Overrated is a useful mod, mostly for situations like this post which was initially modded up to +5 interesting by a bunch of moderators who either didn't read it, or didn't know any physics. It is useful to be able to have a way for moderators who know more to come along and mod something back down because it really isn't as good as its current mod bonus claims.
The question is, why not meta-moderate overrated mods. The problem is context - what was the mod level when the overrated mod was applied? Without that it's hard to make an accurate call as to whether the mod was justified or not. Slashdot currently doesn't have the ability to track such things. Should overrated be meta-moderated? Yes. Will it? Not likely.
And yes, I do agree that overrated is now heavily abused - some system needs to be put in place to fix that. My random suggestion would be to have an overrated mod burn 1 karma point as well as 1 mod point, thus too many overrated mods will destroy your karma. Overrated has a place, but mostly it doesn't need to be used very often. I think people could probably sparea akrma point on those odd occasions when it is justified.
Meanwhile, Apple's been in the news with its clusters and is catering to the distributed computing with software like Xgrid and Xsan
Which could be a "late step into the game" from Apple. There are plenty of companies out tere that have been offering complete clustering solutions for Linux for a long time now. Check out Scyld for example - what they're offering, as far as cluster computing software goes, is far in advance of what Apple is currently throwing out there.
It is nice to see new players stepping up, as competition is only a good thing, but you're speaking as if Apple was what prompted Microsoft into this move. While Apple does have one big name cluster project (Virginia Tech) and it has been very successful, it's still just one project, compared to the innumerable Linux clusters out there - and honestly, have a look at Scyld, they're a good example of the state of Linux clustering: plug it in and go. The only thing easier than that for HPC is, say, Cray or SGI, who offer serious complete solution (hardware and all) systems in a plug and go fashion. Compared to them Apple supercomputing is a hodge-podge do it yourself affair.
If you're serious about building a Linux cluster and want to pay money for a preconfigured system and associated support for it, you don't go to RedHat, you go to someone who specialises in that, like Scyld. Take a look at what they offer for their OS distribution - the whole thing is designed, ground up to work on clusters and make adminustration thereof as easy as possible.
One of the benfits of Linux is that it is flexible, and can be reshaped and repackaged accrding to differing needs (in some ways that's what different distributions are all about). If you want a cluster solution, go talk to people who build cluster distributions (Scyld is far from the only one).
C has a really crappy track record of being secure actually. As does C++. Fundamentally, they are just fine. In practice, just about ever buffer overflow exploit around was enabled at least partly because the developers were sloppy and used unchecked buffers. This is not possible in C# or other.NET langauges.
There is a big point that is being missed here though. We're talking about cluster computing, presumably on a large scale. You don't bother with something like that unless performance is a top priority. Should security be a second priority? In terms of the code written to do computations on a large powerful supercomputer... hell yes! You see, if you have a huge expensive compute engine, you don't go randomly hooking it up to the internet, nor letting anyone who hasn't had careful screening get access to the damn thing. Security for a cluster needs to be strong - so strong that by the time you actually have any access to the cluster you can be assumed to be trusted and not worry about buffer overflows. Basically, if a cracker has account access to the machine to be able to use a local buffer overflow, your security has already failed big time, and him getting root is, by the point, the least of your worries.
Having candidate (a) hire a spammer to spam for candidate
Or, more effectively a candidate hires a spammer to spam for his opponent. I mean really, what sane person votes for someone who spammed them? On the other hand carefully constructed astroturf spam for your opponent could send your poll ratings through the roof.
lthough mathematics is indeed a very precise language, it still fails to define the number 1.
Try looking in here or here both of which conveniently go to some trouble to very explicitly define 1 and number, etc. Philosophy of mathematics has a much mre solid grounding than you apparently imagine.
Secondly - and I'm being very hypothetical here - even though dimensions are implied to be static, surely a reference point within one dimension can move independently of other dimensions? And aren't our observations based on drift relative to the reference point being used?
