As many posts already have speculated, maybe KDE will become the standard X desktop? Eazel was a very important piece of GNOME, and surely their absence will be quite a blow to the project. This really sucks for the GNOME users and developers. But what can you do?
Anyway, I know it's depressing for these people, and I don't think the GNOME developers are going to just throw in the towel, but I began pondering what unix would be like if KDE were the only desktop to worry about. Sure, there would be other window managers, but KDE would be the only desktop environment / component framework to deal with. This would solve the problem that commercial developers face when they have to "choose which desktop to develop for."
In the past there was CDE, and KDE was supposed to be the replacement. It's been quite a history since, and the whole QT licensing fiasco plus GNOME's rise would make an interesting bedtime story. Perhaps it is time for KDE to finally reach its goal?
-Justin
Re:Little Known DOOM Feature
on
PanQuake
·
· Score: 2
Hey, I used to play DOOM a lot, and I didn't know about that feature. Guess I didn't read the docs fully, and I'm probably not the only one.
Honestly, 40 cents for a blank CDR is still a good deal. It would only make a difference to the people who buy hordes of CDRs. And to these people, I have a question:
What on earth do you use all these CDRs for? Seriously, how can you amass so much data so quickly that you need spindles atop spindles of them? =)
I have some theories:
1) Packrat. This person loves collecting everything. TV episodes, movies, software. Obviously this person doesn't actually do anything with these CDRs other than lend them out to people who make copies and do the same thing.
2) Rampant Windows pirate. This person makes illegal copies of Windows software and carries all the CDs around in a black CD-binder/case thing. Need some outdated version of Photoshop? He's your man.
3) Music Leech. All of this person's blanks go to hold the massive amounts of Napster downloads. Obviously this person does not have a long enough lifespan to listen to all of the audio acquired.
Ok enough jokes:) What do you guys use your CDR's for? Or did I nail it on the head? The last time I burned a CD was SuSE 7.1 last month. Before that? Probably Slackware sometime in 1942.
I wish I knew the source, but I read that also. If I remember right, the order of popularity is: MSN, AIM, Yahoo, ICQ. Yes, Yahoo Pager is said to have more users than ICQ. However the hell that happened.
You forget that ICQ is controlled by a corporation. Here are the 3 main reasons to use Jabber:
1) No corporate control.
2) No central server.
3) Open standard.
This puts Jabber in the same class as email. I run my own server and I can say who can have accounts with my system. If some other server goes down, it does not affect me. This is how IM should have been since the very beginning. You can whine all day about the number of users AIM has, or how cool ICQ is, but when it comes down to it, they all suck because they violate those 3 items above.
Let's not forget that Jabber also has some good functionality:
1) Serverside contact list.
2) Multiple chat transports (for evangelizing to other IM users)
3) Authorization that actually works.
I started a small company last year (Affinix Software) and we're working with GameBoy Color. The good thing about making a game for a low-end system like this is that it is actually possible to create a good game with a small team on limited funds. Once we get "our foot in the door", we should have no problem expanding to other platforms (our next target is GameBoy Advance).
This is all without any CS degrees in the company, however we all are extremely experienced in our respective areas. The two programmers, Hideaki and I, got quite a bit of experience from our days with the TI scene/community. Because these calculators use a very similar processor to the GameBoy, we were able to walk right into development. It is actually quite common for TI folks to move over to the GameBoy world (see Icarus Productions).
Unfortunately, the GBC is about to be phased out for the GBA, so it's a little late in the game for you to begin a GBC project. However, a GBA game still does not take quite a large team as the powerhouse systems (PS2, XBox, GameCube, PC) do. So if you want to enter the market, I say enter from there. Of course, this advice is really only useful if you plan to start your own company.
Use Jabber for its own IM system, not for the transports (like AIM). It's a common misconception that Jabber only supports other IM services. Jabber has it's *own* IM specification, as a distributed server system, much like how email works.
