I think online chatting is a totally lame way to get to know someone, but these online "matchmaking" services can make it easier to locate people that you can meet in person. In fact, that looks like the whole point of Trepia.
Meeting women or interesting folks in "in real life" is difficult. I agree that it is good to get out and find someone at the gym, but your chance of meeting someone worthwhile that way is very slim. As an earlier poster noted, people like me who have jobs where we are stuck at home or in a cubicle, and don't go to school, have a terrible time finding people. Online matchmaking can be a great way to fix this. My point, though, is that it is not a substitute for a relationship (the idea of an "online relationship" sounds lame to me), it is only a way of finding someone in the first place. Once you find someone, don't waste time with emails, arrange a date at the gym.;-)
Umm, so if the GPL is annoying to deal with, how would you rather all the code you come across be licensed?
Proprietary/Closed? That doesn't help you at all.
BSD? You're more of a dreamer than Stallman.
As a professional, you just have to use what is available and get on with life. There is a lot of code you'll never get to use, let alone see. It should not cause you "heartache".
To each his own
on
Gentoo Reviewed
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Gentoo really requires a speedy system if you want to have any fun, as you'll spend so much time compiling things. I have Gentoo on my desktop here, and it is great. I used to use Slackware, and this is definitely an upgrade. Well, for me at least. The great thing about Linux is that there is a distro for everyone, no such thing as 'best'.;-)
However, on my laptop, which is about half the speed, I use Debian. While Debian has been around for a long time, I only recently tried it, some six months after I discovered Gentoo. I'm very impressed by it, apt-get is as good as emerge as far as I can tell, but without any compilation to wait for. I had a full system, KDE and all, up in just a few hours instead of days.
If you use Gentoo and a friend says to you, "oh you need program X", throw your instant gratification out the window. By the time you have program X, your friend will be asleep, and you'll have to coordinate another day.
I still recommend Gentoo, but I think Debian is probably a better choice if you want easy software installation. Of course, neither of these distros is very user friendly. Setting up Gentoo is almost like LFS, and Debian is sorta like Slack. Give your mom SuSE.
This is absolutely not true. Go read the license sometime, it is pure GPL.
I believe you're thinking of some old FAQ entry on the Trolltech website, probably written by someone without a clue. Saying that you can't change your application's license is ridiculous and completely unenforcable. Of course, if you distribute your code then you can't take it back (this goes for any software), but future distributions of the code could have a different license. Even the GPL itself doesn't 'force' your derivatives to be GPL, only that you break copyright law otherwise (in which case, you pay your fines and keep your source closed).
So yeah, go use your Free Qt initially, and then buy a commercial license when you want to close the source. This issue has been brought up too many times on the qt-interest mailing list, with the same concluding remarks as this message, and with no objection from Trolltech. Bottom line: read the license.
Yup, Symbian rocks. The Psion Revo was a very cool PDA. The whole thing felt solid, and the apps worked nicely. Its email application was the best I've used on a PDA yet, and the GSM phone sync software was quite handy (I used to backup my phone on the Revo, and backup my Revo on my laptop:) ). Internet access via IR cellphone, telnet client, Opera web browser, what more could you want? It's a shame it was a minority product here in the USA. I guess no one likes PDAs with keyboards?
Like you, now I have a Zaurus, which is an improvement over the Revo in just about every way possible, except now in a vertical form-factor (arguably also an improvement). My only complaint is the battery life. The apps could use some work, but the development environment on the Zaurus is just so damn cool (it don't get any better than Linux + Qt, folks), that I'm sure the apps will greatly improve over time. I just hope the product survives. Probably one of the reasons Psion died out in the USA is because of Palm/PocketPC dominance.
... puts X compatability on a layer _above_ the windowing system. Many people believe this is where network transparency belongs rather than entangled within the windowing system.
Yup, this is my feeling exactly. I have no problem with X11. DirectFB is interesting because it allows us to have a much better design for our graphical subsystem (first and foremost, by using Linux kernel drivers). It does not replace X11 at all, just the driver base of XFree86.
Can everybody please stop the X11 naysaying? DirectFB and X11 are complimentary.
Umm, that could be said of any driver. Video isn't inherently less stable than other hardware. I've used audio and network drivers that crash on me. Should we move them into userspace? Get real.
X works through the/dev/io and/dev/mem devices which allow priveleged applications to talk directly to the corresponding busses.