Welcome to the world of not understanding dimension as used in special and general relativity. It's on a manifold, which is coordinate system indpendent - that's the whole point really - you're talking about moving the coordinate system, when the whole point is that it doesn't matter.
To me, "rotation in 1 dimension" is possible, with a very limited definition of rotation - freedom to change "forward" from a given direction to its opposite.
Actually think about what you're saying for change. Motion (even in one direction) requires time, which we've already said is just another dimension in spacetime, so to have motion we have 2 dimensions and we're not talking about rotation in 1 dimension any more, but in 2. It helps if you pay attention in class, honest.
Does this make sense?
Not in the least, and I shouldn't even be bothered spending nthe time replying, but I'm bored. Please, go read some books on the subject(s) before shooting your mouth off randomly.
There have been concerted effort with Linux, however, and it has some concerted long term backing. China, Japan, and South Korea are working together on this - there have various reports like this in April 2004, or this in Spetember 2003. The notable aspect is that, as mentioned here, this isn't a short term program to adopt Linux, and results shouldn't be expected immediately - rather it is a long term plan to reposition themselves to be more independent of Microsoft.
A large part of the push is making sure Linux support for Chinese, Japanese and Korean character sets and translations is robust and well developed - think of it as a massive scale localization project that reaches down as deep as they can get it.
How this current Debian push fits into the grand scheme of things (part of the larger project, at least in some sense, or just an independent push) is not clear to me, but regardless it represents a growing desire in Asia to move to a more flexible system that can be adapted to their specific needs. This isn't an attempt at promotion so much as a growing interest from China, Japan and Korea. Expect to see more such stories over the next 5 to 10 years.
(1) The fundamental principle of special and general relativity (upon which this theory is clearly based) is that spacetime is coordinate system independent, and hence any concept of "moving dimensions" is complete nonsense. Either you scrap general relativity, or you scrap moving dimensions... hmm, I know which I'd pick.
Well, the fundamental misuse (or possibly just misunderstanding) of basic terms is kind of a give away. Dimensions don't move, and you can't rotate in 1 dimension, unless you completely redefine what you mean by dimension (i.e. you use it in a sense entirely disimilar to every other mathematician and physicist with any education in the subject area). These are well defined terms (mathematics is a very precise language wherever possible), so misuse is a bad sign to start. The fact that the required redefintion of dimension would render invalid whole swathes of mathematics required to support the theories upon which this stuff is based... well that just kind of makes it all patently stupid.
There's nothing wrong with new ideas, but basing them on existing ideas that you/Dr. Elliot has apparently failed to properly understand is probably not a good way to go about it.
You'll be much better off posting in a forum where people don't actually know any real math or physics beyond what they read in Scientific American. Anyone who actually has a clue can see this for the drivel it is just from your abuse of semantics alone.
If you want to swallow mathematically unjustified drivel, I highly reccomend Gene Ray and Time Cube. I think Mr. Ray is at the pinnacle of meaningless drivel, and your paltry example doesn't even come close.
Alternatively you could actually do the math - Here's a nice textbook you can start with, or just search Amazon for "differential geometry".
Jedidiah.
Re:Good Quality Cuts down or out Testing
on
QA != Testing
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· Score: 1
You assume compiler correctness or else the whole process is pointless. The rest is either the event of hardware failure (processors or caches doing anything other than what you would expect), or a flaw at such a fundamental level (the OS kernel) that again, the whole exercise is pointless. If you OS kernel doesn't do what it should you are going to be having more problems than just this particular program going wrong.
Jedidiah.
Re:Good Quality Cuts down or out Testing
on
QA != Testing
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· Score: 1
Think of it like a math equation. Y = f(x). Y is the output and f(x) is the input. If you control the inputs with no variation then the output will always be the same so no need to test it.
