Well, XFree86 can do mmap for client/server communications on a single system, I believe, so you're really getting pretty good speeds. The biggest issue there is the context switch time, I imagine.
I have to beg to differ. If MS can destroy desktop Java by simply not bundling it with their OS, then desktop Java was dead already.
In fact, the wide range of systems on which network clients written in Java can operate was and is one of the main reasons why we did Ganymede in Java.. we can and do run our client on Win32, Mac OS (8, 9, and X), OS/2, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, etc., etc., etc.
In the real world, Java is still the best at client-side WORA if your demands for performance and features can be satisfied with the abilities of the Java VM and class libraries.
I can't speak to whether or not OS X is kernel preemptible either, but I assume when Apple talks of "fully preemptible" they are just drawing a contrast with the cooperative multitasking that MacOS has had since day one.
Re:Q: Why should an IE user switch?
on
Mozilla 0.9.5
·
· Score: 2
Recent builds of Mozilla (much more recent than the Netscape 6.1 code drop) include a turbo start mode similar to what IE does, so that the browser's shared libraries get linked and loaded on system start time, and when you go to run the browser, it can pop up the first window almost instantly.
So they say, anyway.. I mostly use Mozilla on Linux and that feature isn't supported on Linux yet.
Mail/News/Chat clients, better Java support
on
Mozilla 0.9.5
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Mozilla is being built as a successor to Netscape Communicator, and so includes a bunch of tools to take advantage of a variety of open Internet standards, including POP,IMAP,NNTP,LDAP, and IRC. Mozilla also includes a web page editor (Composer) which can be used to create mail and news posts as well as web pages, if you're into that kinky HTML stuff. This makes Mozilla vulnerable to the (misleading) bloat charge, for those who don't like flexible tools, but it also gives you a one-stop tool that can take you all over USENET as well as the web.
One of the most important benefits that I can see on Windows is that Mozilla comes with support for using Sun's recent, vastly improved, Java VM's integrated into the browser. Yes, people can write HTML for Java applets that will work on IE and Netscape 4.x using the Java plug-in, but Mozilla automatically uses the Java plug-in for all Java code, with significant benefits in performance and stability. If you have any use for Java in your browser, Mozilla will support things better.
There's also things like themeing, the sidebar, the improved cookie management, and the lack of operating system exploits that IE and Outlook seem to continually fall prey to.
Despite the announcement of the 0.9.5 milestone being reached, Mozilla seems to have seen many regressions and user interface issues recently. Mozilla's stability tends to come and go in waves, but at the end of each cycle the high water mark is much further along.
Give it a week or so and try the nightly builds and I think you'll see some pleasant improvements.
Hm? What's the karma whore / no mod connection? Does mod'ing now cost karma, or are you just worried about a negative meta-mod?
Open source non-Swing Java tree and table Java
on
J#
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Actually, if you are looking for less complicated tree and table components, check out the ones included with Ganymede.
I wrote them because I needed them for Ganymede
development, and Swing hadn't quite come along yet. I kept them because they are simple to use, they are pretty high performance, and you can do fancy tricks like node dragging ihttp://www.arlut.utexas.edu/gash2/doc/javadoc/arl ut/csd/JTable/baseTable.htmln the tree with little-to-no effort.
As long as Microsoft has any patents or copyrights that they could commingle with their products, they can fend off any obligation for true interoperability.
I.e., with Samba, they might document their protocols, but hold onto their patent for (really bad) password hashing and use that to exact licensing fees to interoperate with Microsoft servers.
Or, with Word, they can document that you need to use some kind of ActiveX technology (monikers? ActiveX ClassID's?) to do document embedding. And yes, you can be free to support this file format as long as you happen to be reading the file on a platform that supports ActiveX and the Win32 API on an IA32 Instruction Set compatible system to execute the ActiveX components needed.
There are so many ways that software can be designed and structured that Microsoft will always be able to entangle things in a way that will spoil the intent of open file formats and open protocols, and which will require massive oversight.
The documents I've examined by breaking out a.sxw file do include high-bit numbers, so I'm quite certain they are using Unicode. StarOffice writes its XML files out in UTF-8, which uses ASCII-compatible char codes for things which can be expressed in ASCII, then busts out with multiple-byte sequences to express characters from higher in the Unicode range.
If you do a 'zipinfo' on the.sxw file, you'll see that it is a pkzip file with all of the data contained in xml files and attendant graphics files.