I was actually saying the same thing you are saying: Let's do our own thing rather than relying on AIM/ICQ/etc. That would be like everyone only having @hotmail.com email addresses.
Really, let's just move on. Instant messaging should be free and open like HTTP and E-mail. Just because some corporations made some closed IM server/clients first does not mean that there is no hope.
Everyone, please just go try out Jabber. In the past, people have mentioned that the clients are not quite up to par as other IM clients, but it just might be worth the sacrifice to switch. Who cares if the AIM transport doesn't work? Tell your AIM-using friends to switch also.
Heck, I've already begun writing my own Jabber client. How's *that* for wanting to get away from these corporate controlled servers?
Qt's power comes from inheritance. The entire toolkit was designed in C++ for a reason. This makes creation of widgets super-easy. You cannot get this level of control by just wrapping a C library in C++. Also, Trolltech has to worry about crossplatform portability. This puts Qt in a class by itself.
Here is a link to Trolltech's page about why you should use Qt. After reading this, why would you use anything else?
They are not the same. In fact, they are not even close. You might want to try something like wxWindows or zoolib. These toolkits "wrap" other toolkits for ease in portability.
Beware that when you wrap like this, you generally lose the extra features of each toolkit in order to remain portable.
Now I have to ask: why? Why would you want to do this? All this would do is change the look and feel of the application. This is not important. wxWindows and friends were made for crossplatform. Linux Qt -> Linux Gtk is not crossplatform, and isn't even worth talking about.
Do you really want to use the widgets of the opposite toolkit that badly? Why not just use Qt? It is much more complete and proven than its competitors and has all you need.
-Justin
When the 'anime' catagory first came to be, I thought it looked a little out of place. Maybe because I'm not into anime at all? It's weird though.. there are many catagories I don't give a hoot about (like the "Star Wars" one) but for some reason this anime catagory stands out as particularly unrelated.
Every time one of these anime posts appears, there are endless trolls and hostile comments towards this catagory. People respond saying "turn off the catagory" if you don't want to see it. So what's the problem then? Why are people not getting the message? Why does the anime catagory still suffer from trolls? No other catagory has the problem to this extreme. Not even Jon Katz.
Maybe a poll is in action? Frankly there are rarely any decent comments in an anime discussion that I don't think we'll be missing anything if it goes. Anyone?
Really. They've already convinced the world that you need a fast PC even for word processing. What is the slowest computer you can get these days at CompUSA? 500MHz? Good lord! I'd say they're already on a roll. Word Processing, AOL, Outlook. These apparently are killer CPU intensive apps.
Still, why use X when there's probably a zero possibility of these PDA's ever using it remotely?
We already know that for the average user, X is overkill. There is a small minority that use its remote capability (myself included), and that's really the only reason to keep it around on the desktop.
But a Linux PDA? Qt/Embedded is clearly the way to go. Lovely screenshots can be found here.
Sprint uses a proprietary CDMA network. This will just be an addition to that. GSM (Global System for Mobile) is a much more capable and proven network, and its member companies are already working on their own technologies, like GPRS (General Packet Radio System) and HSCSD (High Speed Circuit-Switch Data), among other 3G technologies. GSM is not run by a single corporation, and instead it is an alliance of companies with a well defined specification. I hate to rant like this, but honestly, if it's not going to be part of GSM (the clear *standard*) then this is fairly meaningless news.
However, I'd like to add that I don't think Windows can even be compared to a Dreamcast or Playstation. People buy console systems to play games. People don't buy Windows to play games. Rather, a lot of people have Windows, and so there is a market for games. It's much like what you said about Linux and games. You happen to be using Linux, so now you are a potential market.
Remember back in the DOS days when Windows started getting popular? No developer wanted to switch to making Windows games. In fact, DOS games continued to be made, despite Win95 being the default OS everywhere. Eventually developers gave in, and Micrsoft helped them along with DirectX. This is not comparable to a Dreamcast. This is called "following the market".
Windows is not a gaming platform. It just happens to have many games available for it. I highly doubt any of the current crop of game developers are really much in love with Windows development.