Close enough. To me, "DOS-Style" means "App-can-take-your-system-down-Style.":) And XFree86 lives up to this, unfortunately.
The linux framebuffer is a kernel land driver, but it's not needed.
Of course it is not needed, it is just a better design. You don't think xmms should access/dev/io and/dev/mem just to play a song, do you? We have drivers for a reason. One nice thing about the Linux Framebuffer is that you can change the permission of your video with chmod.
What do You mean by "proper video display"? Video output is done by applications and not by the kernel directly.
Linux has kernel video drivers, part of something known as the Linux Framebuffer. This is a much better and safer design than the old way of letting applications access the video "DOS-style".
...this leads to the building of integral applications for a platform, and the building of concept applications for a platform, but there is no building of "in-between" applications...
Then pay them to! What does this have to do with Open Source?
Someone needs to write the definitive GEULA. (or should that be GNEULA?)
Though it would be essentially redundant, I guess our GNEULA could look like this:
#1 - Please read up on Copyright law to learn what you are able to do with this software. This is basically your distribution/fair-use rights. We could have written the law text here, but since the gov't has done it already we figure we'll save our breath.
#2 - Read our included LICENSE.GPL, LICENSE.BSD, or other file to learn about the additional freedoms you have.
#3 - Instead of Yes/No, there is only an 'OK' button. This is because you have to accept Copyright law (it is not a question), and we don't care if you accept #2 or not (if you don't want your extra freedoms, no harm to us).
Interesting, just last week I was writing a post and came across this issue. As I was saying the content in my head while writing it out, I stumbled on "quote unquote". You see, in my head I was saying those words, but since it surely wouldn't look right as text, I type real quotes.
Problem is, reading back the text that had real quotes just didn't have the same kind of flow as a spoken message using the silly "quote unquote" substitute. They each come across in a slightly different way. I couldn't find a way to represent the flow I wanted, so I ended up canning the idea of quoted text entirely, and wrote around it.
"... the story is almost too ambitious for a cartoon (especially for people who like their cartoons with a little more fun and a little less elaborate plots and "end of the world" stuff)." -- The Movie Chicks
That quote bothers me, and I'm not even an anime fan!
Well, if it ever got "bad", I'd hope that they could simply invoke their ability in the FQF to release the latest Qt under the BSD license. If for some reason that doesn't fly, then yes they could recreate Qt. I wouldn't call it 'simple', but it would be easier than designing a full desktop environment.
To make a closed-source app, yes you must pay Trolltech. However, I don't think that should make you turn your back on KDE.
You should read up on the history of KDE and Qt. The main issue is that back when KDE started, Qt was the best tool for the job, and I don't think Gtk even existed.
At the time, Qt wasn't even GPL yet, it was licensed more like qmail, where you can't distribute a modified version of it. This bothered many Free software purists, because if they wanted to add a new feature, the best they could do is send a patch to Trolltech and pray it gets added. The KDE team acknowledged this problem, but they decided that writing a toolkit is easier than writing a desktop environment (on kde.org, they mention at one point KDE had 800,000 lines of code, while Qt had 80,000). So the logic was that they could always go back and recode a free toolkit if Trolltech ever went bad. Eventually though, the KDE Free Qt Foundation was formed, which gives KDE the power to release the latest Qt under a BSD-like license. Basically, if Trolltech stops working on Qt for any reason, stops selling commercial licenses, wishes to change the license to Qt, or otherwise abuses or loses control of their position, all at the discretion of two signed KDE members, a BSD Qt gets released (at which point, KDE would likely start their own LGPL fork of it). I've read over the Foundation papers a few times, and I think Trolltech must have been on crack when they signed it, but I guess it worked out alright since they are hugely popular now because of KDE's succes.
In the meantime, the Harmony project, a reimplementation of Qt, had started. To quote kde.org: "... the solution doesn't lie in writing a new desktop from scratch but in writing an LGPL'ed Qt clone. This is what the Harmony Project does. Even for GPL purists there is no viable reason to refuse KDE since a Qt clone will be available in the not so far future. We believe that we have made the right decision by first building a desktop rather than first building a Qt clone. There would have been a good chance that we would have suffered the same fate that the GnuStep project had to endure if we had acted otherwise."
Today, Qt is GPL, and so Harmony ceases to exist, and the Free Qt Foundation is not really necessary anymore except for ensuring closed-source KDE applications are always possible.
