Since neither of my immediate corporate nor
military superiors really understand the GPL,
they've all agreed to license the software
under it; and from day-one, everything
developed has been released under the GPL,
with my name as the holder of the copyright.
This will get interesting, if those superiors
were actually entitled to give away those
rights.
It might sound sensible to say "Why can't we all just get along?" or even "Why can't these Linux kids give UNIX/BSD their props?"
but that matter is no more objective than OS preference.
Perhaps they will grow up.:-)
The interesting thing is that many of these people tend to judge by the looks. This year I had several people who perceived my FreeBSD box running under Windowmaker
as a Linux box. Obviously they associated something totally alien with a BSD box and did not really grasp the idea that under UNIX the GUI is portable. For them KDE or GNOME is synonymous for Linux (yes, arghll!)
So both "worlds" have many in common, but also important differences (BSD license vs GPL, rather centralistic development vs loose development..)
My belief is, that the BSD will benefit from the BSD license. It is more free and allows for cooperation with industry. The GPL might have its advantages, but is not really the optimum for world of free and commercial/closed software.
Was it really impossible to burn DVDs under Linux prior to this?
It might depend on the access method.
What we have here is a giant ISO 9660 file system (the format common CD-ROMs use) to access the DVD.
This seems indeed not to have been possible due
to a kernel limitation in Linux.
They describe the making of the DVD
here, the really interesting link BTW.
The natural format for such a large optical disc would be UDF of course. I am not sure if this is also on that DVD (or if dual ISO 9660 / UDF discs
are possible at all).
Yep. Schneier is a bit overreacting, like Bill Joy lately (or people reacting to Gödel's theorem, or Turing..).
Going from one extreme to the other.
Of course you can't have full safety, but that holds true as well for the real world.
You can't prevent anyone from getting into a building, but you can make it so hard, that only
a few will manage. And you have to pay in a way
for that.
It would be really nice to think that they are fully supporting open standards for
SOAP and C#. SOAP has tremendous potential.
Wait a minute! Why do we feel excited about SOAP?
Anders describes this as an easy and more importan scalable way for beaming objects around in a network (possible object migration is the better term):
You take your object and tell it or some facility to write down its type and state into a piece of XML and -whoop- transport this (HTTP conforming mostly) from your socket over ther wire to some
receiving socket, where the reverese process is happening, the XML gets read and reassembled into
a copy of the object. A similiar thing holds for method calls of an object - the method plus parameters get XML-fied (this is described in the SOAP spec) and beamed over.
When I first read such a scenario I was excited too.
What would be the alternative. On the lower end it would mean devising my own beaming protocol using sockets/udp packets. But on the higher end there is something like CORBA.
Wasn't CORBA supposed to act as object bus?
And this on a higher level than fiddling with sockets myself?
Right now I think I have this latent positive feeling about SOAP because that uses simple technology (sockets + HTTP + XML) I understand,
plus I understand how to scale such a system.
while on the other hand there is this behemoth
of CORBA specs and the mysterious world of orbs
that I don't know yet.
I would love to know some comment from somebody who has done some real CORBA work and who would
express his opinions on this matter!
One of the arguments in favour of SOAP was that
this would mean that there is no state involved
in the protocol. Uhm, what is the real advantage
here? Isn't this situation not a bit different from serving just a page from whatever server to a client?
And why would CORBA look unfavourably in this setting?
The other thing I could not follow Anders' argumentation was about him distinguishing beetween Java interpretes and his IL run time
mechanisms. Sorry sounded pretty much like JIT
technology. If.NET sends no binary to the
target host, I would not declare that one
running natively.
I think it is a nice idea to extend unicode to all known scripts. Just read the stuff about the Linear B deciphering in Simon Singh's code book. Some of the charakters reminded me of Japanese Kanji. Also the way a konsonant and a vowel are encrypted by a character.
Careful formal testing is among other things dull work. Definitly less sexy than the usual areas hackers like to hack. So it is not impossible, it just might proceed very slow if at all.
And guess what, the dependency resolution of the Dev Studio IDE was found to have bugs that caused recursion until some internal counter turned around (that took a couple of minutes).
The guy who fixed it changed the build process to spill out a makefile, processed it with awk to remove some dependencies and then ran the resulting makefile.
That made me wonder if Microsoft developers themselves use that IDE for any huge project.
Probably it is fixed in release 15 + service pack 7:-)
Mr Garbus does it right to ask Mr Valenti if it will be possible to cite from a DVD.
