So you got the state to support your line of reasoning; you still want to be able to renege on something you agreed to.
Sure but that's between you and the company. The company can still tyr and enforce that if they want, they just don't have any legal recourse. Maybe they can appeal to your sense of honour.
Just because someone doesn't want to honour their promises doesn't make it the state's fault.
I think the simple way to look at it is this: Who actually enforces the contract? The state. It's the state's courts and legal systems that you will be using to enforce a contract. Given that I see no reason why the state should not be allowed to decide what they will and will not enforce. If you write a contract that the state isn't willing to enforce then tough luck, you wrote a bad contract. Don't like it? Move to a different state/country.
If only this was shown in American prime-time, people may start thinking more critically about the moves we are taking now...
It's quite depressing really. That documentary was shown in the UK almost a year ago. It has made the rounds in prime time slots all over the world - it was showing here in Canada several months ago. And for all that, the one country where it probably most needs to be seen is where it isn't getting any significant play.
If you can't download whole documentaries, you can start this article on Al Qaeda by Jason Burke who featured in the documentary. It will give you an idea of at least some of the background and misperceptions of the "global terror network", or lack thereof, that we are facing.
Care to name a few companies which have significant CS R&D labs?
There are plenty out there, though a lot of them are small and thus probably under your radar. For a random example of one I've encountered try Praxis Critical Systems who do a lot of interesting work in verification, refinement systems and that sort of thing. You could try Certicom who have a lot of interesting work in the cryptography front - and a decent portion of that is work of efficient algorithms and secure protocols as well as the pure math side. There's Telecom Italia who are doing interesting work in agent architectures (I just happen to know of then having used JADE, their agent system, once).
If none of that appeals I'm sure there are literally hundreds more companies, those were just random ones I knew off the top of my head. And beyond that you have government work: DARPA, NSA, and many others are all quite interested in cutting edge CS work (look at SELinux from NSA for example, a demonstration of their research work into secure architectures).
If you open your eyes and look there is no shortage of opportunities.
People wonder why no one is going into CS anymore.
If you honestly think he'll be struggling to find a well paying job elsewhere you're deluding yourself. Just because large floundering corporations are laying off good CS people doesn't mean much. Mostly what it means is that HP obviously doesn't have any long term vision anymore, and are probably very much on the way out.
To be fair you need more detail with a map in Japan. In a map of the US or Europe the street names and a few street numbers are all you need to find a particular building or house. Japan, on the other hand, has their own particularly weird system where buildings are numbered by blocks (roughly speaking) based on when they were built, and the majority of streets don't have names. Given the general lack of street names and building numbers (well, the kind we're used to) any map in Japan is only really useful if it provides some landmarks to navigate by - which is I presume why they include all the building details and traffic light symbols etc.
My personal irk after spending some time backpacking around Japan: they are kind enough to post maps around the place to help you find things, but the orientation of the map is can often be pretty much random - no "North is up", no aligning with the street layout as it is in front of you, just general "however they felt like" orientation.
Every show gets cancelled eventually (with the possible exception of The Simpsons). Getting cancelled after one series probably correlates well with sucking - I can't think of any good series that got cancelled so quickly (I've never seen Firefly so I can't judge).
Space Above and Beyond was cancelled during it's first season. No it wasn't the greatest, but it was definitely good. The first episodes were decidedly average, but given the last two thirds of the season it probably rates as one of the best Science Fiction series I've ever seen. The new BattleStar Galactica owes a lot to SAAB in many ways. Certainly SAAB didn't suck.
I'm sure there are plenty of other examples. That was simply one I could think of rapidly.
I have to agree, at least as to the benefits of hi-res laptop displays. I have a Dell (yeah, that sucks) but it has a 15 inch widescreen display that will happily do 1920x1200. After working on that a lot other laptops seem to have very constricted displays.
And like you, no I don't have fabulous eyesight - I use fairly large fonts and simply scale things up - but the added clarity and crispness in both font rendering and graphics is definitely a huge bonus. By comparison 1024x768 displays looks blurred and fuzzy.