Welcome to Design by Contract. Each function or method has a set a preconditions on inputs, and a set of postconditions guaranteeing peoperties of the output. Each object has a set of invariant conditions that are checked each time a method is run, guaranteeing and object will always conform to certain conditions. Chain all of that together and you have a set of contracts ("I'll provide you with this and this, which I can guarantee will meet your preconditions because of..., and you give me somethign which can do... so I can pass this object to the next method." kind of thing) that allow you to prove the possible states your code can take providing you get the right inputs. Better yet, if you've got a bug that causes it not to follow that flow, it's easy to find and correct because it'll through a contract exception when you run the code in testing.
When people say "Assurance" they really ought to mean assurance, like "I've sat down and done a full proof of this code, and explored all possible states". We ought to be building tools to help us do that, rather than just doing a couple extra days testing on each project.
In addition, you haven't been productive as a scientist until you've fired up TexShop on the Mac, IMHO the top LaTeX editor.
I'm rather fond of Kile to be honest. I haven't actually seen anything that even comes close for niceness of editing TeX files (plus large TeX documents such as books etc,)
Seriously, just look through the features and screenshots. I presume it will run on a Mac (albeit possibly under the X11 environment)
MacOS X does a lot of really nice, small things. For example, say you're mousing around in the finder looking for a file, and then you want to access it from the command line. How do you get the path out to the shell? Easy, just drag the file onto the terminal window in which you need the filename, and bam, it types the filename in for you. You want to look at your current shell directory in the finder? No problem, type "open.".
[sigh]. Because as we all know, such a thing doesn't work on any other platform. I think you can get a powertoy to let Windows do it, it works by default under GNOME (though you type "nautilus." instead of "open." - but that's obvious if you're a GNOME user), and it works under KDE too (konsole comes up with a little option menu when you drop a file into it - you can paste, move, copy, link etc., and you use "konqueror." - again, obvious if you're a KDE user).
I don't have CDE, OS/2, or XFCE in front of me to play with, but I would't actually be surprised if they worked that way too.
It is powered by pure drag and drop. When I drag stuff off of the Finder Sidebar, it goes away. On Windows, a useless link is left I my desktop that I've got to get rid of.
Some people see the dragging off to create a new shortcut as a feature in windows. I would find it annoying on OS X if that deleted it, simply because I am not used to it. This doesn't mean either OS is bad, each has its own way of doing it - just because one is different doesn't make it bad.
Actually this has some merit - a true/pure drag and drop system should only get rid of it if you drag it to the trash/recycle bin, dragging it to the desktop should move it to the desktop. You could look at this as inconsistent behaviour on the part of the Mac.
You mean like this from 1985 which had (they claim) a working User Interface Management System? Yes, I agree, it is hard, and is an active field of academic research. There is a lot of research though, that we really ought to be looking at instead of just letting it remain research. I think this starts to fall into that category.
I don't see why you need XUL or XAML either - it would seem to me that, for instance, libglade is something you could build such a system on top of as well. This is something GNOME and KDE could be working toward right now as yet another way to help unify the desktop. Applications could still be GNOME or KDE specific (if they chose to use particular features of the DE) but it would then also be possible to write applications that were desktop agnostic and slotted into either.
this is how many such things are already done in KDE. margin hints, spacing hints, menu layouts... there are some things that just don't translate to being put in the libraries, however.
I think that's great, but in the end that is just hinting toward looks, not actually doing the job of laying out the GUI (which is possible). The really extreme approach is to actually decide how to represent things in the GUI - a component just says "I have feature X which has use priority Y and..." and the HIG engine decides whether that features needs its own dialog, or a button on the toolbar, or... and where (based on relationships to other functions and components) to place the function as a menu item in the main menu. Does the function show up in a context menu? Potentially you can define all of those things too.