Definitely look into Jabber. The IETF recently got involved with it, and the official protocol name will be "XMPP". See the Jabber Software Foundation's website for more information and the full protocol specification (plus over 70 enhancement proposals).
As for a client, you should find one to your liking in the Jabber community. I am the author of Psi, which was recommended to you by another person in the thread. Though the program is incomplete, it is quite stable, and the requirements you list in your post are my thoughts exactly. Email me if you want to get involved;-)
Btw, I noticed you marked yourself as a fan of me. What was the reason?
Yeah, who knows, maybe we'll do that. Unfortunately, there are still some final touches to be done before it is releasable. After the whole Crave incident we just completely dropped the project, and since then it hasn't been touched. We might get the team together again just to put out a ROM, though we've been saying that for awhile now...
I have first-hand experience here, working on Infinity for Gameboy Color. Sure, GBC is obsolete, and we really should nuke that web site right now, since it isn't going anywhere, but a few years ago it was hot stuff.
The GBC glaringly lacked RPGs. At the time, I could safely say that the best RPG for the platform was Final Fantasy Legend 3, and that was for the monochrome GB! Infinity was going to change that. It was a game SquareSoft would have made, had they stayed around to make GBC games. Our game played a little like something between FF2 and FF3, with a full 25,000 word story. No real innovation here (except for maybe the battle system), we were simply trying to fill a nitch on the platform. For that reason, we got so many emails from gamers wondering when this thing would be released. After all, their only other choice was Pokemon. Many of them wondered if we would face a similar fate as Mythri, another GBC title that you never saw (both games were highlighed on RPGamer).
Unfortunately, Infinity never saw the light of day because we couldn't land a publisher. We sent a letter out to nearly all publishers, but in only three cases did they contact us back: EA, Nintendo, Crave. I actually flew to Washington to meet a guy at Nintendo (pretty cool place, looks just like the stuff in the pictures), only to be denied an offer. He did, however, show me a GBA prototype with Mario Kart. Sure, Mario Kart is a cool game, but I wanted to play an RPG. On the first day we met with Crave, the guy asked if we could substitute the characters with some from a movie. We tried to get them to go along with the game as-is, and we had a long negotiation period, but they ended up just stringing us along with no result. At one point, their plan was to show the game at E3 2001, but we were denied that also (I even have the 1 poster of the game we had made for the occasion, hanging on the wall behind me right now).
What I learned from all this is that publishers generally only want to take safe bets. Why go for a risky RPG when you can just make Men in Black 2? It pained me to walk down the GBC isle at stores and see something featuring the Olsen twins. How on earth do these games get published, but ours not? It is the sad state of the game industry.
Would anybody be interested in developing a BSD/LGPL version of qt from scratch?
Nope. Are you going to reimplement the entire Qt toolkit, something that has taken years for Trolltech to design, just to save a couple thousand bucks? If you want to write closed source software, it is simpler just to pay the money. If you don't want to write closed source software, then why the heck would you start such a project? Do you feel the need to be charitable to corporations? The rest of us Free developers don't need an LGPL Qt.
Re:But it makes up in one huge way....
on
Has GNOME Become LAME?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
"OpenQT" ? I guess you're thinking of the Harmony project, in which the goal was to write a Free implementation of Qt back when Qt was not considered Free. This is no longer needed, as Qt is available as GPL now, and has been for many years.
No one is going to reimplement Qt just to have an LGPL/BSD license. The only people that need such a thing are commercial developers, who are the least likely to ever create such a free project in the first place.
Sorry commercial developer, pay your dues to Trolltech, so that in turn my KDE is made better. Thank you:)
Actually, I don't see why it wouldn't be compatible with current software. Most OSs already can handle hot-swapping of PCMCIA / USB devices, certainly they could easily handle an entire system of similar devices.
I could swear I read something about an entirely card-based computer maybe 6 years ago. I remember retelling what I had read to friends over and over, about the possibility of easily installing all of your hardware by just sliding it into some external slot.
Everytime I install hardware into current PCs, I always end up losing screws or cutting my hands on those metal spikes that line the bottom of PCI cards. If I dread installing hardware into my own PC, how could anyone expect normal folks like my mom to be able to do it? It's clear we have a long way to go. Everything should be as easy as PCMCIA.