With expose (or dragging over the taskbar in Windows) you are required to make a precise mouse move onto the target window (or taskbar button), plus if you have a decent screen resolution the distance all the way to the top corner then back to wherever your target window has moved to is quite significant. With this method you can relatively inaccurately wave your mouse about a few times then drop onto a fullsizez target window.
Target area is huge (you don't need to be precise with the folding) and the distance to move is minimised (just over the edge of the window and back). According to Fitt's law that's actually pretty damn good compared to over to the corner then all the way back to a small target.
Is folding going to be faster? In general it will mostly be about the same I expect, and in some cases it will be slower. It is also much more discoverable, and clear how to use it once you've started. Those are benefits that mitigate the speed loss. Will this replace Expose? No way. Would this be a damn good feature to add regardless of what expose might be able to do? Hell yes.
He obviously wasn't talking about Java vs Quartz but exposé vs fold-n-drop. Fold and drop clearly is an O(n) operation, where n is the numbrer of windows. Other solutions such as OS X exposé or Windows hover-over-taskbar-thingie on the other hand are O(1) operations.
If your windows are stacked then the total amount you have to move the mouse for fold (quick back and forth motion over a short distance n times) compared to moving the mouse up to the top corner, then back down to where Expose put the window is going to be about the same. The folding has the advantage that you require no accuracy with the movement, just back and forth until you're at the right depth. With Expose you have to accurately land on the mini version of the window.
I would suggest that for most common situations the methods are roughly equivalent in terms of the amount of mouse work required (which is what we ought to be measuring for a drag operation). Sure there will be plenty of situations when Expose is faster, but then if you only have to go 1 or 2 windows down then folding could be considerably faster.
I simpy, couldn't imagine how someone could view this process as "100 times slower than Expose" unless they meant the laggy Java graphics.
Exactly! There are many times when this would be sensible and efificient even for power users, and as a bonus it is a much more obvious method for beginning users to discover and use.
It seems to me there's plenty of space in the desktop for a system like this. I hope to see it implemented soon.
I was talking about the physical delay of moving the mouse toward and over the corner of the window at the right speed, stopping, pulling back a bit, and continuing this process for every window in the way. It's much faster to start dragging, hit F9, throw the cursor over the appropriate window, and hit F9 again.
That really depends. The java demo is not exactly responsive, so it is a little slow and tedious to start and maintain folds. With a properly implemented version it is a very natural mouse gesture that would be very quick. If all your windows are stacked it's just a wave of the mouse back and forth a few times till you are deep enough in the stack. If you have many windows around, but the one you want is only one or two windows below then just quickly folding back to get to it will be considerably faster than using Expose and locating the window and then letting everything go back.
Is it more efficient? Sometimes yes, sometimes no, and in general probably not. Is it really significantly slower if well implemented? I wouldn't imagine so, except in some specific cases. Is it an elegant and natural way to manipulate the windows? Yes.
Having grouped windows (see my sig) suitably tagged for keyboard shortcuts, even spread across multiple desktops, would be considerably faster than Expose - no waiting for animations, no moving the mouse at all - just quick keyboard commands. I would be stupid to pretend that such a method is "better" or in any way invalidates the usefulness, clarity, and elegance of Expose.
Just because something isn't quite as blindingly efifcient doesn't mean it isn't as good.
Yes, and typing commands (especially using tab completion) onl the command line can be immensely faster and more efficient than dragging icons around. Whacking something through in Emacs or vi using a complex series of keystroke commands is immensely faster than selecting the text with the mouse and doing something with it.
No one is going to take Expose away from you. This technique does offer significant advantages over Expose though - it is considerably more discoverable and obvious to use than Expose. The Genie effect takes longer than simply having the window vanish, but it provides good hints about what is going on. This method will be slower than flicking through with keystrokes or using Expose, but it will be more visually obvious to the user what is going on.
Why are people so down on anything that is new and different?
I'll put it another way then: It is very discoverable, and immediately clear how to use it once it is discovered. Start dragging past the corner of a window and it peels back, push that and it folds it away as you would expect. Easy to find, and easy to see how to use it quickly.