The file format isn't so terribly space efficient, it's just compressed. Getting to actually see the contents of the file and understand what the structure of the file really looks like is pretty neat-o.
To the poster who was asking why you needed such
a huge code base for a text editor, try loading a complex MS Word doc and then save it using StarOffice 6's native file format, 'sxw'. The
sxw format is actually a pkzip file which contains
a bunch of XML files and the associated image resources.
If you look at the content.xml file, you'll get
an idea of the vast amount of formatting and structural information that is retained in an MS Word style file.
How could the kernel developers be so stupid as to leave Linux with an uncompetitive parallel port printer implementation? Now I'll never be able to drive my Star NX-10 printer at a decent rate of speed!
f you think it's wrong to have to pay to access video files then, heck, I'm sympathetic, but the only way you're going to be able to avoid it is if folks help to support projects like Ogg Tarkin.
Free software is something you give, not something you can take. If the CodeWeavers folks have done good work, there's not a thing in the world wrong with them charging for it.
Doesn't Microsoft have a tendency to write license terms that prohibit running their software on non-Microsoft platforms? IOW, I bet you can't run the Windows MSIE legally without a Windows license.
Brett, I've done a google search on the terms 'Brett Glass GPL' and found a great deal, as you can imagine. I've actually spent a couple of hours reading your various attacks against the GPL in a variety of forums over the last couple of years.
You tend to make a few points that are worth considering, but the value of those points tend to be diluted by your hatred of the GPL, and the lengths to which you will go to attack it and anyone who supports it. Declaring that people who use the GPL are either morons who don't know their own self interest or evil sons of bitches who want to hurt others is not helpful. Describing the GPL as not being an Open Source license due to the discrimination clause when the authors of said license explicitly wrote the Open Source terms to encompass the GPL also does not make you seem like you are interested in listening to anything anyone else has to say on the matter.
The GPL is a mechanism to implement a social contract, where programmers put their software under the GPL to ensure that said software can have continued relevence and utility in the network effect economy of the software world. The value in software is, as you know, not intrinsic to the bits. Microsoft paid $50,000 for QDOS and made untold billions off of it. The reason they did is because DOS became the standard of compatibility for all the software made for the IBM PC, not because DOS was particularly well made. In a winner-take-all software market, what can programmers do if they want to have a piece of software be available for public use and public evolution, without worrying about a bad actor doing as Microsoft did with the Kerberos standard in Windows 2000 and taking a public program or specification private and then using network effects to freeze out other usage?
The GPL is a license of one's own work to
the public under specified terms. You seem to think that it is unfair that programmers may not take GPL'ed work and then do anything they like with it, but the same could be said of any commercial license. If you or anyone else wants to create something with functionality similar to a GPL'ed product but under non-GPL'ed terms, then you can very well go off and write it yourself, the old fashioned way. If the labor of others, available under the GPL, makes it hard for you to make a living creating similar work, then that's too bad. That's competition. Those programmers working under the GPL have sacrificed much (as you like to point out) to release their software in that way.
There are a lot of reasons not to use the GPL, even for publicly distributable software. There are many kinds of software that would have better effect and influence if they were to be released under a BSD or Apache style license. That's a debate worth having. But claiming that the GPL is evil, as you do, is unconvincing unless you would claim that any kind of restrictions placed on you for the use of someone else's property is evil. If you want to write commercial software, do like everyone else does and write it yourself, or pay to license it from someone else.
Could we have a little less of the 'always left chasing the taillights' talk, please? I've seen a whole lot of innovative GPLed software, and written a fair bit myself.
There's lots to be said for and against the GPL, but no points for dismissing the originality and character of all work not under your favorite license.
I would still disagree. Microsoft had to write some software to have WindowsCE machines talk to Outlook. The fact that they call that piece of software part of Outlook and include it doesn't make it anything fundamentally different than that which is done with a Palm device. The primary difference is in the bundling and the marketing, not the technical capabilities.
PocketPC is no more integrated with Windows than Palm is. There are programs for Palm that let you view Word, Excel, and even PowerPoint documents, and HotSync has been cleanly integrated from day one.
What's not integrated is the marketing message, which of course is one of Microsoft's core competencies. What is integrated is an 80% share of the market, and a vast catalog of software developed for the needs of a handheld device.
The interesting question is, just how easy would
it really be to move Qt to Berlin? Berlin is designed around a model where all of the drawing and interaction code for widgets are hosted inside the display server. I haven't seen any talk of a Java VM like system for safely hosting downloadable code, so I'm not sure how well that actually works in practice, but it seems like there would be a whole lot more structural differences for a widget set written to use Berlin than just what rendering layer it's layered on top of.