Present German law for example allows citations, under certain circumstances it is even possiible to use the whole work in question as citation. If the film industry wants to have such a level of control over DVD that not even a citation is possible they clearly try too much.
Thanks for the confirmation that Palm + Nokia works as well in an European net.
WAP is horrible to set up, you need no less than NINE parameters to configure WAP service (URL, Connection type, Connection security, Bearer, Dial-up number, IP address, Authentication type, Data cell type, Data speed, User name and Password) (PHEW!)
That sounds very similiar to setting up a modem to connect to an ISP. There I pay a fee for the phone connection to the phone company plus a fee to the ISP for the data volume. Is WAP handled similiar? What do I pay for?
about 2k of bandwidth, so any websurfing (even with WAP) is very slooooow.
I am happy with ~8 kB/s via one ISDN channel at home. So I expected bandwidth not to be the possibly annoying part of WAP (assumed it uses not much graphics) - what I can't estimate right now is the cost for the WAP access calls themselves.
All, at least not in the UK. Nokia can't give away the 7110.
I signed a contract last year, so I would need to buy the 7110 or a similiar WAP phone for full money. In that regard I could put less money into an organizer to enhance my mobile.
At the moment, it really isn't a standard that needs supporting. What's wrong with a Palm Pilot or Handspring Visor? Assuming they work with your mobile phone, they'll do everything you.
I do not know if the palm offers software to make it do the WAP part together with the Nokia. Plus the keyboard of that Siemens gadget seems more fit to me than the input mechanism of the palm. Or is that no problem, once one gets used to it?
Open Source Development tools and a large body of software are already available for them.
That is the point why I did not buy anything yet. I want a programmable system like palm and something that works flawlessly with the mobile phone to provide WAP (and here I am only sure of that Siemens PDA).
Are you really that desperate to check Slashdot:-)
You should try to get in contact with the university library. This one is an IEEE publication and either they have it themselves or they can arrange things through another library for you.
I looked a bit around in my region and I can get articles either via the local university library for about 10 cent copy fee per xeroxed page or delivered via email as TIFF files from the JASON server for about $1.50 per article. This link will send a test article to your email address. You then need an uudecode utility to turn the attachment into a binary und the result (a selfexploding ARJ for DOS) can be unpacked with the unarj utility that is available for UNIX too.
Their list of 10 algorithms having 'the greatest influence on the development and practice of science and engineering in the 20th century' appears in the January/February issue of Computing in Science & Engineering.Their list of 10 algorithms having 'the greatest influence on the development and practice of science and engineering in the 20th century' appears in the January/February issue of Computing in Science & Engineering.
Rather use this link - it has the missing explanations.
I really wonder what kind of abstract UI model gets developed there.
After all a UI is not only some widgets/graphical controls with some input, and output facilities. A typical GUI program encodes a lot of the control flow in the way the widgets interact. They might spawn or have interesting life spans.
The abstract description has to be able to cover this complicated control flow/life time behaviour.
Returning to the thought of using XML to describe a widget. It will not be only about some graphical/layout XML (HTML like XML) that should encode the abstract description of the real widget, there also needs to be some control flow description embedded as well.
This probably doesn't meet all the criteria right now - due to lack of toolkits - but DHTML (i.e. HTML + DOM + Javascript), combined with XML and XSL, makes for a very viable, powerful, cross-platform, "rich GUI front end".
HTML is crossplatform.
Javascript might be, if you stick to Netscape. (I would drop it for Perl anytime - and something like this gets into Mozilla:-)
But what about DOM? Is that really crossplatform? I thought it was not, but maybe I am wrong.
Projects (.dsp,.dsw) are stored in a kind of makefiles under Visual C++ as well. It is also possible to manipulate them to a certain extent.
However there is nothing in the MS Developers Studio IDE that forces you to use it if you don't want, possibly with the exception of the debugger - and you need working debugging sooner or later.
I used the NT version of Emacs 20.x happily as text editor all the time, while starting compilation from within the Dev Studio. No problem.
Also having used rmail was not a bad idea too, considering that stupid Outlook worm.:-)
If I had had more time, I maybe had tried to use the existing Visual C++ bindings for Emacs that float around the Emacs repositories.
While I am still an Emacs fan, I had to admit to our Win32 zealots, that Dev Studio has aquired many features that I knew from mighty Emacs only previously. But I am sure the Emacs crowd will catch up - that stuff is open source and sooner or later every itch gets addressed.