Is it as fast as Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V? No. The again very few things beat vi for editing text - that doesn't make a very natural interface, just a very efficient one. Vi is truly fantastic if you care to learn it, but not everyone is willing to invest the required time learning how to edit text.
It is probably more natural and intuitive to use folding windows, but from playing with the demo it also seems to take several hundred times as long as using Expose.
Are you honestly comparing a java demo to finalised software? Does the java demo have all the wonderful niceness of Quartz to do the graphics and compositing? No. Is the java demo optimised much at all? I expect not. Yes it is slow - it is supposed to give you an idea of how the concept could work, not a demonstration of how the guy expects it ot behave in a final product.
I would expect that when not using slow multiplatform raw java graphics libraries to do the graphics and compositing, but instead say Quartz or Cairo, or Avalon that it would be as quick as you can use. I look forward to this feature being available on Linux in the near future, and potentially in Leopard.
Use a bit of common sense and a little bit of imagination please.
You would think a MacOS X fan would appreciate a more natural and intuitive system for achieving what can potentially be done in other ways.
The Genie effect, translucent windows during a move operation, Expose, virtual desktops, dashboard, automator, tabbed browsing, and more are things for which similar results can be achieved by slightly clunkier or slightly less intuitive/clear/natural operations. They all offer significant improvement.
It strikes me that the window folding offered on the site represents exactly the same sort of thing. Yes you can achieve the same "effect" but you can do that on Windows via the taskbar. Neither expose nor the taskbar offer the very natural and intuitive method of flipping through the windows onscreen like flipping through a bunch of papers. The metaphor is much more clear. It is a significant improvement.
Apple is not the sole source of desktop innovation.
Now it's true that those who feel like gambling can gamble with 4 years and $$$ and their future, and if they graduate below the top tier, they can apply for the same jobs as the anthropology majors who don't become professional anthropoligists.
Actually odds are that they'll be competeing with mathematicians, physicists and philosophy majors rather than anthropologists - there is a distinct difference in the sort of work you can apply for.
I have worked several jobs on the basis of my skills as a mathematician, and that's not academic work, that's working in industry: any company large enough to have a research division (and that's quite a few) is interested in having people with incisive logical abilities and talent for readily understanding and using abstract concepts regardless of their particular field of study - a degree in philosophy, mathematics or (real/pure) computer science goes a long way to demonstrating such abilities.
If you are willing to wade into the deep end of the high level abstract subjects there are jobs out there for you (though that is partly because so few people are willing to delve into such abstract areas).
Computer Science as an industry is following that of the TV and VCR repair men. When TVs and VCRs are expensive they get em fixed....Early on there was Computer Science. Now they have splintered into various factions like various specialized sciences following certain areas, (MIS,IT,DBAs,Programming, etc.)
And then there are people who still do real Computer Science as opposed to programming or "Computer Related Work". There's a nice quote by Dijkstra to the effect that Computer Science is as much about computers as Astronomy is about telescopes. Computer Science is still going quite strong, and there is active and intersting research into a variety of fields.
I am a mathematcian, so I am not really all that up on all the various interesting areas of CS are these days except for the odd bits that cross my path. One of those is Algebraic Specification, which is an effort to formalise the design and specification of systems (software) using algebraic techniques. In practice this could mean vastly more reliable software down the line. For now it means a lot of hard slog involving a lot of pure math (universal algebras, category theory, etc.) which doesn't involve a computer in any way shape or form. You can get some idea of the sort of thing they're doing here, or here, or just google Algebraic Specification. It's pretty exciting stuff from the mathematician's point of view (some very lovely mathematics finding practical application).
Don't misinterpret what CS is, and what it offers.
It strikes me as similar to project GoneME which was started with much sound and fury by people when GNOME 2.0 came out and started dropping features and moving options into GConf instead of extra tabs in preferences dialogs.
It turned out that all the noise was really just a few very vocal people and some trolls, and thus GoneME turned out a few patches (reversing button order for instance) then promptly died. I think their last patch to "fix" all of GNOME came to a whopping 22k.
I expect the same for this project trying to drag KDE in the opposite direction. Ho knows though, maybe there are some people really intereste in this. We shall see.