That said, I completely agree. I'll take it a step further and say they should snag the UI requirements that apple has available for software developers to ensure consistent look and feel on their OS ( I believe those are freely available ) and use that to redesign KDE once and for all. Or come up with their own list, but *stick* to it, and further, don't approve software apps for kde unless they follow the list as well
I'm beginning to come around to the point of view that perhaps Human Interfeace Guidelines ought to be enforced programmatically rather than as a document of requests of things you would like a developer to do. What do I mean? I mean, try and create a new layer of abstraction for programming so that GUI construction and layout becomes the responsibility of desktop environment rather than the responsibility of the programmer. The application developer has the responsibility for coding the various components of the application, exposing their functions in a particular way, and the relationships between components; then the HIG (a DE library, or formal code spec, whatever) takes the components, features, and relationships and constructs a GUI to make those components and features accessible to the user (via menus, buttons, list selectors, dialogs, etc.) structuring them, according to the given relationships, into a completely HIG consistent GUI app.
Okay, that is a very non-trivial exercise, and exactly how much work you can get the HIG to do instead of the programmer is not an easy question, however, thee are some real gains if you can actually do (at least some level of) this right:
(1) All applications coded with this will automatically be very consistent with all others, and complete HIG compliant - the developer doesn't have to worry so much about UI design (that work is pushed off more toward the people writing the HIG engine).
(2) Each DE can have their own programmed HIG, so an application coded with this system can be compiled against each DE and be fully HIG compliant for each different DE.
(3) It completely formalises the HIG - it isn't a document of reccomendations, but is required to be an actual formal layout engine.
(4) For the really "do it yourself" people you can code your own HIG engine and have your own completely unique look and feel that will be consistent across all the application coded with this system.
So perhaps widgets are too low level for application programming these days. It is my understanding that AWT worked something along these lines at least for layout of widgets), and well, obviously AWT isn't very popular. Then again, AWT was a little slow, and didn't provide the flexibility I'm talking about (it had, presumaly, its own hard coded HIG engine). As I said, this sort of thing would be very difficult, but perhaps it is worth considering.
That is to say, if I want to become a "worker bee", let me!
In my opinion you are perfectly welcome to. My point is that if that is what you want, go to a trade school to do it and stop clogging up the universities.
Learning for learning's sake is not possible when system forces you to "learn". Mandatory general education courses do not make you appreciate literature, sociology and and psychology. They make you hate all this subjects, ensuring that you forget about them next day you get the grade.
Yup, and I am not actually a fan of mandatory courses at university. In fact in my university undergraduate career I did 18 points of a 108 point degree that were not mathematics. All 18 of those points were physics.
I'm discssn the difference between being at university to learn about what interests you, and being at university to get vocational training. There is a distinct difference between the two. Yes, sometimes they conincide. The presumption that they must is the problem.
High school can definitely include vocational training, as that is compulsory. University is optional. You do not need to attend. There is no reason that it need include vocational courses. University is something you go to if you choose to, and in principle it is somewhere you go if you want to learn for learning's sake. You can go to university at any time, while working, while unemployed, whenever. When I got my Masters' degree I graduated alongside an 83 year old who had come back to university after she retired to pursue her interests in Statistics.
i agree with your statement, that people should go to college for learning's sake. however the real world gets in the way of that. i can't afford to dick around at this point. i have to find a major that will result in me having a job after i graduate rather than be back in the same place i started, only now with thousands of dollars of debt...
But you see, this is exactly what I'm complainign about. What you really need is not a university that's teaching vocational courses. Universities are expensive, because they are supposed to be storehouses of knowledge, and places of research. The lecturers are supposed to be primarily researchers and are paid as such. That means going to university is expensive.
What you really need is a trade school, with instructors who do nothing but instruct (and hence are much better teachers than you'll find at a university) and a course stucture that is clsoely targetted to place you into a job. Such a course is going to be cheaper than a university.
But instead we're in some weird half way system. Employers have no respect for trade school qualifications, even though those are specifically qualifications for a job. Meantime universities are wasting their time and effort providing basic vocational courses that they shouldn't have to. The whole system is screwed.
I'm going to college so I can learn how to make a lot of money doing what I like, and live a happy life.
My only complaint is that you're clogging up the college system when all you really want is a trade school. If you want to learn fr the sake learning and explore knowledge go to a university; if you want to learn a trade, go to a trade school.
