As some of the postings throw everything together, there is 1) Java the OOP language, there is 2) the huge runtime library of classes and 3) there is the virtual machine that interprets the byte code OR the compiler that creates a native executable from either bytecode or source code.
So, if speed is a problem, try compiling into a native executable. What's new (compared to C, as an example) is the fact that no platform-dependent problems will arise when programming, so you don't have to do a thousand ifdef checks to see how large an int variable is. If it wasn't for these nasty problems, C would also be a great platform-independent programming language (well, not great:-)).
The RTL is a huge plus IMHO - all basic stuff is already there and it works.
The XML approach is much better from a technical point of view. With XML you can specify the structure of documents in the DTD and you simply need one of the many XML libraries to actually parse the data (and even detect errors). If word processing creators would not agree on a single DTD but create their own (which is the most probable thing to happen), you can specify a conversion scheme using a query language and even convert XML word processor documents between the DTD's automatically -- if every element in the source DTD has an equivalent element in the destination DTD.
With products as XMill it is even possible to compress XML documents very welll so that the additional markup won't result in bloated files.
Binary proprietary formats are only good for keeping the structure secret and competitors out of the race. I wonder why Microsoft opened up theirs... Maybe it has become complicated enough so that nobody tries to create a filter! Or the descriptions do not contain 100 percent of the file format or wrong information... Yes, that's a bit paranoid, I know. Anyone from the KOffice team here to give us some insight?!
1) free map data from all over the world and 2) a program to display that data, preferably in Java?
I only know about commercial products, even for the Psion 5mx (and someone mentioned the Palm), but no free ones. I guess it's hard to get the map data digitized without 'stealing' it from proprietary software.
I don't think so. Your typical AOL user wants Windows applications because their friends have them. They will not want to have to make sure their hardware is supported by the OS. They are people for whom everything must run out of the box. That's one of the few points where Windows is still better than other OS's, simply because of their market share.
Let's say someone posted a comment on the Hellmouth topic on slashdot.org, the comment got included in the book and the original author of the comment doesn't like it. Also, it is really important for that person that the comment is not included.
How does one make sure that the person that is claiming to have written the comment really is the author? It's impossible IMHO, so in the very improbable case that someone will make a trial out of this, there is no basis...
What I cannot quite understand is that the people running slashdot haven't made it absolutely clear (and legally correct, I guess they have the money to pay some lawyers) that content published here can be republished in any form.
FYI: With Suse 6.4, I could for the first time flawlessly update from a previous Suse installation. So for those of you having experienced similar problems and who are unsure about getting 6.4, you might want to give it a try. Of course my single experience still isn't a guarantee...
Another hint: AFAIK, you must use the old text-based yast for updating, yast2 (the graphical version) is only for a new install. Correct me if I'm wrong here...
Re:GIF won't die without an animation replacement
on
Unisys Cracks The Whip
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· Score: 2
I meant IE and Netscape in their various flavors - together, they make up most people's browsers (in terms of market share).
And I do think one or more wrongly displayed images can hurt the usefulness of a site. If transparency fails all over the page, it looks ugly. And unnecessary, such a bug shouldn't be too hard to fix.
Some postings here said that folks are glad PNG doesn't have animation support, but I'm afraid one has to see it from the other side -- as long as there is no MNG support (which is a format for animation and has some things in common, see http://www.cdrom.com/pub/mng/) everywhere, GIF will stay. Web site creators want animations, and they want their stuff to display on most people's browsers, so they will take GIF. They don't give a damn about Unisys' behaviour, they paid for their software (probably;-)) and they want to get things done.
The only way to really let GIF die (IMHO) is to create a free MNG library that can be easily included everywhere (like libpng) and put it into all free or semi-free browsers like Netscape, kfm, whatever. Once web site creators start using it, users will ask for MNG support (Ma, the animation doesn't display!) and IE will have it as well. Best thing would be a free GIMP-like animation editor...