The GUI is still in the early stages of development, but Smart is by some of the the same people that wrote Synaptic, so if you like Synaptic then you'll probably like Smart hne it is done.
That would be a Bad Idea. Even the authors of Autopackage highly recommend against any such thing. RPM or DEB are great for building and maintaining the core base of a system. Upgrades and patches and bugfixes are easy. Autopackage is designed for thirs party extras and doesn't really provide the same sort of management and upgrade facilities that RPM and DEB based package management tools offer.
What I'd like to see is a GUI based package manager that could just bloody well figure out that your repos are.deb based or.rpm based, and act accordingly.
You might be lookign for Smart which is a potential replacement for apt. It does the dependency resolution and installation that apt does but with more advanced dependency resolving algorithms (seee their README for examples). It has command line and GUI modes of operation so there's no need for another program to provide a GUI front-end like Synaptic does for apt. Best of all it has a system of pluggable backends, which means it (right now) understands apt-deb repositories, apt-rpm repositories, yum repositories, and slackware package respositories among other things, and is thus a common frontend that could be used for (almost) all distributions. You can even mix and match repositories if you like and have it pointed to, say, an apt-deb repsoitory and a yum repository and it will do dependency resolution against both. Of ourse mixing up repositories (from potentially different distributions) has its own natural compliations and probably isn't advised, but that's as much to do with naming, packaging and LSB stuff as anything.
Don't mistake the Kraft "cheese food" we like to put on our cheeseburgers for quality cheeses from Wisconsin & Minnesota.
Don't worry, I'm not making that mistake. I have tried WI cheddar and my reaction is that the cheddar I am used to is to WI cheddar as WI cheddar is to Kraft "cheese food".
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So you got the state to support your line of reasoning; you still want to be able to renege on something you agreed to.
Sure but that's between you and the company. The company can still tyr and enforce that if they want, they just don't have any legal recourse. Maybe they can appeal to your sense of honour.
Just because someone doesn't want to honour their promises doesn't make it the state's fault.
Jedidiah.
I think the simple way to look at it is this: Who actually enforces the contract? The state. It's the state's courts and legal systems that you will be using to enforce a contract. Given that I see no reason why the state should not be allowed to decide what they will and will not enforce. If you write a contract that the state isn't willing to enforce then tough luck, you wrote a bad contract. Don't like it? Move to a different state/country.
Jedidiah.
If only this was shown in American prime-time, people may start thinking more critically about the moves we are taking now...
It's quite depressing really. That documentary was shown in the UK almost a year ago. It has made the rounds in prime time slots all over the world - it was showing here in Canada several months ago. And for all that, the one country where it probably most needs to be seen is where it isn't getting any significant play.
If you can't download whole documentaries, you can start this article on Al Qaeda by Jason Burke who featured in the documentary. It will give you an idea of at least some of the background and misperceptions of the "global terror network", or lack thereof, that we are facing.
Jedidiah.
Care to name a few companies which have significant CS R&D labs?
There are plenty out there, though a lot of them are small and thus probably under your radar. For a random example of one I've encountered try Praxis Critical Systems who do a lot of interesting work in verification, refinement systems and that sort of thing. You could try Certicom who have a lot of interesting work in the cryptography front - and a decent portion of that is work of efficient algorithms and secure protocols as well as the pure math side. There's Telecom Italia who are doing interesting work in agent architectures (I just happen to know of then having used JADE, their agent system, once).
If none of that appeals I'm sure there are literally hundreds more companies, those were just random ones I knew off the top of my head. And beyond that you have government work: DARPA, NSA, and many others are all quite interested in cutting edge CS work (look at SELinux from NSA for example, a demonstration of their research work into secure architectures).
If you open your eyes and look there is no shortage of opportunities.
Jedidiah.
People wonder why no one is going into CS anymore.
If you honestly think he'll be struggling to find a well paying job elsewhere you're deluding yourself. Just because large floundering corporations are laying off good CS people doesn't mean much. Mostly what it means is that HP obviously doesn't have any long term vision anymore, and are probably very much on the way out.
Jedidiah.