Old NES games by Nintendo always had a habit of containing extras after you win like that.
Super Mario Bros let you play again with all "Goombas" turned into those beetle things. Metriod let you play again without your suit. To get the best ending to Kid Icarus, you had to play more than once (but you kept all of your items). There are probably more things like this.
Zelda, however, took the cake. It included an *entirely new* game. I mean, some games add a secret dungeon, or a secret this or a secret that. But to be given an entirely new game? Now that's cool.
Nowadays, games are generally more complex such that making another full quest would add significant time to the development. I mean, if I had to add another quest to (warning: shameless plug) Infinity, I'd probably jump off of a bridge.
Don't worry, it's not a gross-out site. It's actually a site for a product, and all of the pictures/diagrams are cartoon or computer generated.
Think CUSeeMe but taken further. Yes, "mounting your drive" can now be taken literally. You can even place an order from the site, but I can't imagine anyone buying one of these. Wouldn't lag ruin the moment anyway?
Your experiences with FreeBSD sounds a lot like mine with Slack. Although I have not used FreeBSD myself, I have heard Slackware compared to it countless times. As a Slack user, I can attest to some similarities: BSD-style init scripts, rock solid, and almost no real hand-holding.
It's a no-nonsense Linux distribution. You may want to try it out sometime.:)
DirectX is a MS Windows driver/library, and it is disgusting. Also, it's not cross-platform at all. About the closest thing you can get to Linux DirectX support is the Wine libraries. Do you have any idea what you are talking about?
Games should be written to be portable in the first place by using SDL / OpenGL.
Of course GtkFB has limitations too. The main limitation is the single-process model. All code in the system must be in the same binary and run in the same process. This means you can't use processes to separate and protect different parts of the system from each other. It also makes it harder to design larger systems.
This is a pretty serious limitation. I didn't see any mention of a future change in the whitepaper, but there definitely should be. How else would this be useful if you can only run one big "master app" ?
I've used Qt/Embedded, and it works by starting up a host app (any app can be a host) which initializes the display and proceeds to run. Any Qt/Embedded apps to get launched from this point on will use the host's framebuffer.
For now (toolkit preferences aside), Qt/E will probably a more viable solution for handhelds, since it's A) Done, and B) has a good environment host application.
GtkFB sounds promising, but it absolutely needs separate process support. I don't think I missed anything about this in the whitepaper.
Can anyone shed some additional light on this issue?
Obviously this is a short term solution. There are only so many credit card numbers if the string is only 16 digits long. Soon numbers will be repeated, which could make for some strange things if companies keep records on file.
The real solution is to ditch this insane credit card system. It plain makes no sense. Instead of giving the money to the merchant, you are giving him a key to your safe and telling him to "take only what you need." Sure, we have banks to protect overcharging, etc. The consumer actually does have a lot of protection when using a credit card. But think about the hassle that the credit card companies must go through because of this deranged system. What we need is a system that allows the consumer to authorize a payment. Perhaps when you go to the store, there would be a "vendor ID" at the counter and you would just whip out your cellphone and authorize a transaction.
It's funny, because all of us can talk all day about security and huge bit keys and networking, yet we give our login and password to the waitress every time we eat out.
It's a version of Qt built to use the Linux framebuffer.
Anything that compiles on the normal Qt X11 will compile on this. Awhile back, someone even ported Konqueror to it. Qt is very much a standard in the Linux world, and this extreme portability to an embedded platform is amazing. Trolltech also has a window manager / environment program to launch and manage applications with. Looks a bit like WinCE, at least the coloring.:)
I don't know of any handhelds currently that are using this (or that might use it), but it seems like a very good choice for a standardized X-less handheld.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously... you like to burn CDs? Go burn yourself a GNU/Linux ISO.
-Justin
As many posts already have speculated, maybe KDE will become the standard X desktop? Eazel was a very important piece of GNOME, and surely their absence will be quite a blow to the project. This really sucks for the GNOME users and developers. But what can you do?