Sorry, but I have to step in here. Buffy is/not only/ for kids (or guys watching that cute slayer), it has a great sense of humour in it. You don't have to like it, but there is a bit more to the show than just the fighting scenes or crappy F/X. For me, it's the same reason I watch the X-Files these days: dialogue between the main characters is fun, the rest is the same stuff we've already seen many times. All very subjective, of course...
Re:Is Anybody Really Using Java? (Honestly!)
on
Swing
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· Score: 2
The behaviour depends/very much/ on your JRE (Java Runtime Environment) and system.
This means for the IBM-PC world: if you use a relatively modern system (P-II 266+) with enough RAM (64 MB+) and a 1.2+ JRE (1.3 RC-2 is out already) things should work out well. Yes, these requirements are still not matched by every system out there, but at least it is possible to use Java without waiting for that menu to pop up (I've experienced that myself some time ago).
Java was a great chance to make a C++ that people could understand without going through the mental contortions that currently plaugue it. At first glance it looks a lot nicer, but when you take a closer look it is just as bad, but with long keywords rather than obscure symbols. When you have classes peppered with "abstract", "final" and so on, and methods with "synchronized" etc. you start to wonder what exactly all this "synchronized final void foo()" is all about.
You get into this very fast. These modifiers are used in a consistent way, and you have public/published/protected/private in about any other OOP language as well. Final is a method that cannot be overridden, abstract is one that has to be overridden in heirs. I haven't created a multithreaded app yet, so I'm not so sure about the synchronized thing;-)
... at least at Amzaon.com, 40 at ThinkGeek (who don't seem to have a site search engine at their introductory page; argh). Not that the price was unusual, but it should be part of the review IMHO. The price still makes a difference for some of us...
The category is not about who integrates some new kind of effect, it's about the overall impression you get. And Ep I had a lot of effects which were seen before, but not in that perfection and not in that number. I agree with the original poster that Ep I was robbed, although Denis Muren and his ILM folks must have about a gazillion statuettes already, so they will get over it;-)
Unfortunately, every member (even 90-year old actors that would not recognize a special effect if it jumps on their head) of the Academy can vote for the award, only the nominations are determined by specialists on the field for each category. I guess Academy members dislike George Lucas because of the commercial success of his films... And they may remember that any other Star Wars film has received the Award, so they might think it's alright to give it to someone else this time.
The Awards have a long history of giving statuettes away for the wrong reasons...
It's a GPL'd Pascal compiler for Linux x86 (and Win32 and OS/2 and...) that is very compatible with Borland Pascal and Delphi - but it's command line only at the moment.
A frontend for visual development is being created with the Lazarus project.
Visit www.freepascal.org and support the developers! They're trying to port FP to other platforms than x86 to make a tool that is not only available on the strategically important systems... Not that this is wrong, Borland has to make money of it!
There is a PDF viewer at tucows.com for EPOC (e.g. Psion devices), which is a port of xpdf. I guess that program takes some MB's of memory, which might be too much for a Palm. Or just nobody ported it to Palm OS.
Go see the EPOC version's homepage at http://www.xs4all.nl/~svdwal/Pdf/Pdf.htm
Suggestion: XML for base version of etexts
on
King's New eBook
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· Score: 2
If you leave aside the copyright issue (which is probably different for any other country), I suggest to standardize DTD's for all kinds of texts (novel, short story, poem, song lyrics, play) and convert the existing etexts to XML.
Although there are tons of texts available, most of them are distributed as HTML with lots of unncessary layout. Often they are split over many small HTML files which makes it hard to download them (not everybody has low online costs).
Once you have them stored as XML files you can create different XSL files to view them the way you like them or print them if that's what you want. In combination with an XML parser it might also be very easy to convert them to some proprietary binary etext or word processing format (if you really need that). With the transformation language for XML it might even be possible to automatically convert a complete novel to LaTeX and get some nice PostScript file!
Is compression software in a category that inherently plateus quickly, so that significant further work simply isn't possible? Or is there some other reason, such as Real Life(tm) intruding and preventing any substantial development?
