I really wonder who Metcalf is and what qualifies him as a technical reviewer of software. He doesn't seem to be any more qualified than an average medical doctor. I mean, he can write, but he seems to have no clue about operating systems... I also think that W2K will mark the collapse of M$ as a leader in OS products. At least I hope so. Though it wouldn't be the case if the majority of users are as idiot as Metcalfe. We'd (with cmos) speculated that the release of NT5 was delayed because it was very difficult to recompile the source-tree. Be warned that the renamed NT5 is still a bug factory, and a masterpiece of kitsch.
Well, so you have a Bsc. in Comp. Sci., or perhaps you've been hacking computers for 10 years. Both true for me.
Unfortunately, I can't understand when a so-called programmer praises non-standard, ugly M$ technologies(?). Does somebody really mean that making ActiveX a central part of OS is any good? That one must have blown the sh*t out of his nose.
Sorry, the W2k features listed have been/.ed already. In addition to the previous replies I should express that there aren't heaps of other features. There can't be, there can only be quick bugfixes, worhtless little applications, other things to make windows even more clowny. And speaking as a faithful NT4 programmer (because I had to, job you know) I'm not sure if anything weindows can be fast, reliable, stable, secure, whatever. No OS course I took advocates a Windows like OS.
I apologize, but real programmers are a bit more rigorous than that.
That's the phrase I was looking for: "cheap windoze knock-off". The supposition that the duplication of form is indeed healthy is wrong. To the contrary, when you imitate something you are bound to be "second-grade". A Linux system, forget the dreadful benchmarks, is far superior than Windows system "under the hood", using the term as some technical(?) people do. That's why a similar user interface is not correct. For your suggestion on imitating NextStep rather than Windoze, I agree 100%.
I installed (had to) WinNT on a few workstations for about a 100 times. What I learned from that is no WinNT install gets done in one sweep. At least I hadn't done that right with years of Comp. Sci. study;)
In particular, the "windows networking installation wizard" suxx ultimately. If it crashes, you basically have to reinstall... Not to mention the superior performance of the resulting system, as some benchmark gurus have recently demonstrated *cough* I was never lucky enough to witness the speed and smoothness of WinNT as a file server, gateway, ftp server, development environ., anything. too bad for me.
In Linux, be it Slackware/Debian/RedHat, I've always had less headaches.
Is TrollTech so fond of Windows UI which is notoriously known to be the state-of-the-art in user-hostile behaviour?
I think trying to make a GNU/Linux system look like Windows is a futile attempt at popularity and a bold signature of lack of creativity. The terminology (see 'Wizard') and the graphical language is best described as a second hand imitation of windoze.
Can I run them on my Lýnux box? Are there Lýnux kernel drývers ýn the 2.3 tree?
I'd just like to use this next to my Sirius-made holographic display that has a nice SVGA port, APM & PnP support, also complies with those low radiation standards...
Really? I think that any structure is arithmetizable. Including any hologram. And information theory is valid even if you have quantum nano-computers.
Plus, I think you don't know what "comparison" and "symbol manipulation" is. What you call "associative" and "looks at convolution" is composed of computational primitives. Frege once said that all meaning is compositional. Well I'm still in love with Alan Turing, and he would suggest that principle of compositionality would hold for all machiness, including our conscious engines.
Really? I think that any structure is arithmetizable. Including any hologram. And information theory is valid even if you have quantum nano-computers. Plus, I think you don't know what "comparison" and "symbol manipulation" is. What you call "associative" and "looks at convolution" is composed of computational primitives. Frege once said that all meaning is compositional. Well I'm still in love with Alan Turing, and he would suggest that principle of compositionality would hold for all machiness, including our conscious engines.
A UNIX DE is not a bad idea. I've been using emacs for years, but I don't use its debugger interface: I prefer DDD. If a tool helps me, I use it.
Likewise, it would be handy to get hold of a slim and capable editor, a gifted debugger, GUI builder, makefile manager, class/object browser, etc. as a suite of development tools. But that doesn't mean that you can write a single ugly application that makes kludgey auto generated code and doesn't give you full control, numbing you with silly conventions. They call that Visual C++, if you're fond of that join MS Developer Studio team and be shadowed under curses of a thousands developers every day.