Slashdot Mirror
Overrated is a useful mod, mostly for situations like this post which was initially modded up to +5 interesting by a bunch of moderators who either didn't read it, or didn't know any physics. It is useful to be able to have a way for moderators who know more to come along and mod something back down because it really isn't as good as its current mod bonus claims.
The question is, why not meta-moderate overrated mods. The problem is context - what was the mod level when the overrated mod was applied? Without that it's hard to make an accurate call as to whether the mod was justified or not. Slashdot currently doesn't have the ability to track such things. Should overrated be meta-moderated? Yes. Will it? Not likely.
And yes, I do agree that overrated is now heavily abused - some system needs to be put in place to fix that. My random suggestion would be to have an overrated mod burn 1 karma point as well as 1 mod point, thus too many overrated mods will destroy your karma. Overrated has a place, but mostly it doesn't need to be used very often. I think people could probably sparea akrma point on those odd occasions when it is justified.
Jedidiah.
Meanwhile, Apple's been in the news with its clusters and is catering to the distributed computing with software like Xgrid and Xsan
Which could be a "late step into the game" from Apple. There are plenty of companies out tere that have been offering complete clustering solutions for Linux for a long time now. Check out Scyld for example - what they're offering, as far as cluster computing software goes, is far in advance of what Apple is currently throwing out there.
It is nice to see new players stepping up, as competition is only a good thing, but you're speaking as if Apple was what prompted Microsoft into this move. While Apple does have one big name cluster project (Virginia Tech) and it has been very successful, it's still just one project, compared to the innumerable Linux clusters out there - and honestly, have a look at Scyld, they're a good example of the state of Linux clustering: plug it in and go. The only thing easier than that for HPC is, say, Cray or SGI, who offer serious complete solution (hardware and all) systems in a plug and go fashion. Compared to them Apple supercomputing is a hodge-podge do it yourself affair.
Jedidiah.
If you're serious about building a Linux cluster and want to pay money for a preconfigured system and associated support for it, you don't go to RedHat, you go to someone who specialises in that, like Scyld. Take a look at what they offer for their OS distribution - the whole thing is designed, ground up to work on clusters and make adminustration thereof as easy as possible.
One of the benfits of Linux is that it is flexible, and can be reshaped and repackaged accrding to differing needs (in some ways that's what different distributions are all about). If you want a cluster solution, go talk to people who build cluster distributions (Scyld is far from the only one).
Jedidiah.
C has a really crappy track record of being secure actually. As does C++. Fundamentally, they are just fine. In practice, just about ever buffer overflow exploit around was enabled at least partly because the developers were sloppy and used unchecked buffers. This is not possible in C# or other .NET langauges.
There is a big point that is being missed here though. We're talking about cluster computing, presumably on a large scale. You don't bother with something like that unless performance is a top priority. Should security be a second priority? In terms of the code written to do computations on a large powerful supercomputer... hell yes! You see, if you have a huge expensive compute engine, you don't go randomly hooking it up to the internet, nor letting anyone who hasn't had careful screening get access to the damn thing. Security for a cluster needs to be strong - so strong that by the time you actually have any access to the cluster you can be assumed to be trusted and not worry about buffer overflows. Basically, if a cracker has account access to the machine to be able to use a local buffer overflow, your security has already failed big time, and him getting root is, by the point, the least of your worries.
Jedidiah.
Having candidate (a) hire a spammer to spam for candidate
Or, more effectively a candidate hires a spammer to spam for his opponent. I mean really, what sane person votes for someone who spammed them? On the other hand carefully constructed astroturf spam for your opponent could send your poll ratings through the roof.
Jedidiah.
lthough mathematics is indeed a very precise language, it still fails to define the number 1.
Try looking in here or here both of which conveniently go to some trouble to very explicitly define 1 and number, etc. Philosophy of mathematics has a much mre solid grounding than you apparently imagine.
Secondly - and I'm being very hypothetical here - even though dimensions are implied to be static, surely a reference point within one dimension can move independently of other dimensions? And aren't our observations based on drift relative to the reference point being used?