Yes, this is true. All Qt (and therefore KDE) themes are made in C++ using the QStyle class. Unfortunately, as knowledge of C++ is required to make such a widget style, there are a lot less Qt themes available than gtk. On the positive side, you have an absurd amount of control when making a style, and you can perfect it down to the pixel. Qt was designed this way so that it could easily adapt to existing GUI environments and still feel native (Windows/Mac/Motif), but it also makes for some nice theming possibilities:)
All GNU components could be replaced with BSD, or even propeitary versions, and it would still be Linux.
I guess.. but then I think you would call it BSD/Linux. The fact is that Linux is just a very small part of your entire system. This is not to say it isn't important, but it is so low in the chain that it is most certainly not the defining factor.
When someone looks at my desktop, I say it is KDE. The OS underneath could be Solaris for all anyone knows. When someone looks at my Zaurus, I say it is Qtopia. The term 'Linux' is just too vague to mean anything.
When talking about a GNU system on top of Linux, saying "GNU/Linux" can be very appropriate. The parent poster was not necessarily talking about your computer.
I agree with you. My beef with the current system is mainly the organization. I don't know enough about the X protocol itself to comment on it, so I will say it is good enough.
What I don't like is how XFree86 accesses the graphics hardware itself. First, this goes against everything else in Linux. Normally applications use a kernel driver, but not XFree86. Second, this is a security risk. XFree86 requires root access in order to do its own driver handling, and this is why it is setuid root. Third, because XFree86 sticks its hand right into the video, it is easy for it to conflict with other programs that might be accessing the video also (svgalib, fbcon, etc). If there was a separate system managing just your graphics, then this could all be handled properly and cleanly.
The Linux Framebuffer is a wonderful solution (or at least the idea is anyway), because it makes your video device "/dev/fb". Set your permissions with chmod and be done with it. No root access, no sharing conflicts. You can actually run XFree86 on top of the Linux Framebuffer, but unfortunately it lacks a lot of features this way (though I'm sure it will improve). Also, the Linux Framebuffer lacks any sort of 3D. So clearly there is a lot of work left here:(
As far as local vs remote, I think the situation could be a little bit better than it is now, by coming up with a way for programs to access the display directly if running locally. But I would not want to sacrifice the remote capability. Remote should _always_ be possible, it is just a question of how to organize the layers that get you there. If I weren't already working on another major project, I'd probably try my hand at this:)
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I think online chatting is a totally lame way to get to know someone, but these online "matchmaking" services can make it easier to locate people that you can meet in person. In fact, that looks like the whole point of Trepia.
;-)
Meeting women or interesting folks in "in real life" is difficult. I agree that it is good to get out and find someone at the gym, but your chance of meeting someone worthwhile that way is very slim. As an earlier poster noted, people like me who have jobs where we are stuck at home or in a cubicle, and don't go to school, have a terrible time finding people. Online matchmaking can be a great way to fix this. My point, though, is that it is not a substitute for a relationship (the idea of an "online relationship" sounds lame to me), it is only a way of finding someone in the first place. Once you find someone, don't waste time with emails, arrange a date at the gym.
Umm, so if the GPL is annoying to deal with, how would you rather all the code you come across be licensed?
Proprietary/Closed? That doesn't help you at all.
BSD? You're more of a dreamer than Stallman.
As a professional, you just have to use what is available and get on with life. There is a lot of code you'll never get to use, let alone see. It should not cause you "heartache".
Gentoo really requires a speedy system if you want to have any fun, as you'll spend so much time compiling things. I have Gentoo on my desktop here, and it is great. I used to use Slackware, and this is definitely an upgrade. Well, for me at least. The great thing about Linux is that there is a distro for everyone, no such thing as 'best'. ;-)
However, on my laptop, which is about half the speed, I use Debian. While Debian has been around for a long time, I only recently tried it, some six months after I discovered Gentoo. I'm very impressed by it, apt-get is as good as emerge as far as I can tell, but without any compilation to wait for. I had a full system, KDE and all, up in just a few hours instead of days.
If you use Gentoo and a friend says to you, "oh you need program X", throw your instant gratification out the window. By the time you have program X, your friend will be asleep, and you'll have to coordinate another day.
I still recommend Gentoo, but I think Debian is probably a better choice if you want easy software installation. Of course, neither of these distros is very user friendly. Setting up Gentoo is almost like LFS, and Debian is sorta like Slack. Give your mom SuSE.
This is absolutely not true. Go read the license sometime, it is pure GPL.