I believe that there are a couple of guidelines to follow. For instance, the infrastructure is more important than the looks. In order for the tools to communicate, they should have CORBA (or an appropriate object model) interfaces. In other circumstances, they should be usable as standalone applications. So you can have your editor-of-choice that works with the rest. The compiler and debugger interfaces must be well defined, as well as binary format handling; I think the standard GNU tools will do.
The DE must not be focused on a single language, for instance the "type browser" must work equally well for both C++ and Scheme. No need to mention that support for a new language should be as simple as a plug-in.
If a tool is calling a command line program, it must supply a complete interface. That is, one that gives ultimate control over the tool: without omitting any options or functionality, and indicating the mapping clearly. So a front-end for gcc options must be pretty articulated. Of course, for makefile management, as an example, I think there might be multiple back-end choices. So the design can take that into account. [Don't know, make it OO and derive subclasses.. Separate interface/implementation so that the framework is not tied to a single CLI]
There are many other things to worry about, but I'm out of ATP. After all, you'd like something that works and give you a good speed-up.
Unfortunately, there is no such thing in UNIX. I haven't seen it and I don't believe that it exists.:) Hope remains that some people are going to start it as part of the GNOME project. Perhaps, we would have something if GNUSTEP was somehow complete. Until then, I have my terminal windows, emacs and ddd.
I'd always thought that OpenGL rendering pipeline mimicked SGI's gfx hardware.:) Of course the OpenGL API is designed to give the maximum performance and still have you write portable code. Although the number of OpenGL features, extensions (and some SGI oddities) make it a bit large, I think OpenGL is the *ONLY* decent low level graphics API that lets you code *realtime* 2d/3d graphics; especially if you're not going for a software renderer. [it's okay to forget about DirectX ]
I'd checked the design documents when PI released them and they did seem reasonable. Lacking only a few features (at least at first release), the GNU/Linux platform is going to be excellent for 3d. We'll be seeing a lot of catchy 3d stuff: modelers, games, demos, window managers, etc. I think that the GL support in GUI toolkits will just make it better (like the one for GTK+)...
I'd been following PI's plans for a while, and I'm indeed pleased to see they've punched in a milestone. CG freaks here know that GLX is an important OpenGL extension, don't we? And of course it'd be the clean way to code 3d apps, making use of your hardware.
Now we can start coding some 3d apps, demos, games. Where was my OpenGL book?
Why don't biologists and neuroscientists know TM?
on
Biomolecular Computers
·
· Score: 1
The first article says that the biological computer won't be in Von Neumann machine architecture but in Turing Machine architecture.
Yeah , Yeah. Tell it to me. But read the cindrella book first. Why do some scientists write such fallacious things? Any RAM computer is equivalent to a universal TM! Man, the thing they wrote in the BBC article is so silly.
I guess I'd studied FPGA's when I first got a digital design course at univ. Back then, it looked interesting but the overhead for "switching" the circuitry seemed awful.
Now, I recall some news when reconfiguration time was reduced in a significant proportion. I also remember that some guys at Amiga were very keen on it. Hopefully, the FPGA is more than plain old parallel stuff. Wanna see if we can get a hacker's regular hourly thought exercise.;)
I think reconfiguration is particularly useful if your system is bit wiser than a traditional number crunching procedural system. I'm not suggesting that you can get some NN to let h/w to converge to the ideal. (That's a too difficult problem in itself) Sure I won't. But the thing is, if you let your software know how FPGA can be utilized it can make a difference.
Especially, it occurs to any demo-coder that those tiny cute loops that do the tricks would fit nicely in a hardware design. So, I think you could make your DSP(audio,video,compression,etc.) & 3d stuff really faster. However, I suppose there are other ways in which you could actually improve the existing implementations. A key point is making your algorithms adaptive. Then, they are not the usual kind of "perfect tool" instruments but ones that use some heuristics that try to find the best hardware design for the job.