Using CVS under Win32 is possible too, I had only problems with CR characters showing up at places where I did not want them. Otherwise it worked fine, even with ssh to remote code repositories over the internet.
Like I said above, it is possible to use the command line version of the MS C/C++ compiler from usual Makefiles and thus from within Emacs, but I don't think the debugger is available as a command line tool. That would make it harder to integrate it with Emacs. On the other hand the Developer Studio is highly customizable with Visual Basic and COM modules. So maybe some hacker with time get it done sooner or later.
I would love to do. But given the fact, that developers are small minority among users, and Emacs users are a small minority among developers, I would not dare.:-)
About that HTML idea. HTML has simply not been intended for controlling layout, so there are many cases when it does not bring the necessary looks. Some folks use Flash as an alternative. And to be honest, theses sites look not bad at all. Have these two examples:
The site of Talla2XLC, arguably one of the best german DJs. His site looks cute and are even able to choose one of several background Techno music stomps.:)
Of course we have the problem that this flash module is not available for every platform. I used it from within the Linux Navigator under FreeBSD's excellent Linux emulation. I would have prefered a FreeBSD flash module but there was none (working) the last time I checked.
I also do not know if there are open source authoring tools or even generating tools available for that format.
There is also GTK for Windows. I'm not sure how well the port is done, but if it's good enough for Mozilla......
It was ported by Tor Lillqvist in order to port the GIMP to Win32. Being able to use the GIMP at home under FreeBSD and at work under Win32 helped me a lot this year with some serious documentation tasks where I used it for the illustrations together with Gnuplot (which I got to run under Win32 as well).
So much to the folks who cried traitor when it became public that Tor ported this fromidable program.
I just left a company that used the old StarView library to build Win32 and OS/2 application. Yes, some folks (here German banks) still insist on OS/2.
So that gave some real world lessons with a huge application built on a cross plattform GUI kit.
OK, we developers cursed StarView a lot, but this was mainly not because the class library was BS, but because we were left with the ~1994 source code of a further unsupported product. (Star Division continued with a new version that is the base for todays StarOffice, but this lib was never made public as the old one was).
While the source was available to us, that just enabled us to do changes at all. We did the 16bit to 32bit migration of the NT code base, the Borland to MS Devstudio migration, a lot of bugfixes and some enhancements to both NT and OS/2 versions we needed. Everytime it was a non trivial time consuming job to get it running. I would have prefered to have some commercial support.
Think of something very complicated that works most of the time, but if it is broken then it creates a lot of trouble because no one usually likes to touch it and is untrained with it.
Another point was, but was far less important than the functionality, that the applications turned out to look very old fashioned. You immediatley see that a lot of things happened to tthe Win32 and even the OS/2 native GUI in the last years. If our clients were not banks, were some mainframe stuff is still in use, we had certainly to work that aspect.
If I had gotten the task to convert our applications to a modern GUI like MFC or GTK or QT, heck, I probably would have had written a modern-gui to old-StarView interface layer, because of the sheer giant heaps of present code that use the old interface. So better have a good look at the structure of your intended X-plattform GUI before you start a large task with it. You might never have the chance to get rid of it, without starting to rewrite the app.
And similiar to the experience I had with Java, it was only seldom the case that I could just stick to developping under one operating system, eg Win32, and expect the version for the other platform, say OS/2 to need no fine tuning. There were issues with the fonts and other system specific glitches.
Please forget that it is not only the different GUI you have to face when working X-plattform. No it is different tools too.
A Microsoft Compiler under NT does not speak the same C++ as a Borland Compiler or Visual Age under OS/2 does. So if you want to use modern features like exceptions or even templates you are in for a lot extra fun.
My personal favourite for least headaches is using gcc together with GTK whereever possible.
Yes I still prefer C and C++. While Java seems to have matured a lot, I still consider it a joke for everything larger than an applet. Emacs does better as a X-plattfrom VM.:)
It seems that to be of any use, these self-replicating 'bots must have high levels of access to the system.
Yep. And the bots themselves are after all just another system that is likely to have security vulnerabilities. It will certainly get attacked with the intention to blind or corrupt it.
The psychic power of Akira seems to be that he can ignite a Big Bang. The explosion bubble that comes up is rather a new universe thus. Unfortunately that gives quite a huge mess if one tries that amidst the city of Tokyo.