I believe you're thinking of some old FAQ entry on the Trolltech website, probably written by someone without a clue. Saying that you can't change your application's license is ridiculous and completely unenforcable. Of course, if you distribute your code then you can't take it back (this goes for any software), but future distributions of the code could have a different license. Even the GPL itself doesn't 'force' your derivatives to be GPL, only that you break copyright law otherwise (in which case, you pay your fines and keep your source closed).
So yeah, go use your Free Qt initially, and then buy a commercial license when you want to close the source. This issue has been brought up too many times on the qt-interest mailing list, with the same concluding remarks as this message, and with no objection from Trolltech. Bottom line: read the license.
Yup, Symbian rocks. The Psion Revo was a very cool PDA. The whole thing felt solid, and the apps worked nicely. Its email application was the best I've used on a PDA yet, and the GSM phone sync software was quite handy (I used to backup my phone on the Revo, and backup my Revo on my laptop :) ). Internet access via IR cellphone, telnet client, Opera web browser, what more could you want? It's a shame it was a minority product here in the USA. I guess no one likes PDAs with keyboards?
Like you, now I have a Zaurus, which is an improvement over the Revo in just about every way possible, except now in a vertical form-factor (arguably also an improvement). My only complaint is the battery life. The apps could use some work, but the development environment on the Zaurus is just so damn cool (it don't get any better than Linux + Qt, folks), that I'm sure the apps will greatly improve over time. I just hope the product survives. Probably one of the reasons Psion died out in the USA is because of Palm/PocketPC dominance.
... puts X compatability on a layer _above_ the windowing system. Many people believe this is where network transparency belongs rather than entangled within the windowing system.
Yup, this is my feeling exactly. I have no problem with X11. DirectFB is interesting because it allows us to have a much better design for our graphical subsystem (first and foremost, by using Linux kernel drivers). It does not replace X11 at all, just the driver base of XFree86.
Can everybody please stop the X11 naysaying? DirectFB and X11 are complimentary.
Umm, that could be said of any driver. Video isn't inherently less stable than other hardware. I've used audio and network drivers that crash on me. Should we move them into userspace? Get real.
:P
Just try not to write drivers that crash, ok?
X works through the /dev/io and /dev/mem devices which allow priveleged applications to talk directly to the corresponding busses.
:) And XFree86 lives up to this, unfortunately.
/dev/io and /dev/mem just to play a song, do you? We have drivers for a reason. One nice thing about the Linux Framebuffer is that you can change the permission of your video with chmod.
Close enough. To me, "DOS-Style" means "App-can-take-your-system-down-Style."
The linux framebuffer is a kernel land driver, but it's not needed.
Of course it is not needed, it is just a better design. You don't think xmms should access
What do You mean by "proper video display"? Video output is done by applications and not by the kernel directly.
Linux has kernel video drivers, part of something known as the Linux Framebuffer. This is a much better and safer design than the old way of letting applications access the video "DOS-style".
...this leads to the building of integral applications for a platform, and the building of concept applications for a platform, but there is no building of "in-between" applications...
Then pay them to! What does this have to do with Open Source?
Someone needs to write the definitive GEULA. (or should that be GNEULA?)
Though it would be essentially redundant, I guess our GNEULA could look like this:
#1 - Please read up on Copyright law to learn what you are able to do with this software. This is basically your distribution/fair-use rights. We could have written the law text here, but since the gov't has done it already we figure we'll save our breath.
#2 - Read our included LICENSE.GPL, LICENSE.BSD, or other file to learn about the additional freedoms you have.
#3 - Instead of Yes/No, there is only an 'OK' button. This is because you have to accept Copyright law (it is not a question), and we don't care if you accept #2 or not (if you don't want your extra freedoms, no harm to us).
Interesting, just last week I was writing a post and came across this issue. As I was saying the content in my head while writing it out, I stumbled on "quote unquote". You see, in my head I was saying those words, but since it surely wouldn't look right as text, I type real quotes.
Problem is, reading back the text that had real quotes just didn't have the same kind of flow as a spoken message using the silly "quote unquote" substitute. They each come across in a slightly different way. I couldn't find a way to represent the flow I wanted, so I ended up canning the idea of quoted text entirely, and wrote around it.
"... the story is almost too ambitious for a cartoon (especially for people who like their cartoons with a little more fun and a little less elaborate plots and "end of the world" stuff)." -- The Movie Chicks
That quote bothers me, and I'm not even an anime fan!
Obviously the answer is "here, take it". A better question would be: What license do you release your source code under?