I suspect that the simplistic kind of translation [ say a 3d algorithm to an FGPA spec., then reconfiguration when the algorithm's needed (probably over one of the custom processors alloc'd for this task) and using it as a subroutine ] might be generalized to implementing a programming paradigm as hardware. It seems that OS and compilation systems would better be revised to get it done effectively, but still it is very interesting in its own right. The array of possibilies might be larger than the excitement in implementing cryptography and NN apps, or fast Java VM's. When I imagine that the cruical parts of an expert system, or an inference engine, or just about any complex application out there could be done that way, I'm awed.
Nevertheless, I don't know the theoretical "sphere" of the work precisely. It would be very satisfactory, for instance, to see some work on the computational complexity induced by such devices. Stuff that says "In x domain, FPGA's are useful" preferred, not the kind of stuff that says "Generally, it's NP-complete" or "Oh no, it's undecidable"....
You have no training and experience in science and literacy.
You live in the medieval age.
You are a poor religious person.
You don't know what a "satire" is.
You know *nothing* about philosophy of mind, cognitive sciences, neurosciences, computer sciences. Please be wary of the skills of the people who write here.
I think it is good for the public if the general applications are free, I mean the basic components of the OS.
But some areas, like the game industry, is not very likely to go "free". I think those are too specialized, and way too many resources are being put into a computer game. It's just like movie business. Similar cases for 3d programs and alike..
:) Okay, I don't claim to be a judge over these subjects. Nonetheless, I oppose to incapable, sluggish and ugly GUI frameworks. I think MFC is leading the edge here (at being anti-elegant), but QT has its fallacies too.
About Motif, I don't know if any of you like 3.5 Mb statically linked binaries and easy-crash-slow-motion programs. On the other hand, I like GTK+ because it is a good compromise on productivity versus design. I personally endorse use of libgtk--, and the choice of language bindings is favorable.
In general, a robust and scalable GUI framework, in C++ or a prominent OO language like Ada9x, is very desirable. Of course it would have to attain other design goals like uniformity or comprehensibility, making use of clear design paradigms like MVC. In that respect, hardly few libraries seem to suffice. (I hate Java but swing has a somewhat nice design) Many of which I tried just didn't give the right feel.
Well, perhaps we should ask slashdot about GUI frameworks!
I think I had covered up QT1.x to a considerable extent. Also, I know about the content of files produced by moc, an accompanying class that's all. The rest handled by inheritance, etc..
The mistake with moc was that it did not supply an adequate C++ extension. You *had* *to* write in QT style, just as in VC++/MFC. Actually, it was unable to cope with any of my coding techniques. (templates etc..) I think it could be acceptable if it gave a full-blown addition to *standard* C++.
While the signal/slot mechanism seems reasonable at first, the macros introduce several constraints on them. QT signals are well out of question in a proper OO design.
And a fatal error is in their failure to recognize standard C++ library. In any C++ system, a decent integration with standard library is favored.
I'm a coder, I think I know how complex a web browser is. I tag them as "basic apps" because they are among the most common used. Think of a desktop manager, file manager, text editor, etc. Those are non-trivial applications, too. But I view them as "basic".
Are you sure that free software browsers suck compared to Opera? Mozilla may not have been very successful, but I'll use a free (in the sense of "freedom") browser instead of proprietary software that claims to be superior.
Also, I haven't seen an impressive browser in the various trial versions I set up on the terrible NT.
No it doesn't. The extremes in the spectrum of free/non-free software are not equivalent, nor are their goals. The licenses are a legal way we make use of, it is not something that defines us.
Since it is the many hackers who made the free OS possible (in the sense of freedom) the standards for the OS are already settled down.
A 3d modeler is a special program while a web browser is a generally useful program. So don't expect that free software/non-free software borders are the same.