Algorithms differ in what they offer at what price:
there are very fast compressors out there that result in average compression (lzop),
compressors with good ratios at high CPU and memory costs (bzip2)
specialized compressors that work only well on one class of data (e.g. XMill for XML files)
Gzip is a good general-purpose compressor with the additional quality of being written in C and availalbe under the GPL.
Hmm... While I see that there are some prominent German KDE developers, I seriously doubt that it has a 'German' look. Too many other people involved there... And I really think many things simply look a lot like the Windows GUI (which is basically a good thing IMHO). But that's very subjective. Could it be that KDE resembles whatever QT has to offer?!
Slashdot Mirror
As some of the postings throw everything together, there is 1) Java the OOP language, there is 2) the huge runtime library of classes and 3) there is the virtual machine that interprets the byte code OR the compiler that creates a native executable from either bytecode or source code.
:-)).
So, if speed is a problem, try compiling into a native executable. What's new (compared to C, as an example) is the fact that no platform-dependent problems will arise when programming, so you don't have to do a thousand ifdef checks to see how large an int variable is. If it wasn't for these nasty problems, C would also be a great platform-independent programming language (well, not great
The RTL is a huge plus IMHO - all basic stuff is already there and it works.
The XML approach is much better from a technical point of view. With XML you can specify the structure of documents in the DTD and you simply need one of the many XML libraries to actually parse the data (and even detect errors). If word processing creators would not agree on a single DTD but create their own (which is the most probable thing to happen), you can specify a conversion scheme using a query language and even convert XML word processor documents between the DTD's automatically -- if every element in the source DTD has an equivalent element in the destination DTD.
With products as XMill it is even possible to compress XML documents very welll so that the additional markup won't result in bloated files.
Binary proprietary formats are only good for keeping the structure secret and competitors out of the race. I wonder why Microsoft opened up theirs... Maybe it has become complicated enough so that nobody tries to create a filter! Or the descriptions do not contain 100 percent of the file format or wrong information... Yes, that's a bit paranoid, I know. Anyone from the KOffice team here to give us some insight?!
Is there any sort of a project that has
1) free map data from all over the world and
2) a program to display that data, preferably in Java?
I only know about commercial products, even for the Psion 5mx (and someone mentioned the Palm), but no free ones. I guess it's hard to get the map data digitized without 'stealing' it from proprietary software.
Wait for Media Player 7, which will add lots of useless visual crap (don't know about banners, though).
It was announced for the first quarter of 2000, but nothing ever happened... ;-(
I don't think so. Your typical AOL user wants Windows applications because their friends have them. They will not want to have to make sure their hardware is supported by the OS. They are people for whom everything must run out of the box. That's one of the few points where Windows is still better than other OS's, simply because of their market share.
Let's say someone posted a comment on the Hellmouth topic on slashdot.org, the comment got included in the book and the original author of the comment doesn't like it. Also, it is really important for that person that the comment is not included.
How does one make sure that the person that is claiming to have written the comment really is the author? It's impossible IMHO, so in the very improbable case that someone will make a trial out of this, there is no basis...
What I cannot quite understand is that the people running slashdot haven't made it absolutely clear (and legally correct, I guess they have the money to pay some lawyers) that content published here can be republished in any form.
FYI: With Suse 6.4, I could for the first time flawlessly update from a previous Suse installation. So for those of you having experienced similar problems and who are unsure about getting 6.4, you might want to give it a try. Of course my single experience still isn't a guarantee...
Another hint: AFAIK, you must use the old text-based yast for updating, yast2 (the graphical version) is only for a new install. Correct me if I'm wrong here...
I meant IE and Netscape in their various flavors - together, they make up most people's browsers (in terms of market share).
And I do think one or more wrongly displayed images can hurt the usefulness of a site. If transparency fails all over the page, it looks ugly. And unnecessary, such a bug shouldn't be too hard to fix.
Some postings here said that folks are glad PNG doesn't have animation support, but I'm afraid one has to see it from the other side -- as long as there is no MNG support (which is a format for animation and has some things in common, see http://www.cdrom.com/pub/mng/) everywhere, GIF will stay. Web site creators want animations, and they want their stuff to display on most people's browsers, so they will take GIF. They don't give a damn about Unisys' behaviour, they paid for their software (probably ;-)) and they want to get things done.