Of course, I haven't done any Qt coding.. perhaps Qt is sufficiently abstract that such a very different underpinnings could be put in place. It doesn't at all seem like an easy or obvious conclusion to make, though.
Gah, looks like the new Slashdot decided to no longer default to 'HTML Formatted' for my posts, so the <p> and </p> tags I put in blew up.
Blech.
"Vast Amounts of RAM Used by X"
on
Linux: Browser Wars
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Sorry, the amount of memory used by XFree86 isn't really all that much. What you're seeing when you see huge memory usage for X in top is because the X process has memory mapped your video card's graphics RAM into its memory space, several times over.
On my 32 meg GeForce2MX card, top shows X taking up 135megs of RAM. On a friend's system with an old school 2 meg VRAM card, X is only shown taking up 4-5 megs of RAM.
X is actually pretty damn memory efficient. Remember it was originally created when a workstation might have had one megabyte of memory, total. If you have a lot of windows open at high color depth, there will be some real RAM taken up to store those bitmaps, depending on whether you have 'save unders' enabled, but that's a function of all of the programs you have running, more than of X's inefficiency, even if the memory is counted against the X server process and not the X programs themselves.
FWIW.
I still think that the browser tests covered here are rather meaningless on a 32 meg machine. These days, browsers will take up close to a full 32 megs of RAM on a UNIX system, especially with the 'cache in RAM' option of Mozilla and Netscape. These days, when you can get 512 megs of PC133 RAM for less than fifty bucks, it just doesn't make sense to worry about 32 megs here or there, anymore.
The upshot of this change is that Apple, Real,
and everyone else will *have* to package their technologies in ActiveX form in order to be compatible with Internet Explorer under Windows XP. If Apple and Real and everyone else do this, maybe they won't bother to continue providing a Netscape-style plugin, and maybe Netscape 4.x users will be screwed out of access to any modern media formats, and maybe Netscape 6.x will have to have a lot of engineering work put in in order to support ActiveX.
This is absolutely textbook Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish. This is simply the Extinguish phase, and shouldn't we have all seen this coming?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, XFree86 can do mmap for client/server communications on a single system, I believe, so you're really getting pretty good speeds. The biggest issue there is the context switch time, I imagine.
I have to beg to differ. If MS can destroy desktop Java by simply not bundling it with their OS, then desktop Java was dead already.
In fact, the wide range of systems on which network clients written in Java can operate was and is one of the main reasons why we did Ganymede in Java.. we can and do run our client on Win32, Mac OS (8, 9, and X), OS/2, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, etc., etc., etc.
In the real world, Java is still the best at client-side WORA if your demands for performance and features can be satisfied with the abilities of the Java VM and class libraries.
I can't speak to whether or not OS X is kernel preemptible either, but I assume when Apple talks of "fully preemptible" they are just drawing a contrast with the cooperative multitasking that MacOS has had since day one.
Recent builds of Mozilla (much more recent than the Netscape 6.1 code drop) include a turbo start mode similar to what IE does, so that the browser's shared libraries get linked and loaded on system start time, and when you go to run the browser, it can pop up the first window almost instantly.
So they say, anyway.. I mostly use Mozilla on Linux and that feature isn't supported on Linux yet.
Mozilla is being built as a successor to Netscape Communicator, and so includes a bunch of tools to take advantage of a variety of open Internet standards, including POP,IMAP,NNTP,LDAP, and IRC. Mozilla also includes a web page editor (Composer) which can be used to create mail and news posts as well as web pages, if you're into that kinky HTML stuff. This makes Mozilla vulnerable to the (misleading) bloat charge, for those who don't like flexible tools, but it also gives you a one-stop tool that can take you all over USENET as well as the web.
One of the most important benefits that I can see on Windows is that Mozilla comes with support for using Sun's recent, vastly improved, Java VM's integrated into the browser. Yes, people can write HTML for Java applets that will work on IE and Netscape 4.x using the Java plug-in, but Mozilla automatically uses the Java plug-in for all Java code, with significant benefits in performance and stability. If you have any use for Java in your browser, Mozilla will support things better.
There's also things like themeing, the sidebar, the improved cookie management, and the lack of operating system exploits that IE and Outlook seem to continually fall prey to.