Now, if your vendor deserves the money (SuSe Linux) there's nothing wrong with it. But if ppl start charging you with the most basic components in a free operating system, something's wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
I really wonder who Metcalf is and what qualifies him as a technical reviewer of software. He doesn't seem to be any more qualified than an average medical doctor. I mean, he can write, but he seems to have no clue about operating systems... I also think that W2K will mark the collapse of M$ as a leader in OS products. At least I hope so. Though it wouldn't be the case if the majority of users are as idiot as Metcalfe. We'd (with cmos) speculated that the release of NT5 was delayed because it was very difficult to recompile the source-tree. Be warned that the renamed NT5 is still a bug factory, and a masterpiece of kitsch.
Well, so you have a Bsc. in Comp. Sci., or perhaps you've been hacking computers for 10 years. Both true for me.
/.ed already. In addition to the previous replies I should express that there aren't heaps of other features. There can't be, there can only be quick bugfixes, worhtless little applications, other things to make windows even more clowny. And speaking as a faithful NT4 programmer (because I had to, job you know) I'm not sure if anything weindows can be fast, reliable, stable, secure, whatever. No OS course I took advocates a Windows like OS.
Unfortunately, I can't understand when a so-called programmer praises non-standard, ugly M$ technologies(?). Does somebody really mean that making ActiveX a central part of OS is any good? That one must have blown the sh*t out of his nose.
Sorry, the W2k features listed have been
I apologize, but real programmers are a bit more rigorous than that.
That's the phrase I was looking for: "cheap windoze knock-off". The supposition that the duplication of form is indeed healthy is wrong. To the contrary, when you imitate something you are bound to be "second-grade". A Linux system, forget the dreadful benchmarks, is far superior than Windows system "under the hood", using the term as some technical(?) people do. That's why a similar user interface is not correct. For your suggestion on imitating NextStep rather than Windoze, I agree 100%.
I did it on the Amiga, Solaris, Linux...pro enuff?
I installed (had to) WinNT on a few workstations for about a 100 times. What I learned from that is no WinNT install gets done in one sweep. At least I hadn't done that right with years of Comp. Sci. study ;)
In particular, the "windows networking installation wizard" suxx ultimately. If it crashes, you basically have to reinstall... Not to mention the superior performance of the resulting system, as some benchmark gurus have recently demonstrated *cough* I was never lucky enough to witness the speed and smoothness of WinNT as a file server, gateway, ftp server, development environ., anything. too bad for me.
In Linux, be it Slackware/Debian/RedHat, I've always had less headaches.
Is TrollTech so fond of Windows UI which is notoriously known to be the state-of-the-art in user-hostile behaviour?
I think trying to make a GNU/Linux system look like Windows is a futile attempt at popularity and a bold signature of lack of creativity. The terminology (see 'Wizard') and the graphical language is best described as a second hand imitation of windoze.
I don't buy it.
Can I run them on my Lýnux box? Are there Lýnux kernel drývers ýn the 2.3 tree?
I'd just like to use this next to my Sirius-made holographic display that has a nice SVGA port, APM & PnP support, also complies with those low radiation standards...
Really? I think that any structure is arithmetizable. Including any hologram. And information theory is valid even if you have quantum nano-computers.
Plus, I think you don't know what "comparison" and "symbol manipulation" is. What you call "associative" and "looks at convolution" is composed of computational primitives. Frege once said that all meaning is compositional. Well I'm still in love with Alan Turing, and he would suggest that principle of compositionality would hold for all machiness, including our conscious engines.
Really? I think that any structure is arithmetizable. Including any hologram. And information theory is valid even if you have quantum nano-computers. Plus, I think you don't know what "comparison" and "symbol manipulation" is. What you call "associative" and "looks at convolution" is composed of computational primitives. Frege once said that all meaning is compositional. Well I'm still in love with Alan Turing, and he would suggest that principle of compositionality would hold for all machiness, including our conscious engines.
A UNIX DE is not a bad idea. I've been using emacs for years, but I don't use its debugger interface: I prefer DDD. If a tool helps me, I use it.
:) Hope remains that some people are going to start it as part of the GNOME project. Perhaps, we would have something if GNUSTEP was somehow complete. Until then, I have my terminal windows, emacs and ddd.