The main story line is of course the friendship between Kaneda and Tetsuo. Plus we have the rebels misused by some political game of power (that weazel like guy). Plus lot of other stuff, including motor bike gangs. Folks that don't comply to the strict social rules of Japanese society. Drugs use. Orphans. Sex. Violance. Mutants. Oribital laser stations. The usual.:)
Or what part else was unclear?
From the Leijiverse: Star Blazers
on
Essential Anime
·
· Score: 2
They stream Star Blazers on some internet site. Read this article about it.
Re:Don't forget Rumiko Takahashi (esp. Maison Ikko
on
Essential Anime
·
· Score: 2
I like Rumiko Takahasi too.
Maison Ikkoku and Inu Yasha are very good series. Ranma 1/2 was very good in the beginning but gets very silly later. Lum (Urusei Yatsura) however was silly (but nice) from the beginning. The mermaid series is very dark.
While I like the stories and characters very much, the art is light years away from the great art of Masamune Shirow or Akira's Katsuhiro Otomo or Johji Manabe (Outlanders - aah those space crafts..)
Same holds for Dragon Ball. Beautiful comedy and interesting fights and I really like it. But it is not in the same artistic league. Not to mention some of the European masters like Andre Franquin, Moebius, Christin/Mezieres, Vance/Van Hamme, Lawrence/Lodewijk, Kuipers and so on.
Interesting side note. Someone told me that Rumiko Takahashi managed to get Japan's richest woman with her art. Anyone knows if this is true?
Re:frankly, I'm dissapointed...
on
Essential Anime
·
· Score: 2
First off, although I did end up seeing a lot of recommendations for them, I did not see enough stress on the incredible coolness of Akira and Ghost in the Shell...
Akira lists more studios in its credits than most films list individual artists. The art is superb. I am lucky to have the British collectors video, with one tap subtitled film and one tape with the making of documentary. Guess that beats the DVD available in Germany.
I had the luck to see the movie two times in cinema. That is a huge difference to the video. Very good is the scene where one of the characters falls from a twin skyskraper. All the little windows drawn - faboulous. Another thing is that this movie does a black/yellow/orange color scheme to portray night scences apart from the Terminator black/blue color scheme. I also liked the scene where Tetsu is put into that scanning aparatus with the two detector rings.
Ghost in the Shell is less advanced graphically. You see several cheap computer animations. Im am not sure if Akira contains computer graphics at all (heck, I have to rewatch the making of:). The best scene of Ghost in the shell is the making of Major Kusanagi as an android. Plus I love the views of the city in the rain, with the many Kanji characters and rain plus the very stylish music.
Like I wrote above, the story lines are far away from the complex sometimes philosophical story lines of the orininal manga comic book series.
So don*t forget to read the mangas!
Akira: I found this to be the best anime movie I have ever watched... be warned, however, that you can not watch it on a small screen in ugly quality... I unfortunately first watched it on my comp in 320x240 mpeg format, not good enough, I've beat myself ever since... the cinematic value is incredible, thus I wish I had watched it on a 15x40 foot screen ina theatre or something...
Slashdot Mirror
This will get interesting, if those superiors were actually entitled to give away those rights.
Then it's leaving or fighting the GPL. Cool.
Perhaps they will grow up. :-)
The interesting thing is that many of these people tend to judge by the looks. This year I had several people who perceived my FreeBSD box running under Windowmaker as a Linux box. Obviously they associated something totally alien with a BSD box and did not really grasp the idea that under UNIX the GUI is portable. For them KDE or GNOME is synonymous for Linux (yes, arghll!)
So both "worlds" have many in common, but also important differences (BSD license vs GPL, rather centralistic development vs loose development..)
My belief is, that the BSD will benefit from the BSD license. It is more free and allows for cooperation with industry. The GPL might have its advantages, but is not really the optimum for world of free and commercial/closed software.
It might depend on the access method. What we have here is a giant ISO 9660 file system (the format common CD-ROMs use) to access the DVD. This seems indeed not to have been possible due to a kernel limitation in Linux.
They describe the making of the DVD here, the really interesting link BTW.
The natural format for such a large optical disc would be UDF of course. I am not sure if this is also on that DVD (or if dual ISO 9660 / UDF discs are possible at all).
Yes. And he falls into the same trap, as if this would make these systems totally useless.
Going from one extreme to the other.