Anyway, I know it's depressing for these people, and I don't think the GNOME developers are going to just throw in the towel, but I began pondering what unix would be like if KDE were the only desktop to worry about. Sure, there would be other window managers, but KDE would be the only desktop environment / component framework to deal with. This would solve the problem that commercial developers face when they have to "choose which desktop to develop for."
In the past there was CDE, and KDE was supposed to be the replacement. It's been quite a history since, and the whole QT licensing fiasco plus GNOME's rise would make an interesting bedtime story. Perhaps it is time for KDE to finally reach its goal?
-Justin
Hey, I used to play DOOM a lot, and I didn't know about that feature. Guess I didn't read the docs fully, and I'm probably not the only one.
When you're in a hurry copying someone's work, make sure you don't copy the person's name.
Honestly, 40 cents for a blank CDR is still a good deal. It would only make a difference to the people who buy hordes of CDRs. And to these people, I have a question:
:) What do you guys use your CDR's for? Or did I nail it on the head? The last time I burned a CD was SuSE 7.1 last month. Before that? Probably Slackware sometime in 1942.
What on earth do you use all these CDRs for? Seriously, how can you amass so much data so quickly that you need spindles atop spindles of them? =)
I have some theories:
1) Packrat. This person loves collecting everything. TV episodes, movies, software. Obviously this person doesn't actually do anything with these CDRs other than lend them out to people who make copies and do the same thing.
2) Rampant Windows pirate. This person makes illegal copies of Windows software and carries all the CDs around in a black CD-binder/case thing. Need some outdated version of Photoshop? He's your man.
3) Music Leech. All of this person's blanks go to hold the massive amounts of Napster downloads. Obviously this person does not have a long enough lifespan to listen to all of the audio acquired.
Ok enough jokes
I wish I knew the source, but I read that also. If I remember right, the order of popularity is: MSN, AIM, Yahoo, ICQ. Yes, Yahoo Pager is said to have more users than ICQ. However the hell that happened.
You forget that ICQ is controlled by a corporation. Here are the 3 main reasons to use Jabber:
1) No corporate control.
2) No central server.
3) Open standard.
This puts Jabber in the same class as email. I run my own server and I can say who can have accounts with my system. If some other server goes down, it does not affect me. This is how IM should have been since the very beginning. You can whine all day about the number of users AIM has, or how cool ICQ is, but when it comes down to it, they all suck because they violate those 3 items above.
Let's not forget that Jabber also has some good functionality:
1) Serverside contact list.
2) Multiple chat transports (for evangelizing to other IM users)
3) Authorization that actually works.
Go, quickly! http://www.jabbercentral.com/
-Justin
I started a small company last year (Affinix Software) and we're working with GameBoy Color. The good thing about making a game for a low-end system like this is that it is actually possible to create a good game with a small team on limited funds. Once we get "our foot in the door", we should have no problem expanding to other platforms (our next target is GameBoy Advance).
This is all without any CS degrees in the company, however we all are extremely experienced in our respective areas. The two programmers, Hideaki and I, got quite a bit of experience from our days with the TI scene/community. Because these calculators use a very similar processor to the GameBoy, we were able to walk right into development. It is actually quite common for TI folks to move over to the GameBoy world (see Icarus Productions).
Unfortunately, the GBC is about to be phased out for the GBA, so it's a little late in the game for you to begin a GBC project. However, a GBA game still does not take quite a large team as the powerhouse systems (PS2, XBox, GameCube, PC) do. So if you want to enter the market, I say enter from there. Of course, this advice is really only useful if you plan to start your own company.
-Justin
And it serves the Jabber IM protocol.
An added bonus of Jabber is that it can communicate with other IM networks, but this is not something you have to use.
Please see my other response to one of your postings.
Use Jabber for its own IM system, not for the transports (like AIM). It's a common misconception that Jabber only supports other IM services. Jabber has it's *own* IM specification, as a distributed server system, much like how email works.