Likewise, it would be handy to get hold of a slim and capable editor, a gifted debugger, GUI builder, makefile manager, class/object browser, etc. as a suite of development tools. But that doesn't mean that you can write a single ugly application that makes kludgey auto generated code and doesn't give you full control, numbing you with silly conventions. They call that Visual C++, if you're fond of that join MS Developer Studio team and be shadowed under curses of a thousands developers every day.
I believe that there are a couple of guidelines to follow. For instance, the infrastructure is more important than the looks. In order for the tools to communicate, they should have CORBA (or an appropriate object model) interfaces. In other circumstances, they should be usable as standalone applications. So you can have your editor-of-choice that works with the rest. The compiler and debugger interfaces must be well defined, as well as binary format handling; I think the standard GNU tools will do.
The DE must not be focused on a single language, for instance the "type browser" must work equally well for both C++ and Scheme. No need to mention that support for a new language should be as simple as a plug-in.
If a tool is calling a command line program, it must supply a complete interface. That is, one that gives ultimate control over the tool: without omitting any options or functionality, and indicating the mapping clearly. So a front-end for gcc options must be pretty articulated. Of course, for makefile management, as an example, I think there might be multiple back-end choices. So the design can take that into account.
[Don't know, make it OO and derive subclasses.. Separate interface/implementation so that the framework is not tied to a single CLI]
There are many other things to worry about, but I'm out of ATP. After all, you'd like something that works and give you a good speed-up.
Unfortunately, there is no such thing in UNIX. I haven't seen it and I don't believe that it exists.
I'd always thought that OpenGL rendering pipeline mimicked SGI's gfx hardware. :) Of course the OpenGL API is designed to give the maximum performance and still have you write portable code. Although the number of OpenGL features, extensions (and some SGI oddities) make it a bit large, I think OpenGL is the *ONLY* decent low level graphics API that lets you code *realtime* 2d/3d graphics; especially if you're not going for a software renderer. [it's okay to forget about DirectX ]
I'd checked the design documents when PI released them and they did seem reasonable. Lacking only a few features (at least at first release), the GNU/Linux platform is going to be excellent for 3d. We'll be seeing a lot of catchy 3d stuff: modelers, games, demos, window managers, etc. I think that the GL support in GUI toolkits will just make it better (like the one for GTK+)...
I'd been following PI's plans for a while, and I'm indeed pleased to see they've punched in a milestone. CG freaks here know that GLX is an important OpenGL extension, don't we? And of course it'd be the clean way to code 3d apps, making use of your hardware.
Now we can start coding some 3d apps, demos, games. Where was my OpenGL book?
The first article says that the biological computer won't be in Von Neumann machine architecture but in Turing Machine architecture.
Yeah , Yeah. Tell it to me. But read the cindrella book first. Why do some scientists write such fallacious things? Any RAM computer is equivalent to a universal TM! Man, the thing they wrote in the BBC article is so silly.
I guess I'd studied FPGA's when I first got a digital design course at univ. Back then, it looked interesting but the overhead for "switching" the circuitry seemed awful.
;)
Now, I recall some news when reconfiguration time was reduced in a significant proportion. I also remember that some guys at Amiga were very keen on it. Hopefully, the FPGA is more than plain old parallel stuff. Wanna see if we can get a hacker's regular hourly thought exercise.
I think reconfiguration is particularly useful if your system is bit wiser than a traditional number crunching procedural system. I'm not suggesting that you can get some NN to let h/w to converge to the ideal. (That's a too difficult problem in itself) Sure I won't. But the thing is, if you let your software know how FPGA can be utilized it can make a difference.
Especially, it occurs to any demo-coder that those tiny cute loops that do the tricks would fit nicely in a hardware design. So, I think you could make your DSP(audio,video,compression,etc.) & 3d stuff really faster. However, I suppose there are other ways in which you could actually improve the existing implementations. A key point is making your algorithms adaptive. Then, they are not the usual kind of "perfect tool" instruments but ones that use some heuristics that try to find the best hardware design for the job.