Of course you can't have full safety, but that holds true as well for the real world. You can't prevent anyone from getting into a building, but you can make it so hard, that only a few will manage. And you have to pay in a way for that.
Amen brother!
ANSI C, in the hands of a decent coder is very portable. IMHO much more portable than any JAVA code will ever be.
That portability is not achieved automatically, but can be strived for. The reward for that extra work is payed back in form of speed.
I mean not some silly applet, but large packes. Think gcc, Emacs, or UNIX.
Yes, C is a universal assembler and there is still hope that ISO C++ will some day too became widely available in full power.
Wait a minute! Why do we feel excited about SOAP?
Anders describes this as an easy and more importan scalable way for beaming objects around in a network (possible object migration is the better term):
You take your object and tell it or some facility to write down its type and state into a piece of XML and -whoop- transport this (HTTP conforming mostly) from your socket over ther wire to some receiving socket, where the reverese process is happening, the XML gets read and reassembled into a copy of the object. A similiar thing holds for method calls of an object - the method plus parameters get XML-fied (this is described in the SOAP spec) and beamed over.
When I first read such a scenario I was excited too. What would be the alternative. On the lower end it would mean devising my own beaming protocol using sockets/udp packets. But on the higher end there is something like CORBA.
Wasn't CORBA supposed to act as object bus? And this on a higher level than fiddling with sockets myself?
Right now I think I have this latent positive feeling about SOAP because that uses simple technology (sockets + HTTP + XML) I understand, plus I understand how to scale such a system. while on the other hand there is this behemoth of CORBA specs and the mysterious world of orbs that I don't know yet.
I would love to know some comment from somebody who has done some real CORBA work and who would express his opinions on this matter!
One of the arguments in favour of SOAP was that this would mean that there is no state involved in the protocol. Uhm, what is the real advantage here? Isn't this situation not a bit different from serving just a page from whatever server to a client?
And why would CORBA look unfavourably in this setting?
The other thing I could not follow Anders' argumentation was about him distinguishing beetween Java interpretes and his IL run time mechanisms. Sorry sounded pretty much like JIT technology. If .NET sends no binary to the
target host, I would not declare that one
running natively.
I think it is a nice idea to extend unicode to all known scripts. Just read the stuff about the Linear B deciphering in Simon Singh's code book. Some of the charakters reminded me of Japanese Kanji. Also the way a konsonant and a vowel are encrypted by a character.
Good chance for some company to make some bucks.
And guess what, the dependency resolution of the Dev Studio IDE was found to have bugs that caused recursion until some internal counter turned around (that took a couple of minutes).
The guy who fixed it changed the build process to spill out a makefile, processed it with awk to remove some dependencies and then ran the resulting makefile.
That made me wonder if Microsoft developers themselves use that IDE for any huge project.
Probably it is fixed in release 15 + service pack 7 :-)
Present German law for example allows citations, under certain circumstances it is even possiible to use the whole work in question as citation.
If the film industry wants to have such a level of control over DVD that not even a citation is possible they clearly try too much.
Thanks for the confirmation that Palm + Nokia works as well in an European net.
WAP is horrible to set up, you need no less than NINE parameters to configure WAP service (URL, Connection type, Connection security, Bearer, Dial-up number, IP address, Authentication type, Data cell type, Data speed, User name and Password) (PHEW!)
That sounds very similiar to setting up a modem to connect to an ISP. There I pay a fee for the phone connection to the phone company plus a fee to the ISP for the data volume.
Is WAP handled similiar? What do I pay for?
I am happy with ~8 kB/s via one ISDN channel at home. So I expected bandwidth not to be the possibly annoying part of WAP (assumed it uses not much graphics) - what I can't estimate right now is the cost for the WAP access calls themselves.
All, at least not in the UK. Nokia can't give away the 7110.
I signed a contract last year, so I would need to buy the 7110 or a similiar WAP phone for full money. In that regard I could put less money into an organizer to enhance my mobile.
At the moment, it really isn't a standard that needs supporting. What's wrong with a Palm Pilot or Handspring Visor? Assuming they work with your mobile phone, they'll do everything you.
I do not know if the palm offers software to make it do the WAP part together with the Nokia. Plus the keyboard of that Siemens gadget seems more fit to me than the input mechanism of the palm. Or is that no problem, once one gets used to it?
Open Source Development tools and a large body of software are already available for them.
That is the point why I did not buy anything yet. I want a programmable system like palm and something that works flawlessly with the mobile phone to provide WAP (and here I am only sure of that Siemens PDA).