I was actually saying the same thing you are saying: Let's do our own thing rather than relying on AIM/ICQ/etc. That would be like everyone only having @hotmail.com email addresses.
-Justin
Really, let's just move on. Instant messaging should be free and open like HTTP and E-mail. Just because some corporations made some closed IM server/clients first does not mean that there is no hope.
Everyone, please just go try out Jabber. In the past, people have mentioned that the clients are not quite up to par as other IM clients, but it just might be worth the sacrifice to switch. Who cares if the AIM transport doesn't work? Tell your AIM-using friends to switch also.
Heck, I've already begun writing my own Jabber client. How's *that* for wanting to get away from these corporate controlled servers?
-Justin
Qt's power comes from inheritance. The entire toolkit was designed in C++ for a reason. This makes creation of widgets super-easy. You cannot get this level of control by just wrapping a C library in C++. Also, Trolltech has to worry about crossplatform portability. This puts Qt in a class by itself.
Here is a link to Trolltech's page about why you should use Qt. After reading this, why would you use anything else?
-Justin
They are not the same. In fact, they are not even close. You might want to try something like wxWindows or zoolib. These toolkits "wrap" other toolkits for ease in portability.
Beware that when you wrap like this, you generally lose the extra features of each toolkit in order to remain portable.
Now I have to ask: why? Why would you want to do this? All this would do is change the look and feel of the application. This is not important. wxWindows and friends were made for crossplatform. Linux Qt -> Linux Gtk is not crossplatform, and isn't even worth talking about.
Do you really want to use the widgets of the opposite toolkit that badly? Why not just use Qt? It is much more complete and proven than its competitors and has all you need.
-Justin
When the 'anime' catagory first came to be, I thought it looked a little out of place. Maybe because I'm not into anime at all? It's weird though.. there are many catagories I don't give a hoot about (like the "Star Wars" one) but for some reason this anime catagory stands out as particularly unrelated.
Every time one of these anime posts appears, there are endless trolls and hostile comments towards this catagory. People respond saying "turn off the catagory" if you don't want to see it. So what's the problem then? Why are people not getting the message? Why does the anime catagory still suffer from trolls? No other catagory has the problem to this extreme. Not even Jon Katz.
Maybe a poll is in action? Frankly there are rarely any decent comments in an anime discussion that I don't think we'll be missing anything if it goes. Anyone?
Really. They've already convinced the world that you need a fast PC even for word processing. What is the slowest computer you can get these days at CompUSA? 500MHz? Good lord! I'd say they're already on a roll. Word Processing, AOL, Outlook. These apparently are killer CPU intensive apps.
Still, why use X when there's probably a zero possibility of these PDA's ever using it remotely?
We already know that for the average user, X is overkill. There is a small minority that use its remote capability (myself included), and that's really the only reason to keep it around on the desktop.
But a Linux PDA? Qt/Embedded is clearly the way to go. Lovely screenshots can be found here.
Sprint uses a proprietary CDMA network. This will just be an addition to that. GSM (Global System for Mobile) is a much more capable and proven network, and its member companies are already working on their own technologies, like GPRS (General Packet Radio System) and HSCSD (High Speed Circuit-Switch Data), among other 3G technologies. GSM is not run by a single corporation, and instead it is an alliance of companies with a well defined specification. I hate to rant like this, but honestly, if it's not going to be part of GSM (the clear *standard*) then this is fairly meaningless news.
I agree with what you said.
However, I'd like to add that I don't think Windows can even be compared to a Dreamcast or Playstation. People buy console systems to play games. People don't buy Windows to play games. Rather, a lot of people have Windows, and so there is a market for games. It's much like what you said about Linux and games. You happen to be using Linux, so now you are a potential market.
Remember back in the DOS days when Windows started getting popular? No developer wanted to switch to making Windows games. In fact, DOS games continued to be made, despite Win95 being the default OS everywhere. Eventually developers gave in, and Micrsoft helped them along with DirectX. This is not comparable to a Dreamcast. This is called "following the market".