Welcome to the world of not understanding dimension as used in special and general relativity. It's on a manifold, which is coordinate system indpendent - that's the whole point really - you're talking about moving the coordinate system, when the whole point is that it doesn't matter.
To me, "rotation in 1 dimension" is possible, with a very limited definition of rotation - freedom to change "forward" from a given direction to its opposite.
Actually think about what you're saying for change. Motion (even in one direction) requires time, which we've already said is just another dimension in spacetime, so to have motion we have 2 dimensions and we're not talking about rotation in 1 dimension any more, but in 2. It helps if you pay attention in class, honest.
Does this make sense?
Not in the least, and I shouldn't even be bothered spending nthe time replying, but I'm bored. Please, go read some books on the subject(s) before shooting your mouth off randomly.
Jedidiah.
Jedidiah.
There have been concerted effort with Linux, however, and it has some concerted long term backing. China, Japan, and South Korea are working together on this - there have various reports like this in April 2004, or this in Spetember 2003. The notable aspect is that, as mentioned here, this isn't a short term program to adopt Linux, and results shouldn't be expected immediately - rather it is a long term plan to reposition themselves to be more independent of Microsoft.
A large part of the push is making sure Linux support for Chinese, Japanese and Korean character sets and translations is robust and well developed - think of it as a massive scale localization project that reaches down as deep as they can get it.
How this current Debian push fits into the grand scheme of things (part of the larger project, at least in some sense, or just an independent push) is not clear to me, but regardless it represents a growing desire in Asia to move to a more flexible system that can be adapted to their specific needs. This isn't an attempt at promotion so much as a growing interest from China, Japan and Korea. Expect to see more such stories over the next 5 to 10 years.
Jedidiah.
In fact you could reduce the complaints to:
(1) The fundamental principle of special and general relativity (upon which this theory is clearly based) is that spacetime is coordinate system independent, and hence any concept of "moving dimensions" is complete nonsense. Either you scrap general relativity, or you scrap moving dimensions... hmm, I know which I'd pick.
Jedidiah.
What doesn't make sense in his theory?
Well, the fundamental misuse (or possibly just misunderstanding) of basic terms is kind of a give away. Dimensions don't move, and you can't rotate in 1 dimension, unless you completely redefine what you mean by dimension (i.e. you use it in a sense entirely disimilar to every other mathematician and physicist with any education in the subject area). These are well defined terms (mathematics is a very precise language wherever possible), so misuse is a bad sign to start. The fact that the required redefintion of dimension would render invalid whole swathes of mathematics required to support the theories upon which this stuff is based... well that just kind of makes it all patently stupid.
There's nothing wrong with new ideas, but basing them on existing ideas that you/Dr. Elliot has apparently failed to properly understand is probably not a good way to go about it.
Jedidiah.
Interesting :) God is metric tensor. I would never have thought of that myself.
Jedidiah.
You'll be much better off posting in a forum where people don't actually know any real math or physics beyond what they read in Scientific American. Anyone who actually has a clue can see this for the drivel it is just from your abuse of semantics alone.
Jedidiah.
If you want to swallow mathematically unjustified drivel, I highly reccomend Gene Ray and Time Cube. I think Mr. Ray is at the pinnacle of meaningless drivel, and your paltry example doesn't even come close.
Alternatively you could actually do the math - Here's a nice textbook you can start with, or just search Amazon for "differential geometry".
Jedidiah.
You assume compiler correctness or else the whole process is pointless. The rest is either the event of hardware failure (processors or caches doing anything other than what you would expect), or a flaw at such a fundamental level (the OS kernel) that again, the whole exercise is pointless. If you OS kernel doesn't do what it should you are going to be having more problems than just this particular program going wrong.
Jedidiah.
Think of it like a math equation. Y = f(x). Y is the output and f(x) is the input. If you control the inputs with no variation then the output will always be the same so no need to test it.