Are you really that desperate to check Slashdot :-)
Seems so. :-)
Thanks for your thoughs.
I looked a bit around in my region and I can get articles either via the local university library for about 10 cent copy fee per xeroxed page or delivered via email as TIFF files from the JASON server for about $1.50 per article. This link will send a test article to your email address. You then need an uudecode utility to turn the attachment into a binary und the result (a selfexploding ARJ for DOS) can be unpacked with the unarj utility that is available for UNIX too.
I believe you should find similiar offers.
Rather use this link - it has the missing explanations.
And this link explains integer relations.
After all a UI is not only some widgets/graphical controls with some input, and output facilities.
A typical GUI program encodes a lot of the control flow in the way the widgets interact. They might spawn or have interesting life spans.
The abstract description has to be able to cover this complicated control flow/life time behaviour.
Returning to the thought of using XML to describe a widget. It will not be only about some graphical/layout XML (HTML like XML) that should encode the abstract description of the real widget, there also needs to be some control flow description embedded as well.
HTML is crossplatform.
Javascript might be, if you stick to Netscape. (I would drop it for Perl anytime - and something like this gets into Mozilla :-)
But what about DOM? Is that really crossplatform? I thought it was not, but maybe I am wrong.
However there is nothing in the MS Developers Studio IDE that forces you to use it if you don't want, possibly with the exception of the debugger - and you need working debugging sooner or later.
I used the NT version of Emacs 20.x happily as text editor all the time, while starting compilation from within the Dev Studio. No problem.
Also having used rmail was not a bad idea too, considering that stupid Outlook worm. :-)
If I had had more time, I maybe had tried to use the existing Visual C++ bindings for Emacs that float around the Emacs repositories.
While I am still an Emacs fan, I had to admit to our Win32 zealots, that Dev Studio has aquired many features that I knew from mighty Emacs only previously. But I am sure the Emacs crowd will catch up - that stuff is open source and sooner or later every itch gets addressed.
Using CVS under Win32 is possible too, I had only problems with CR characters showing up at places where I did not want them. Otherwise it worked fine, even with ssh to remote code repositories over the internet.
Like I said above, it is possible to use the command line version of the MS C/C++ compiler from usual Makefiles and thus from within Emacs, but I don't think the debugger is available as a command line tool. That would make it harder to integrate it with Emacs. On the other hand the Developer Studio is highly customizable with Visual Basic and COM modules. So maybe some hacker with time get it done sooner or later.
I would love to do. But given the fact, that developers are small minority among users, and Emacs users are a small minority among developers, I would not dare. :-)
About that HTML idea. HTML has simply not been intended for controlling layout, so there are many cases when it does not bring the necessary looks. Some folks use Flash as an alternative. And to be honest, theses sites look not bad at all. Have these two examples:
The site of Talla2XLC, arguably one of the best german DJs. His site looks cute and are even able to choose one of several background Techno music stomps. :)
The Siemens corporation site.
Of course we have the problem that this flash module is not available for every platform. I used it from within the Linux Navigator under FreeBSD's excellent Linux emulation. I would have prefered a FreeBSD flash module but there was none (working) the last time I checked.
I also do not know if there are open source authoring tools or even generating tools available for that format.
It was ported by Tor Lillqvist in order to port the GIMP to Win32.
Being able to use the GIMP at home under FreeBSD and at work under Win32 helped me a lot this year with some serious documentation tasks where I used it for the illustrations together with Gnuplot (which I got to run under Win32 as well).
So much to the folks who cried traitor when it became public that Tor ported this fromidable program.
I just left a company that used the old StarView library to build Win32 and OS/2 application. Yes, some folks (here German banks) still insist on OS/2.
So that gave some real world lessons with a huge application built on a cross plattform GUI kit.
OK, we developers cursed StarView a lot, but this was mainly not because the class library was BS, but because we were left with the ~1994 source code of a further unsupported product. (Star Division continued with a new version that is the base for todays StarOffice, but this lib was never made public as the old one was).
While the source was available to us, that just enabled us to do changes at all. We did the 16bit to 32bit migration of the NT code base, the Borland to MS Devstudio migration, a lot of bugfixes and some enhancements to both NT and OS/2 versions we needed. Everytime it was a non trivial time consuming job to get it running. I would have prefered to have some commercial support.
Think of something very complicated that works most of the time, but if it is broken then it creates a lot of trouble because no one usually likes to touch it and is untrained with it.