Windows is not a gaming platform. It just happens to have many games available for it. I highly doubt any of the current crop of game developers are really much in love with Windows development.
-Justin
Old NES games by Nintendo always had a habit of containing extras after you win like that.
Super Mario Bros let you play again with all "Goombas" turned into those beetle things. Metriod let you play again without your suit. To get the best ending to Kid Icarus, you had to play more than once (but you kept all of your items). There are probably more things like this.
Zelda, however, took the cake. It included an *entirely new* game. I mean, some games add a secret dungeon, or a secret this or a secret that. But to be given an entirely new game? Now that's cool.
Nowadays, games are generally more complex such that making another full quest would add significant time to the development. I mean, if I had to add another quest to (warning: shameless plug) Infinity, I'd probably jump off of a bridge.
Oh well, can't forget the good old days!
-Justin
Just when you think you've seen it all, you come across http://www.fufme.com/.
Don't worry, it's not a gross-out site. It's actually a site for a product, and all of the pictures/diagrams are cartoon or computer generated.
Think CUSeeMe but taken further. Yes, "mounting your drive" can now be taken literally. You can even place an order from the site, but I can't imagine anyone buying one of these. Wouldn't lag ruin the moment anyway?
You can't judge Linux by Redhat alone.
:)
Your experiences with FreeBSD sounds a lot like mine with Slack. Although I have not used FreeBSD myself, I have heard Slackware compared to it countless times. As a Slack user, I can attest to some similarities: BSD-style init scripts, rock solid, and almost no real hand-holding.
It's a no-nonsense Linux distribution. You may want to try it out sometime.
-Justin
DirectX is a MS Windows driver/library, and it is disgusting. Also, it's not cross-platform at all. About the closest thing you can get to Linux DirectX support is the Wine libraries. Do you have any idea what you are talking about?
Games should be written to be portable in the first place by using SDL / OpenGL.
-Justin
This is a pretty serious limitation. I didn't see any mention of a future change in the whitepaper, but there definitely should be. How else would this be useful if you can only run one big "master app" ?
I've used Qt/Embedded, and it works by starting up a host app (any app can be a host) which initializes the display and proceeds to run. Any Qt/Embedded apps to get launched from this point on will use the host's framebuffer.
For now (toolkit preferences aside), Qt/E will probably a more viable solution for handhelds, since it's A) Done, and B) has a good environment host application.
GtkFB sounds promising, but it absolutely needs separate process support. I don't think I missed anything about this in the whitepaper. Can anyone shed some additional light on this issue?
-Justin
Obviously this is a short term solution. There are only so many credit card numbers if the string is only 16 digits long. Soon numbers will be repeated, which could make for some strange things if companies keep records on file.
The real solution is to ditch this insane credit card system. It plain makes no sense. Instead of giving the money to the merchant, you are giving him a key to your safe and telling him to "take only what you need." Sure, we have banks to protect overcharging, etc. The consumer actually does have a lot of protection when using a credit card. But think about the hassle that the credit card companies must go through because of this deranged system. What we need is a system that allows the consumer to authorize a payment. Perhaps when you go to the store, there would be a "vendor ID" at the counter and you would just whip out your cellphone and authorize a transaction.
It's funny, because all of us can talk all day about security and huge bit keys and networking, yet we give our login and password to the waitress every time we eat out.
-Justin
Check out Qt/Embedded at Trolltech's home page.
:)
It's a version of Qt built to use the Linux framebuffer.
Anything that compiles on the normal Qt X11 will compile on this. Awhile back, someone even ported Konqueror to it. Qt is very much a standard in the Linux world, and this extreme portability to an embedded platform is amazing. Trolltech also has a window manager / environment program to launch and manage applications with. Looks a bit like WinCE, at least the coloring.
I don't know of any handhelds currently that are using this (or that might use it), but it seems like a very good choice for a standardized X-less handheld.
-Justin