To be fair you need more detail with a map in Japan. In a map of the US or Europe the street names and a few street numbers are all you need to find a particular building or house. Japan, on the other hand, has their own particularly weird system where buildings are numbered by blocks (roughly speaking) based on when they were built, and the majority of streets don't have names. Given the general lack of street names and building numbers (well, the kind we're used to) any map in Japan is only really useful if it provides some landmarks to navigate by - which is I presume why they include all the building details and traffic light symbols etc.
My personal irk after spending some time backpacking around Japan: they are kind enough to post maps around the place to help you find things, but the orientation of the map is can often be pretty much random - no "North is up", no aligning with the street layout as it is in front of you, just general "however they felt like" orientation.
Jedidiah.
Every show gets cancelled eventually (with the possible exception of The Simpsons). Getting cancelled after one series probably correlates well with sucking - I can't think of any good series that got cancelled so quickly (I've never seen Firefly so I can't judge).
Space Above and Beyond was cancelled during it's first season. No it wasn't the greatest, but it was definitely good. The first episodes were decidedly average, but given the last two thirds of the season it probably rates as one of the best Science Fiction series I've ever seen. The new BattleStar Galactica owes a lot to SAAB in many ways. Certainly SAAB didn't suck.
I'm sure there are plenty of other examples. That was simply one I could think of rapidly.
Jedidiah.
I have to agree, at least as to the benefits of hi-res laptop displays. I have a Dell (yeah, that sucks) but it has a 15 inch widescreen display that will happily do 1920x1200. After working on that a lot other laptops seem to have very constricted displays.
And like you, no I don't have fabulous eyesight - I use fairly large fonts and simply scale things up - but the added clarity and crispness in both font rendering and graphics is definitely a huge bonus. By comparison 1024x768 displays looks blurred and fuzzy.
Jedidiah.
With expose (or dragging over the taskbar in Windows) you are required to make a precise mouse move onto the target window (or taskbar button), plus if you have a decent screen resolution the distance all the way to the top corner then back to wherever your target window has moved to is quite significant. With this method you can relatively inaccurately wave your mouse about a few times then drop onto a fullsizez target window.
Target area is huge (you don't need to be precise with the folding) and the distance to move is minimised (just over the edge of the window and back). According to Fitt's law that's actually pretty damn good compared to over to the corner then all the way back to a small target.
Is folding going to be faster? In general it will mostly be about the same I expect, and in some cases it will be slower. It is also much more discoverable, and clear how to use it once you've started. Those are benefits that mitigate the speed loss. Will this replace Expose? No way. Would this be a damn good feature to add regardless of what expose might be able to do? Hell yes.
Jedidiah.
He obviously wasn't talking about Java vs Quartz but exposé vs fold-n-drop. Fold and drop clearly is an O(n) operation, where n is the numbrer of windows. Other solutions such as OS X exposé or Windows hover-over-taskbar-thingie on the other hand are O(1) operations.
If your windows are stacked then the total amount you have to move the mouse for fold (quick back and forth motion over a short distance n times) compared to moving the mouse up to the top corner, then back down to where Expose put the window is going to be about the same. The folding has the advantage that you require no accuracy with the movement, just back and forth until you're at the right depth. With Expose you have to accurately land on the mini version of the window.
I would suggest that for most common situations the methods are roughly equivalent in terms of the amount of mouse work required (which is what we ought to be measuring for a drag operation). Sure there will be plenty of situations when Expose is faster, but then if you only have to go 1 or 2 windows down then folding could be considerably faster.
I simpy, couldn't imagine how someone could view this process as "100 times slower than Expose" unless they meant the laggy Java graphics.
Jedidiah.
Exactly! There are many times when this would be sensible and efificient even for power users, and as a bonus it is a much more obvious method for beginning users to discover and use.
It seems to me there's plenty of space in the desktop for a system like this. I hope to see it implemented soon.
Jedidiah.
I was talking about the physical delay of moving the mouse toward and over the corner of the window at the right speed, stopping, pulling back a bit, and continuing this process for every window in the way. It's much faster to start dragging, hit F9, throw the cursor over the appropriate window, and hit F9 again.