Another point was, but was far less important than the functionality, that the applications turned out to look very old fashioned. You immediatley see that a lot of things happened to tthe Win32 and even the OS/2 native GUI in the last years. If our clients were not banks, were some mainframe stuff is still in use, we had certainly to work that aspect.
If I had gotten the task to convert our applications to a modern GUI like MFC or GTK or QT, heck, I probably would have had written a modern-gui to old-StarView interface layer, because of the sheer giant heaps of present code that use the old interface. So better have a good look at the structure of your intended X-plattform GUI before you start a large task with it. You might never have the chance to get rid of it, without starting to rewrite the app.
And similiar to the experience I had with Java, it was only seldom the case that I could just stick to developping under one operating system, eg Win32, and expect the version for the other platform, say OS/2 to need no fine tuning. There were issues with the fonts and other system specific glitches.
Please forget that it is not only the different GUI you have to face when working X-plattform. No it is different tools too.
A Microsoft Compiler under NT does not speak the same C++ as a Borland Compiler or Visual Age under OS/2 does. So if you want to use modern features like exceptions or even templates you are in for a lot extra fun.
My personal favourite for least headaches is using gcc together with GTK whereever possible.
Yes I still prefer C and C++. While Java seems to have matured a lot, I still consider it a joke for everything larger than an applet. Emacs does better as a X-plattfrom VM. :)
Yep. And the bots themselves are after all just another system that is likely to have security vulnerabilities.
It will certainly get attacked with the intention to blind or corrupt it.
The psychic power of Akira seems to be that he can ignite a Big Bang. The explosion bubble that comes up is rather a new universe thus.
Unfortunately that gives quite a huge mess if one tries that amidst the city of Tokyo.
The main story line is of course the friendship between Kaneda and Tetsuo. Plus we have the rebels misused by some political game of power (that weazel like guy). Plus lot of other stuff, including motor bike gangs. Folks that don't comply to the strict social rules of Japanese society. Drugs use. Orphans. Sex. Violance. Mutants. Oribital laser stations. The usual. :)
Or what part else was unclear?
They stream Star Blazers on some internet site. Read this article about it.
Maison Ikkoku and Inu Yasha are very good series. Ranma 1/2 was very good in the beginning but gets very silly later. Lum (Urusei Yatsura) however was silly (but nice) from the beginning. The mermaid series is very dark.
While I like the stories and characters very much, the art is light years away from the great art of Masamune Shirow or Akira's Katsuhiro Otomo or Johji Manabe (Outlanders - aah those space crafts..)
Same holds for Dragon Ball. Beautiful comedy and interesting fights and I really like it. But it is not in the same artistic league. Not to mention some of the European masters like Andre Franquin, Moebius, Christin/Mezieres, Vance/Van Hamme, Lawrence/Lodewijk, Kuipers and so on.
Interesting side note. Someone told me that Rumiko Takahashi managed to get Japan's richest woman with her art. Anyone knows if this is true?
Akira lists more studios in its credits than most films list individual artists. The art is superb. I am lucky to have the British collectors video, with one tap subtitled film and one tape with the making of documentary. Guess that beats the DVD available in Germany.
I had the luck to see the movie two times in cinema. That is a huge difference to the video. Very good is the scene where one of the characters falls from a twin skyskraper. All the little windows drawn - faboulous. Another thing is that this movie does a black/yellow/orange color scheme to portray night scences apart from the Terminator black/blue color scheme. I also liked the scene where Tetsu is put into that scanning aparatus with the two detector rings.
Ghost in the Shell is less advanced graphically. You see several cheap computer animations. Im am not sure if Akira contains computer graphics at all (heck, I have to rewatch the making of :). The best scene of Ghost in the shell is the making of Major Kusanagi as an android. Plus I love the views of the city in the rain, with the many Kanji characters and rain plus the very stylish music.
Like I wrote above, the story lines are far away from the complex sometimes philosophical story lines of the orininal manga comic book series.
So don*t forget to read the mangas!
Akira: I found this to be the best anime movie I have ever watched... be warned, however, that you can not watch it on a small screen in ugly quality... I unfortunately first watched it on my comp in 320x240 mpeg format, not good enough, I've beat myself ever since... the cinematic value is incredible, thus I wish I had watched it on a 15x40 foot screen ina theatre or something...
Why do you watch mpegs? Is that pirated stuff?