Well, if it ever got "bad", I'd hope that they could simply invoke their ability in the FQF to release the latest Qt under the BSD license. If for some reason that doesn't fly, then yes they could recreate Qt. I wouldn't call it 'simple', but it would be easier than designing a full desktop environment.
To make a closed-source app, yes you must pay Trolltech. However, I don't think that should make you turn your back on KDE.
You should read up on the history of KDE and Qt. The main issue is that back when KDE started, Qt was the best tool for the job, and I don't think Gtk even existed.
At the time, Qt wasn't even GPL yet, it was licensed more like qmail, where you can't distribute a modified version of it. This bothered many Free software purists, because if they wanted to add a new feature, the best they could do is send a patch to Trolltech and pray it gets added. The KDE team acknowledged this problem, but they decided that writing a toolkit is easier than writing a desktop environment (on kde.org, they mention at one point KDE had 800,000 lines of code, while Qt had 80,000). So the logic was that they could always go back and recode a free toolkit if Trolltech ever went bad. Eventually though, the KDE Free Qt Foundation was formed, which gives KDE the power to release the latest Qt under a BSD-like license. Basically, if Trolltech stops working on Qt for any reason, stops selling commercial licenses, wishes to change the license to Qt, or otherwise abuses or loses control of their position, all at the discretion of two signed KDE members, a BSD Qt gets released (at which point, KDE would likely start their own LGPL fork of it). I've read over the Foundation papers a few times, and I think Trolltech must have been on crack when they signed it, but I guess it worked out alright since they are hugely popular now because of KDE's succes.
In the meantime, the Harmony project, a reimplementation of Qt, had started. To quote kde.org: "... the solution doesn't lie in writing a new desktop from scratch but in writing an LGPL'ed Qt clone. This is what the Harmony Project does. Even for GPL purists there is no viable reason to refuse KDE since a Qt clone will be available in the not so far future. We believe that we have made the right decision by first building a desktop rather than first building a Qt clone. There would have been a good chance that we would have suffered the same fate that the GnuStep project had to endure if we had acted otherwise."
Today, Qt is GPL, and so Harmony ceases to exist, and the Free Qt Foundation is not really necessary anymore except for ensuring closed-source KDE applications are always possible.
Definitely look into Jabber. The IETF recently got involved with it, and the official protocol name will be "XMPP". See the Jabber Software Foundation's website for more information and the full protocol specification (plus over 70 enhancement proposals).
;-)
As for a client, you should find one to your liking in the Jabber community. I am the author of Psi, which was recommended to you by another person in the thread. Though the program is incomplete, it is quite stable, and the requirements you list in your post are my thoughts exactly. Email me if you want to get involved
Btw, I noticed you marked yourself as a fan of me. What was the reason?
Yeah, who knows, maybe we'll do that. Unfortunately, there are still some final touches to be done before it is releasable. After the whole Crave incident we just completely dropped the project, and since then it hasn't been touched. We might get the team together again just to put out a ROM, though we've been saying that for awhile now...
I have first-hand experience here, working on Infinity for Gameboy Color. Sure, GBC is obsolete, and we really should nuke that web site right now, since it isn't going anywhere, but a few years ago it was hot stuff.
The GBC glaringly lacked RPGs. At the time, I could safely say that the best RPG for the platform was Final Fantasy Legend 3, and that was for the monochrome GB! Infinity was going to change that. It was a game SquareSoft would have made, had they stayed around to make GBC games. Our game played a little like something between FF2 and FF3, with a full 25,000 word story. No real innovation here (except for maybe the battle system), we were simply trying to fill a nitch on the platform. For that reason, we got so many emails from gamers wondering when this thing would be released. After all, their only other choice was Pokemon. Many of them wondered if we would face a similar fate as Mythri, another GBC title that you never saw (both games were highlighed on RPGamer).
Unfortunately, Infinity never saw the light of day because we couldn't land a publisher. We sent a letter out to nearly all publishers, but in only three cases did they contact us back: EA, Nintendo, Crave. I actually flew to Washington to meet a guy at Nintendo (pretty cool place, looks just like the stuff in the pictures), only to be denied an offer. He did, however, show me a GBA prototype with Mario Kart. Sure, Mario Kart is a cool game, but I wanted to play an RPG. On the first day we met with Crave, the guy asked if we could substitute the characters with some from a movie. We tried to get them to go along with the game as-is, and we had a long negotiation period, but they ended up just stringing us along with no result. At one point, their plan was to show the game at E3 2001, but we were denied that also (I even have the 1 poster of the game we had made for the occasion, hanging on the wall behind me right now).
