, like requiring too much keyboard-oriented input rather than list-of-options oriented input. The handheld is not the desktop; the application author must consider even simple things like realising that the users hand is closer to the bottom of the screen and therefore menus and toolbars might best be placed there. Or like sacrificing pretty whitespace in dialogs to avoid scrollbars and other bad solutions to small displays.
While the *GUI* at handhelds.org is not really useful, the real achievement there is a stable and functional Linux *kernel*. This is why Trolltech used it as the kernel for QPE. This is a fully functional Linux environment. Just today I was running gdb on the iPAQ to find a bug in my Scrabble game.
--
Warwick
Rubbish. I did the Qt Palmtop Environment build for the iPAQ, and it only crashed on MY bugs. Fortunately, my iPAQ has gdb on it, so that was easily fixed.
--
Warwick
You can see the windowmanager in the screenshots (see the decorations on the fullscreen windows and on the calcultor and clock).
It's easy to subclass the windowmanager to provide customer look-and-feel on a per-client basis, or change the library default to get a system-wide change.
The "launcher" that consists of the background, taskbar/startbutton/inputmethods/clock is just another application.
But you need applications. PalmOS is in the hotseat, but the hardware is very expensive for the extremely low power (an iPAQ is a 200MHz processor, while the Palm V's is 32MHz).
With Qt/Embedded, the costs (in salaries or your own personal time) of writing applications for a handheld is greatly reduced, since you can develop, run, and RELEASE the code on X11 or Windows too.
--
Warwick
Qt does not have any runtime license fee on X11
or Windows - I'm sure Loki can afford a couple of
grand one-off development license, as can all
serious commercial developers. Even MFC doesn't
require runtime licenses.
Besides, Loki already see Qt as a great option, as documented at:
Slashdot Mirror
It's just Creation v. Evolution. There is no "debate". In Genesis, God created birds (not eggs); meanwhile, the fossil records clearly shows creatures all the way back to the oceanic ancestors of chickens laying eggs long before any birds, let alone specifically chickens. Any scientist who is still "pondering" this should go hang out with Paul Davies or some other Templeton Prize winning fool.
"the two topics force respondents to choose between factual knowledge and religious beliefs."
i.e. the respondents might belief X is false even though they know X is true. That's the best description I've seen of the stupidity of religion.
Yes, so really, the population of an "advanced economy" is 10 times lower because of this factor, thus each one should be allocated 10 times the carbon emissions budget (which they can then spend on powering computers and other intelligence-multipliers like AC units and Plasma TVs). Indeed, each computer I have churning away running SETI@home is doing the work of 1000 mathematicians that never needed to be born! And my Tic-tac-toe game is simulating the minds of 10,000 politicians than never needed to be born! Talk about carbon credits!
US economy == Lawyers.
Last one off the sinking ship is a dodo. Sell.
Creators want to punish you for playing or even trying competitors' games. The only reason you stop any given hobby is because something else takes your time/interest. Directly rewarding playtime is so effective that it can force you to play at a time or in a way that you don't even *want* to - grinding.
It's a sad, sorry way for a game to succeed, but it works on many people.
At least until Spore is released :-)
I can't see the target image in any sequence... because it's a low-contrast image. The fire hydrant and the farm house however, stand way out, contradicting the thesis.
Agreed. That's what I did: got a cheap ($50 second hand) NCD X terminal, 19" monochrome is perfect for technical drawings, etc.
By using a terminal off your main machine, it's easy to do design work etc. in the more comfortable environment of your main machine. It also means that when the terminal DOES die, you'll have lost no data.
Sorry, my fault - I didn't get the package available in time. Check back at www.nethack.org RSN.
--
Warwick
The Qt C++ library is available for X11 under the terms of the GPL. This permits the free development of Free Software. Qt is also available under a commercial license. This additionally permits commercial software to be written.
The GNOME and GTk C libraries are available under the terms of the LGPL, this permits the development of open and closed software development.
Both projects are assisted by a community of open source and Free software developers.
The difference is that GNOME/Gtk requires donations from Sun, etc. to support its development, while Qt is funded by the commercial customers that have supported Trolltech and which Trolltech has supported in return.
The future will tell which business model works, and which business model commercial software developers are willing to risk their businesses on.
--
Warwick
The power management facilities at the kernel level just don't cut it: eg. the SL5000D has an option where you are prompted for a passcode at startup. That sort of thing is messy an insecure if the system can poer up and down without the GUI's knowledge. It could be done of course, but the framework just doesn't exist yet, so Qt Palmtop has to do all the work itself.
If PM issues exist on the iPAQ, it's only because we (Trolltech developers) have spent so much time lately working with the SL5000D rather than the iPAQ.
--
Warwick
Various "uncommon" characters are achieved by less-than-obvious Fn/Shift combinations.
You get used to them quite quickly if they're not so uncommon for you!
Shift-Space gives |.
--
Warwick
Let's see: you could borrow $1950 at say 10% to buy the full Qt Enterprise license. That loan would cost you $200/year to maintain.
By using Qt, your shareware will be better quality, so you'll get more sales. Surely at least $200 worth of sales per year?
If your shareware isn't making far more than $200/year, then you should consider either releasing it as freeware (and living off the adoration from users), or if you really believe in it's commercial value, investing more to commercializing it (eg. advertise, contact publishers, distributors, etc., etc.)