..., and you give me somethign which can do ... so I can pass this object to the next method." kind of thing) that allow you to prove the possible states your code can take providing you get the right inputs. Better yet, if you've got a bug that causes it not to follow that flow, it's easy to find and correct because it'll through a contract exception when you run the code in testing.
Welcome to Design by Contract. Each function or method has a set a preconditions on inputs, and a set of postconditions guaranteeing peoperties of the output. Each object has a set of invariant conditions that are checked each time a method is run, guaranteeing and object will always conform to certain conditions. Chain all of that together and you have a set of contracts ("I'll provide you with this and this, which I can guarantee will meet your preconditions because of
When people say "Assurance" they really ought to mean assurance, like "I've sat down and done a full proof of this code, and explored all possible states". We ought to be building tools to help us do that, rather than just doing a couple extra days testing on each project.
Jedidiah.
Jedidiah.
In addition, you haven't been productive as a scientist until you've fired up TexShop on the Mac, IMHO the top LaTeX editor.
I'm rather fond of Kile to be honest. I haven't actually seen anything that even comes close for niceness of editing TeX files (plus large TeX documents such as books etc,)
Seriously, just look through the features and screenshots. I presume it will run on a Mac (albeit possibly under the X11 environment)
Jedidiah
MacOS X does a lot of really nice, small things. For example, say you're mousing around in the finder looking for a file, and then you want to access it from the command line. How do you get the path out to the shell? Easy, just drag the file onto the terminal window in which you need the filename, and bam, it types the filename in for you. You want to look at your current shell directory in the finder? No problem, type "open .".
." instead of "open ." - but that's obvious if you're a GNOME user), and it works under KDE too (konsole comes up with a little option menu when you drop a file into it - you can paste, move, copy, link etc., and you use "konqueror ." - again, obvious if you're a KDE user).
[sigh]. Because as we all know, such a thing doesn't work on any other platform. I think you can get a powertoy to let Windows do it, it works by default under GNOME (though you type "nautilus
I don't have CDE, OS/2, or XFCE in front of me to play with, but I would't actually be surprised if they worked that way too.
Jedidiah.
Actually this has some merit - a true/pure drag and drop system should only get rid of it if you drag it to the trash/recycle bin, dragging it to the desktop should move it to the desktop. You could look at this as inconsistent behaviour on the part of the Mac.
Hadn't actually considered that before.
Jedidiah.
You mean like this from 1985 which had (they claim) a working User Interface Management System? Yes, I agree, it is hard, and is an active field of academic research. There is a lot of research though, that we really ought to be looking at instead of just letting it remain research. I think this starts to fall into that category.
I don't see why you need XUL or XAML either - it would seem to me that, for instance, libglade is something you could build such a system on top of as well. This is something GNOME and KDE could be working toward right now as yet another way to help unify the desktop. Applications could still be GNOME or KDE specific (if they chose to use particular features of the DE) but it would then also be possible to write applications that were desktop agnostic and slotted into either.
Jedidiah.
this is how many such things are already done in KDE. margin hints, spacing hints, menu layouts... there are some things that just don't translate to being put in the libraries, however.
..." and the HIG engine decides whether that features needs its own dialog, or a button on the toolbar, or ... and where (based on relationships to other functions and components) to place the function as a menu item in the main menu. Does the function show up in a context menu? Potentially you can define all of those things too.
I think that's great, but in the end that is just hinting toward looks, not actually doing the job of laying out the GUI (which is possible). The really extreme approach is to actually decide how to represent things in the GUI - a component just says "I have feature X which has use priority Y and
Jedidiah.
That said, I completely agree. I'll take it a step further and say they should snag the UI requirements that apple has available for software developers to ensure consistent look and feel on their OS ( I believe those are freely available ) and use that to redesign KDE once and for all. Or come up with their own list, but *stick* to it, and further, don't approve software apps for kde unless they follow the list as well
I'm beginning to come around to the point of view that perhaps Human Interfeace Guidelines ought to be enforced programmatically rather than as a document of requests of things you would like a developer to do. What do I mean? I mean, try and create a new layer of abstraction for programming so that GUI construction and layout becomes the responsibility of desktop environment rather than the responsibility of the programmer. The application developer has the responsibility for coding the various components of the application, exposing their functions in a particular way, and the relationships between components; then the HIG (a DE library, or formal code spec, whatever) takes the components, features, and relationships and constructs a GUI to make those components and features accessible to the user (via menus, buttons, list selectors, dialogs, etc.) structuring them, according to the given relationships, into a completely HIG consistent GUI app.