Despite the announcement of the 0.9.5 milestone being reached, Mozilla seems to have seen many regressions and user interface issues recently. Mozilla's stability tends to come and go in waves, but at the end of each cycle the high water mark is much further along.
Give it a week or so and try the nightly builds and I think you'll see some pleasant improvements.
Hm? What's the karma whore / no mod connection? Does mod'ing now cost karma, or are you just worried about a negative meta-mod?
Actually, if you are looking for less complicated tree and table components, check out the ones included with Ganymede.
I wrote them because I needed them for Ganymede development, and Swing hadn't quite come along yet. I kept them because they are simple to use, they are pretty high performance, and you can do fancy tricks like node dragging ihttp://www.arlut.utexas.edu/gash2/doc/javadoc/arl ut/csd/JTable/baseTable.htmln the tree with little-to-no effort.
You can read the Javadocs on them here and here.
They are licensed under GPL, along with the rest of Ganymede.
As long as Microsoft has any patents or copyrights that they could commingle with their products, they can fend off any obligation for true interoperability.
I.e., with Samba, they might document their protocols, but hold onto their patent for (really bad) password hashing and use that to exact licensing fees to interoperate with Microsoft servers.
Or, with Word, they can document that you need to use some kind of ActiveX technology (monikers? ActiveX ClassID's?) to do document embedding. And yes, you can be free to support this file format as long as you happen to be reading the file on a platform that supports ActiveX and the Win32 API on an IA32 Instruction Set compatible system to execute the ActiveX components needed.
There are so many ways that software can be designed and structured that Microsoft will always be able to entangle things in a way that will spoil the intent of open file formats and open protocols, and which will require massive oversight.
The documents I've examined by breaking out a .sxw file do include high-bit numbers, so I'm quite certain they are using Unicode. StarOffice writes its XML files out in UTF-8, which uses ASCII-compatible char codes for things which can be expressed in ASCII, then busts out with multiple-byte sequences to express characters from higher in the Unicode range.
If you do a 'zipinfo' on the .sxw file, you'll see that it is a pkzip file with all of the data contained in xml files and attendant graphics files.
The file format isn't so terribly space efficient, it's just compressed. Getting to actually see the contents of the file and understand what the structure of the file really looks like is pretty neat-o.
To the poster who was asking why you needed such a huge code base for a text editor, try loading a complex MS Word doc and then save it using StarOffice 6's native file format, 'sxw'. The sxw format is actually a pkzip file which contains a bunch of XML files and the associated image resources.
If you look at the content.xml file, you'll get an idea of the vast amount of formatting and structural information that is retained in an MS Word style file.
<despair>
How could the kernel developers be so stupid as to leave Linux with an uncompetitive parallel port printer implementation? Now I'll never be able to drive my Star NX-10 printer at a decent rate of speed!
</despair>
f you think it's wrong to have to pay to access video files then, heck, I'm sympathetic, but the only way you're going to be able to avoid it is if folks help to support projects like Ogg Tarkin.
Free software is something you give, not something you can take. If the CodeWeavers folks have done good work, there's not a thing in the world wrong with them charging for it.
.. for those of us who have never used IE?
Actually, my girlfriend just got a Sony CLIE' PEG-320 (33mhz Dragonball) and it came with software to allow Quicktime video clips to be played on it.
Doesn't Microsoft have a tendency to write license terms that prohibit running their software on non-Microsoft platforms? IOW, I bet you can't run the Windows MSIE legally without a Windows license.
Brett, I've done a google search on the terms 'Brett Glass GPL' and found a great deal, as you can imagine. I've actually spent a couple of hours reading your various attacks against the GPL in a variety of forums over the last couple of years.
You tend to make a few points that are worth considering, but the value of those points tend to be diluted by your hatred of the GPL, and the lengths to which you will go to attack it and anyone who supports it. Declaring that people who use the GPL are either morons who don't know their own self interest or evil sons of bitches who want to hurt others is not helpful. Describing the GPL as not being an Open Source license due to the discrimination clause when the authors of said license explicitly wrote the Open Source terms to encompass the GPL also does not make you seem like you are interested in listening to anything anyone else has to say on the matter.
The GPL is a mechanism to implement a social contract, where programmers put their software under the GPL to ensure that said software can have continued relevence and utility in the network effect economy of the software world. The value in software is, as you know, not intrinsic to the bits. Microsoft paid $50,000 for QDOS and made untold billions off of it. The reason they did is because DOS became the standard of compatibility for all the software made for the IBM PC, not because DOS was particularly well made. In a winner-take-all software market, what can programmers do if they want to have a piece of software be available for public use and public evolution, without worrying about a bad actor doing as Microsoft did with the Kerberos standard in Windows 2000 and taking a public program or specification private and then using network effects to freeze out other usage?