That really depends. The java demo is not exactly responsive, so it is a little slow and tedious to start and maintain folds. With a properly implemented version it is a very natural mouse gesture that would be very quick. If all your windows are stacked it's just a wave of the mouse back and forth a few times till you are deep enough in the stack. If you have many windows around, but the one you want is only one or two windows below then just quickly folding back to get to it will be considerably faster than using Expose and locating the window and then letting everything go back.
Is it more efficient? Sometimes yes, sometimes no, and in general probably not. Is it really significantly slower if well implemented? I wouldn't imagine so, except in some specific cases. Is it an elegant and natural way to manipulate the windows? Yes.
Having grouped windows (see my sig) suitably tagged for keyboard shortcuts, even spread across multiple desktops, would be considerably faster than Expose - no waiting for animations, no moving the mouse at all - just quick keyboard commands. I would be stupid to pretend that such a method is "better" or in any way invalidates the usefulness, clarity, and elegance of Expose.
Just because something isn't quite as blindingly efifcient doesn't mean it isn't as good.
Jedidiah.
Yes, and typing commands (especially using tab completion) onl the command line can be immensely faster and more efficient than dragging icons around. Whacking something through in Emacs or vi using a complex series of keystroke commands is immensely faster than selecting the text with the mouse and doing something with it.
No one is going to take Expose away from you. This technique does offer significant advantages over Expose though - it is considerably more discoverable and obvious to use than Expose. The Genie effect takes longer than simply having the window vanish, but it provides good hints about what is going on. This method will be slower than flicking through with keystrokes or using Expose, but it will be more visually obvious to the user what is going on.
Why are people so down on anything that is new and different?
Jedidiah.
I'll put it another way then: It is very discoverable, and immediately clear how to use it once it is discovered. Start dragging past the corner of a window and it peels back, push that and it folds it away as you would expect. Easy to find, and easy to see how to use it quickly.
Is it as fast as Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V? No. The again very few things beat vi for editing text - that doesn't make a very natural interface, just a very efficient one. Vi is truly fantastic if you care to learn it, but not everyone is willing to invest the required time learning how to edit text.
Jedidiah.
It is probably more natural and intuitive to use folding windows, but from playing with the demo it also seems to take several hundred times as long as using Expose.
Are you honestly comparing a java demo to finalised software? Does the java demo have all the wonderful niceness of Quartz to do the graphics and compositing? No. Is the java demo optimised much at all? I expect not. Yes it is slow - it is supposed to give you an idea of how the concept could work, not a demonstration of how the guy expects it ot behave in a final product.
I would expect that when not using slow multiplatform raw java graphics libraries to do the graphics and compositing, but instead say Quartz or Cairo, or Avalon that it would be as quick as you can use. I look forward to this feature being available on Linux in the near future, and potentially in Leopard.
Use a bit of common sense and a little bit of imagination please.
Jedidiah.
You would think a MacOS X fan would appreciate a more natural and intuitive system for achieving what can potentially be done in other ways.
The Genie effect, translucent windows during a move operation, Expose, virtual desktops, dashboard, automator, tabbed browsing, and more are things for which similar results can be achieved by slightly clunkier or slightly less intuitive/clear/natural operations. They all offer significant improvement.
It strikes me that the window folding offered on the site represents exactly the same sort of thing. Yes you can achieve the same "effect" but you can do that on Windows via the taskbar. Neither expose nor the taskbar offer the very natural and intuitive method of flipping through the windows onscreen like flipping through a bunch of papers. The metaphor is much more clear. It is a significant improvement.
Apple is not the sole source of desktop innovation.
Jedidiah.
Now it's true that those who feel like gambling can gamble with 4 years and $$$ and their future, and if they graduate below the top tier, they can apply for the same jobs as the anthropology majors who don't become professional anthropoligists.
Actually odds are that they'll be competeing with mathematicians, physicists and philosophy majors rather than anthropologists - there is a distinct difference in the sort of work you can apply for.
I have worked several jobs on the basis of my skills as a mathematician, and that's not academic work, that's working in industry: any company large enough to have a research division (and that's quite a few) is interested in having people with incisive logical abilities and talent for readily understanding and using abstract concepts regardless of their particular field of study - a degree in philosophy, mathematics or (real/pure) computer science goes a long way to demonstrating such abilities.