I suspect that the simplistic kind of translation [ say a 3d algorithm to an FGPA spec., then reconfiguration when the algorithm's needed (probably over one of the custom processors alloc'd for this task) and using it as a subroutine ] might be generalized to implementing a programming paradigm as hardware. It seems that OS and compilation systems would better be revised to get it done effectively, but still it is very interesting in its own right. The array of possibilies might be larger than the excitement in implementing cryptography and NN apps, or fast Java VM's. When I imagine that the cruical parts of an expert system, or an inference engine, or just about any complex application out there could be done that way, I'm awed.
Nevertheless, I don't know the theoretical "sphere" of the work precisely. It would be very satisfactory, for instance, to see some work on the computational complexity induced by such devices. Stuff that says "In x domain, FPGA's are useful" preferred, not the kind of stuff that says "Generally, it's NP-complete" or "Oh no, it's undecidable"....
You are unfortunately an idiot.
You have no training and experience in science and literacy.
You live in the medieval age.
You are a poor religious person.
You don't know what a "satire" is.
You know *nothing* about philosophy of mind, cognitive sciences, neurosciences, computer sciences. Please be wary of the skills of the people who write here.
.
Are those features of Opera really outstanding? They don't seem to be very special...
;)
As long as they have high quality products I think that software developers must eat a lot. I have a Bsc. in Comp. Sci.
I think it is good for the public if the general applications are free, I mean the basic components of the OS.
But some areas, like the game industry, is not very likely to go "free". I think those are too specialized, and way too many resources are being put into a computer game. It's just like movie business. Similar cases for 3d programs and alike..
:) Okay, I don't claim to be a judge over these subjects. Nonetheless, I oppose to incapable, sluggish and ugly GUI frameworks. I think MFC is leading the edge here (at being anti-elegant), but QT has its fallacies too.
About Motif, I don't know if any of you like 3.5 Mb statically linked binaries and easy-crash-slow-motion programs. On the other hand, I like GTK+ because it is a good compromise on productivity versus design. I personally endorse use of libgtk--, and the choice of language bindings is favorable.
In general, a robust and scalable GUI framework, in C++ or a prominent OO language like Ada9x, is very desirable. Of course it would have to attain other design goals like uniformity or comprehensibility, making use of clear design paradigms like MVC. In that respect, hardly few libraries seem to suffice. (I hate Java but swing has a somewhat nice design) Many of which I tried just didn't give the right feel.
Well, perhaps we should ask slashdot about GUI frameworks!
I think I had covered up QT1.x to a considerable extent. Also, I know about the content of files produced by moc, an accompanying class that's all. The rest handled by inheritance, etc..
The mistake with moc was that it did not supply an adequate C++ extension. You *had* *to* write in QT style, just as in VC++/MFC. Actually, it was unable to cope with any of my coding techniques. (templates etc..) I think it could be acceptable if it gave a full-blown addition to *standard* C++.
While the signal/slot mechanism seems reasonable at first, the macros introduce several constraints on them. QT signals are well out of question in a proper OO design.
And a fatal error is in their failure to recognize standard C++ library. In any C++ system, a decent integration with standard library is favored.
I'm a coder, I think I know how complex a web browser is. I tag them as "basic apps" because they are among the most common used. Think of a desktop manager, file manager, text editor, etc. Those are non-trivial applications, too. But I view them as "basic".
I treat free software as something more important than a pragmatic issue. Anyway, I understand that it must not be taken too rigid.
Are you sure that free software browsers suck compared to Opera? Mozilla may not have been very successful, but I'll use a free (in the sense of "freedom") browser instead of proprietary software that claims to be superior.
Also, I haven't seen an impressive browser in the various trial versions I set up on the terrible NT.
No it doesn't. The extremes in the spectrum of free/non-free software are not equivalent, nor are their goals. The licenses are a legal way we make use of, it is not something that defines us.
Since it is the many hackers who made the free OS possible (in the sense of freedom) the standards for the OS are already settled down.
.
A 3d modeler is a special program while a web browser is a generally useful program. So don't expect that free software/non-free software borders are the same.
Now, if your vendor deserves the money (SuSe Linux) there's nothing wrong with it. But if ppl start charging you with the most basic components in a free operating system, something's wrong.
I won't, but I won't crack it either. But what they do is not helping our free OS.