I produced shareware at first (find STrabble for example), and made a little money from it. When I did work on NetHack its licensing meant I had to switch to freeware. In the end I was very happy (especially after Trolltech had seen my code and given me a call).
Releasing freeware or buying Qt are different ways to invest in your future, and Trolltech supports both of those ways as best we can.
--
Warwick
Indeed, another poster here with a 20000 project had to change just 1 line. Generally the compiler will lead you to these lines - when we broke anything we tried to make it break in an obvious way, and there is a porting guide to help you.
You missed QSettings.
It's the registry on Windows, and ~/.foobar files on Unix.
http://doc.trolltech.com/3.0/qsettings.html
Cool, eh?
--
Warwick
It shouldn't be too difficult. Qt/Embedded supports VNC (great for debugging your device without hunching over a tiny screen). -- Warwick
Because the idea is to use less memory and to be more efficient. Adding 1M for GGI is pointless: on an iPAQ you only have the framebuffer, so there is little use is the abstraction layer that also lets you re-target to X or MS-Windows.
GGI is appropriate for heavy environments as a way of layering simple graphics on top of diverse displays. Qt/Embedded is for when you want sophisticated GUI on a simple display.
ie. quite the opposite goals.
--
Warwick
X is not the problem. It's Xserver + Xlibs + client libs that is the problem, as well as the aging technology upon which X is based.
Just look at fonts: the QPE version of 12pt Helvetica is 7K and is read-only mmap()'ed directly into client memory and thus is shared by all clients, with only the pages containing the characters you use paged in. By comparison, the PCF version in X is 15K, and the fontmetrics alone take 3K of RAM, in every running client and in the server). A web page with 10 fonts is typical - that's 210K just in fonts on X11, or about 20K with Qt/Embedded (with the generous assumption that 1/3 of the 256 characters are used from every font).
Start doing i18n and X gets even more crazy, with years of Unix history behind it. Qt/Embedded just uses Unicode, so all the multibyte encoding code that Jim Gettys strips from X is not even needed.
Don't get me wrong: X is just great on the desktop, where you really need things like remote font servers, backward compatibility into the old comp.source.unix archives, accelerated 3D video cards, gigs of RAM and ROM, etc.; I'm not an X-hater - it's an excellent protocol for Unix workstations that has stood the test of time. On workstations.
--
Warwick
The entire iPAQ environment exists because Compaq (a company just like Trolltech) see value in supporting Linux and Open Source on their hardware. They have done a supreme job of supporting Linux on the iPAQ, regardless of my biased opinion of the GUI they ship with. It's companies like Trolltech and Compaq who make the effort to find ways to earn income while supporting Open Source that allow people like me to work on Open Source projects and get paid to do it, thereby keeping projects alive. Without such efforts, Open Source is just something students do before they go into the "real world". Is that all you ever want Open Source to be? -- Warwick
QPE, the *environment*, is currently:
- The application launcher button (the "Q")
- Anyone who has used a Palm and tried
the App/DA launcher knows that Palm
made a mistake not having such a button.
- The input methods (the keyboard icons)
- Again, anyone who has used a Palm and
added the hacks that show graffiti as
you draw it know that Palm made a mistake
by not extending the LCD down into
the input area.
- A clock
- As a Palm user, I hate having to leave my
app just to see the time. Again, the
Clock D/A hack was added on Palm.
Everything else is up to the application writer. Qt allows them to make mistakes, like requiring too much keyboard-oriented input rather than list-of-options oriented input. The handheld is not the desktop; the application author must consider even simple things like realising that the users hand is closer to the bottom of the screen and therefore menus and toolbars might best be placed there. Or like sacrificing pretty whitespace in dialogs to avoid scrollbars and other bad solutions to small displays.
--
Warwick
While the *GUI* at handhelds.org is not really useful, the real achievement there is a stable and functional Linux *kernel*. This is why Trolltech used it as the kernel for QPE. This is a fully functional Linux environment. Just today I was running gdb on the iPAQ to find a bug in my Scrabble game. -- Warwick
Rubbish. I did the Qt Palmtop Environment build for the iPAQ, and it only crashed on MY bugs. Fortunately, my iPAQ has gdb on it, so that was easily fixed. -- Warwick
You can see the windowmanager in the screenshots (see the decorations on the fullscreen windows and on the calcultor and clock).
It's easy to subclass the windowmanager to provide customer look-and-feel on a per-client basis, or change the library default to get a system-wide change.
The "launcher" that consists of the background, taskbar/startbutton/inputmethods/clock is just another application.
Grab the binaries to get a quick look.
--
Warwick
But you need applications. PalmOS is in the hotseat, but the hardware is very expensive for the extremely low power (an iPAQ is a 200MHz processor, while the Palm V's is 32MHz). With Qt/Embedded, the costs (in salaries or your own personal time) of writing applications for a handheld is greatly reduced, since you can develop, run, and RELEASE the code on X11 or Windows too. -- Warwick
Besides, Loki already see Qt as a great option, as documented at:
http://www.trolltech.com/compa ny/ announce/loki.html
--
Warwick
It's the programmer that needs some way to make money, not CheapBytes, RedHat, etc. I'm a programmer. -- Warwick