What I learned from all this is that publishers generally only want to take safe bets. Why go for a risky RPG when you can just make Men in Black 2? It pained me to walk down the GBC isle at stores and see something featuring the Olsen twins. How on earth do these games get published, but ours not? It is the sad state of the game industry.
Would anybody be interested in developing a BSD/LGPL version of qt from scratch?
Nope. Are you going to reimplement the entire Qt toolkit, something that has taken years for Trolltech to design, just to save a couple thousand bucks? If you want to write closed source software, it is simpler just to pay the money. If you don't want to write closed source software, then why the heck would you start such a project? Do you feel the need to be charitable to corporations? The rest of us Free developers don't need an LGPL Qt.
"OpenQT" ? I guess you're thinking of the Harmony project, in which the goal was to write a Free implementation of Qt back when Qt was not considered Free. This is no longer needed, as Qt is available as GPL now, and has been for many years.
:)
No one is going to reimplement Qt just to have an LGPL/BSD license. The only people that need such a thing are commercial developers, who are the least likely to ever create such a free project in the first place.
Sorry commercial developer, pay your dues to Trolltech, so that in turn my KDE is made better. Thank you
Actually, I don't see why it wouldn't be compatible with current software. Most OSs already can handle hot-swapping of PCMCIA / USB devices, certainly they could easily handle an entire system of similar devices.
I could swear I read something about an entirely card-based computer maybe 6 years ago. I remember retelling what I had read to friends over and over, about the possibility of easily installing all of your hardware by just sliding it into some external slot.
Everytime I install hardware into current PCs, I always end up losing screws or cutting my hands on those metal spikes that line the bottom of PCI cards. If I dread installing hardware into my own PC, how could anyone expect normal folks like my mom to be able to do it? It's clear we have a long way to go. Everything should be as easy as PCMCIA.
Yes, this is true. All Qt (and therefore KDE) themes are made in C++ using the QStyle class. Unfortunately, as knowledge of C++ is required to make such a widget style, there are a lot less Qt themes available than gtk. On the positive side, you have an absurd amount of control when making a style, and you can perfect it down to the pixel. Qt was designed this way so that it could easily adapt to existing GUI environments and still feel native (Windows/Mac/Motif), but it also makes for some nice theming possibilities :)
All GNU components could be replaced with BSD, or even propeitary versions, and it would still be Linux.
I guess.. but then I think you would call it BSD/Linux. The fact is that Linux is just a very small part of your entire system. This is not to say it isn't important, but it is so low in the chain that it is most certainly not the defining factor.
When someone looks at my desktop, I say it is KDE. The OS underneath could be Solaris for all anyone knows. When someone looks at my Zaurus, I say it is Qtopia. The term 'Linux' is just too vague to mean anything.
When talking about a GNU system on top of Linux, saying "GNU/Linux" can be very appropriate. The parent poster was not necessarily talking about your computer.
I agree with you. My beef with the current system is mainly the organization. I don't know enough about the X protocol itself to comment on it, so I will say it is good enough.
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What I don't like is how XFree86 accesses the graphics hardware itself. First, this goes against everything else in Linux. Normally applications use a kernel driver, but not XFree86. Second, this is a security risk. XFree86 requires root access in order to do its own driver handling, and this is why it is setuid root. Third, because XFree86 sticks its hand right into the video, it is easy for it to conflict with other programs that might be accessing the video also (svgalib, fbcon, etc). If there was a separate system managing just your graphics, then this could all be handled properly and cleanly.
The Linux Framebuffer is a wonderful solution (or at least the idea is anyway), because it makes your video device "/dev/fb". Set your permissions with chmod and be done with it. No root access, no sharing conflicts. You can actually run XFree86 on top of the Linux Framebuffer, but unfortunately it lacks a lot of features this way (though I'm sure it will improve). Also, the Linux Framebuffer lacks any sort of 3D. So clearly there is a lot of work left here
As far as local vs remote, I think the situation could be a little bit better than it is now, by coming up with a way for programs to access the display directly if running locally. But I would not want to sacrifice the remote capability. Remote should _always_ be possible, it is just a question of how to organize the layers that get you there. If I weren't already working on another major project, I'd probably try my hand at this