If you are willing to wade into the deep end of the high level abstract subjects there are jobs out there for you (though that is partly because so few people are willing to delve into such abstract areas).
Jedidiah.
Computer Science as an industry is following that of the TV and VCR repair men. When TVs and VCRs are expensive they get em fixed....Early on there was Computer Science. Now they have splintered into various factions like various specialized sciences following certain areas, (MIS,IT,DBAs,Programming, etc.)
And then there are people who still do real Computer Science as opposed to programming or "Computer Related Work". There's a nice quote by Dijkstra to the effect that Computer Science is as much about computers as Astronomy is about telescopes. Computer Science is still going quite strong, and there is active and intersting research into a variety of fields.
I am a mathematcian, so I am not really all that up on all the various interesting areas of CS are these days except for the odd bits that cross my path. One of those is Algebraic Specification, which is an effort to formalise the design and specification of systems (software) using algebraic techniques. In practice this could mean vastly more reliable software down the line. For now it means a lot of hard slog involving a lot of pure math (universal algebras, category theory, etc.) which doesn't involve a computer in any way shape or form. You can get some idea of the sort of thing they're doing here, or here, or just google Algebraic Specification. It's pretty exciting stuff from the mathematician's point of view (some very lovely mathematics finding practical application).
Don't misinterpret what CS is, and what it offers.
Jedidiah.
It strikes me as similar to project GoneME which was started with much sound and fury by people when GNOME 2.0 came out and started dropping features and moving options into GConf instead of extra tabs in preferences dialogs.
It turned out that all the noise was really just a few very vocal people and some trolls, and thus GoneME turned out a few patches (reversing button order for instance) then promptly died. I think their last patch to "fix" all of GNOME came to a whopping 22k.
I expect the same for this project trying to drag KDE in the opposite direction. Ho knows though, maybe there are some people really intereste in this. We shall see.
Jedidiah.
(Ok, ok, it was a typo. I admit it.)
I expected as much, it was just such an amusing slip...
Jedidiah.
Dissent will be impossible, you WILL see the content that is proscribed and no other
So we will only be able to watch proscribed content eh? We will all be forced to watch kiddie porn and snuff films? I agree, that sounds pretty bad.
Jedidiah.
The GUI is still in the early stages of development, but Smart is by some of the the same people that wrote Synaptic, so if you like Synaptic then you'll probably like Smart hne it is done.
It does have search as you want btw.
Jedidiah.
That would be a Bad Idea. Even the authors of Autopackage highly recommend against any such thing. RPM or DEB are great for building and maintaining the core base of a system. Upgrades and patches and bugfixes are easy. Autopackage is designed for thirs party extras and doesn't really provide the same sort of management and upgrade facilities that RPM and DEB based package management tools offer.
Jedidiah.
What I'd like to see is a GUI based package manager that could just bloody well figure out that your repos are .deb based or .rpm based, and act accordingly.
You might be lookign for Smart which is a potential replacement for apt. It does the dependency resolution and installation that apt does but with more advanced dependency resolving algorithms (seee their README for examples). It has command line and GUI modes of operation so there's no need for another program to provide a GUI front-end like Synaptic does for apt. Best of all it has a system of pluggable backends, which means it (right now) understands apt-deb repositories, apt-rpm repositories, yum repositories, and slackware package respositories among other things, and is thus a common frontend that could be used for (almost) all distributions. You can even mix and match repositories if you like and have it pointed to, say, an apt-deb repsoitory and a yum repository and it will do dependency resolution against both. Of ourse mixing up repositories (from potentially different distributions) has its own natural compliations and probably isn't advised, but that's as much to do with naming, packaging and LSB stuff as anything.
Jedidiah.
Don't mistake the Kraft "cheese food" we like to put on our cheeseburgers for quality cheeses from Wisconsin & Minnesota.
Don't worry, I'm not making that mistake. I have tried WI cheddar and my reaction is that the cheddar I am used to is to WI cheddar as WI cheddar is to Kraft "cheese food".
Jedidiah.