Okay, that is a very non-trivial exercise, and exactly how much work you can get the HIG to do instead of the programmer is not an easy question, however, thee are some real gains if you can actually do (at least some level of) this right:
(1) All applications coded with this will automatically be very consistent with all others, and complete HIG compliant - the developer doesn't have to worry so much about UI design (that work is pushed off more toward the people writing the HIG engine).
(2) Each DE can have their own programmed HIG, so an application coded with this system can be compiled against each DE and be fully HIG compliant for each different DE.
(3) It completely formalises the HIG - it isn't a document of reccomendations, but is required to be an actual formal layout engine.
(4) For the really "do it yourself" people you can code your own HIG engine and have your own completely unique look and feel that will be consistent across all the application coded with this system.
So perhaps widgets are too low level for application programming these days. It is my understanding that AWT worked something along these lines at least for layout of widgets), and well, obviously AWT isn't very popular. Then again, AWT was a little slow, and didn't provide the flexibility I'm talking about (it had, presumaly, its own hard coded HIG engine). As I said, this sort of thing would be very difficult, but perhaps it is worth considering.
Jedidiah.
That is to say, if I want to become a "worker bee", let me!
In my opinion you are perfectly welcome to. My point is that if that is what you want, go to a trade school to do it and stop clogging up the universities.
Jedidiah.
Learning for learning's sake is not possible when system forces you to "learn". Mandatory general education courses do not make you appreciate literature, sociology and and psychology. They make you hate all this subjects, ensuring that you forget about them next day you get the grade.
Yup, and I am not actually a fan of mandatory courses at university. In fact in my university undergraduate career I did 18 points of a 108 point degree that were not mathematics. All 18 of those points were physics.
I'm discssn the difference between being at university to learn about what interests you, and being at university to get vocational training. There is a distinct difference between the two. Yes, sometimes they conincide. The presumption that they must is the problem.
Jedidiah.
High school can definitely include vocational training, as that is compulsory. University is optional. You do not need to attend. There is no reason that it need include vocational courses. University is something you go to if you choose to, and in principle it is somewhere you go if you want to learn for learning's sake. You can go to university at any time, while working, while unemployed, whenever. When I got my Masters' degree I graduated alongside an 83 year old who had come back to university after she retired to pursue her interests in Statistics.
Jedidiah.
i agree with your statement, that people should go to college for learning's sake. however the real world gets in the way of that. i can't afford to dick around at this point. i have to find a major that will result in me having a job after i graduate rather than be back in the same place i started, only now with thousands of dollars of debt...
But you see, this is exactly what I'm complainign about. What you really need is not a university that's teaching vocational courses. Universities are expensive, because they are supposed to be storehouses of knowledge, and places of research. The lecturers are supposed to be primarily researchers and are paid as such. That means going to university is expensive.
What you really need is a trade school, with instructors who do nothing but instruct (and hence are much better teachers than you'll find at a university) and a course stucture that is clsoely targetted to place you into a job. Such a course is going to be cheaper than a university.
But instead we're in some weird half way system. Employers have no respect for trade school qualifications, even though those are specifically qualifications for a job. Meantime universities are wasting their time and effort providing basic vocational courses that they shouldn't have to. The whole system is screwed.
Jedidiah.
I'm going to college so I can learn how to make a lot of money doing what I like, and live a happy life.
My only complaint is that you're clogging up the college system when all you really want is a trade school. If you want to learn fr the sake learning and explore knowledge go to a university; if you want to learn a trade, go to a trade school.
Jedidiah.