The GPL is a license of one's own work to the public under specified terms. You seem to think that it is unfair that programmers may not take GPL'ed work and then do anything they like with it, but the same could be said of any commercial license. If you or anyone else wants to create something with functionality similar to a GPL'ed product but under non-GPL'ed terms, then you can very well go off and write it yourself, the old fashioned way. If the labor of others, available under the GPL, makes it hard for you to make a living creating similar work, then that's too bad. That's competition. Those programmers working under the GPL have sacrificed much (as you like to point out) to release their software in that way.
There are a lot of reasons not to use the GPL, even for publicly distributable software. There are many kinds of software that would have better effect and influence if they were to be released under a BSD or Apache style license. That's a debate worth having. But claiming that the GPL is evil, as you do, is unconvincing unless you would claim that any kind of restrictions placed on you for the use of someone else's property is evil. If you want to write commercial software, do like everyone else does and write it yourself, or pay to license it from someone else.
Could we have a little less of the 'always left chasing the taillights' talk, please? I've seen a whole lot of innovative GPLed software, and written a fair bit myself.
There's lots to be said for and against the GPL, but no points for dismissing the originality and character of all work not under your favorite license.
I would still disagree. Microsoft had to write some software to have WindowsCE machines talk to Outlook. The fact that they call that piece of software part of Outlook and include it doesn't make it anything fundamentally different than that which is done with a Palm device. The primary difference is in the bundling and the marketing, not the technical capabilities.
PocketPC is no more integrated with Windows than Palm is. There are programs for Palm that let you view Word, Excel, and even PowerPoint documents, and HotSync has been cleanly integrated from day one.
What's not integrated is the marketing message, which of course is one of Microsoft's core competencies. What is integrated is an 80% share of the market, and a vast catalog of software developed for the needs of a handheld device.
The interesting question is, just how easy would it really be to move Qt to Berlin? Berlin is designed around a model where all of the drawing and interaction code for widgets are hosted inside the display server. I haven't seen any talk of a Java VM like system for safely hosting downloadable code, so I'm not sure how well that actually works in practice, but it seems like there would be a whole lot more structural differences for a widget set written to use Berlin than just what rendering layer it's layered on top of.
Of course, I haven't done any Qt coding.. perhaps Qt is sufficiently abstract that such a very different underpinnings could be put in place. It doesn't at all seem like an easy or obvious conclusion to make, though.
Gah, looks like the new Slashdot decided to no longer default to 'HTML Formatted' for my posts, so the <p> and </p> tags I put in blew up.
Blech.
Sorry, the amount of memory used by XFree86 isn't really all that much. What you're seeing when you see huge memory usage for X in top is because the X process has memory mapped your video card's graphics RAM into its memory space, several times over.
On my 32 meg GeForce2MX card, top shows X taking up 135megs of RAM. On a friend's system with an old school 2 meg VRAM card, X is only shown taking up 4-5 megs of RAM.
X is actually pretty damn memory efficient. Remember it was originally created when a workstation might have had one megabyte of memory, total. If you have a lot of windows open at high color depth, there will be some real RAM taken up to store those bitmaps, depending on whether you have 'save unders' enabled, but that's a function of all of the programs you have running, more than of X's inefficiency, even if the memory is counted against the X server process and not the X programs themselves.
FWIW.
I still think that the browser tests covered here are rather meaningless on a 32 meg machine. These days, browsers will take up close to a full 32 megs of RAM on a UNIX system, especially with the 'cache in RAM' option of Mozilla and Netscape. These days, when you can get 512 megs of PC133 RAM for less than fifty bucks, it just doesn't make sense to worry about 32 megs here or there, anymore.
The upshot of this change is that Apple, Real, and everyone else will *have* to package their technologies in ActiveX form in order to be compatible with Internet Explorer under Windows XP. If Apple and Real and everyone else do this, maybe they won't bother to continue providing a Netscape-style plugin, and maybe Netscape 4.x users will be screwed out of access to any modern media formats, and maybe Netscape 6.x will have to have a lot of engineering work put in in order to support ActiveX.
This is absolutely textbook Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish. This is simply the Extinguish phase, and shouldn't we have all seen this coming?