The only way to really let GIF die (IMHO) is to create a free MNG library that can be easily included everywhere (like libpng) and put it into all free or semi-free browsers like Netscape, kfm, whatever. Once web site creators start using it, users will ask for MNG support (Ma, the animation doesn't display!) and IE will have it as well. Best thing would be a free GIMP-like animation editor...
Sorry, but I have to step in here. Buffy is /not only/ for kids (or guys watching that cute slayer), it has a great sense of humour in it. You don't have to like it, but there is a bit more to the show than just the fighting scenes or crappy F/X. For me, it's the same reason I watch the X-Files these days: dialogue between the main characters is fun, the rest is the same stuff we've already seen many times. All very subjective, of course...
The behaviour depends /very much/ on your JRE (Java Runtime Environment) and system.
This means for the IBM-PC world: if you use a relatively modern system (P-II 266+) with enough RAM (64 MB+) and a 1.2+ JRE (1.3 RC-2 is out already) things should work out well. Yes, these requirements are still not matched by every system out there, but at least it is possible to use Java without waiting for that menu to pop up (I've experienced that myself some time ago).
Java was a great chance to make a C++ that people could understand without going through the mental contortions that currently plaugue it. At first glance it looks a lot nicer, but when you take a closer look it is just as bad, but with long keywords rather than obscure symbols. When you have classes peppered with "abstract", "final" and so on, and methods with "synchronized" etc. you start to wonder what exactly all this "synchronized final void foo()" is all about.
You get into this very fast. These modifiers are used in a consistent way, and you have public/published/protected/private in about any other OOP language as well. Final is a method that cannot be overridden, abstract is one that has to be overridden in heirs. I haven't created a multithreaded app yet, so I'm not so sure about the synchronized thing
Sure, but it's interesting to know if the books falls in the US-$ 20, 40 or 60 category.
;-(
I found a very promising book recently only to learn that it costs US-$ 70
... at least at Amzaon.com, 40 at ThinkGeek (who don't seem to have a site search engine at their introductory page; argh). Not that the price was unusual, but it should be part of the review IMHO. The price still makes a difference for some of us...
The category is not about who integrates some new kind of effect, it's about the overall impression you get. And Ep I had a lot of effects which were seen before, but not in that perfection and not in that number. I agree with the original poster that Ep I was robbed, although Denis Muren and his ILM folks must have about a gazillion statuettes already, so they will get over it ;-)
Unfortunately, every member (even 90-year old actors that would not recognize a special effect if it jumps on their head) of the Academy can vote for the award, only the nominations are determined by specialists on the field for each category. I guess Academy members dislike George Lucas because of the commercial success of his films... And they may remember that any other Star Wars film has received the Award, so they might think it's alright to give it to someone else this time.
The Awards have a long history of giving statuettes away for the wrong reasons...
You can also get it as text in alt.books.stephen-king - the group finally lives up to its name ;-)
The name of the thread is "Re: Copy/Paste RTB from here".
It's a GPL'd Pascal compiler for Linux x86 (and Win32 and OS/2 and...) that is very compatible with Borland Pascal and Delphi - but it's command line only at the moment.
A frontend for visual development is being created with the Lazarus project.
Visit www.freepascal.org and support the developers! They're trying to port FP to other platforms than x86 to make a tool that is not only available on the strategically important systems... Not that this is wrong, Borland has to make money of it!
I don't want to start a flamewar, but what exactly is supposed to replace huge reliable Unix systems to run corporate databases, web servers etc.?!
While I'm unsure about Unix' (Linux') future on the desktop, I'm very confident about the professional part of the computer world.
There is a PDF viewer at tucows.com for EPOC (e.g. Psion devices), which is a port of xpdf. I guess that program takes some MB's of memory, which might be too much for a Palm. Or just nobody ported it to Palm OS.
Go see the EPOC version's homepage at http://www.xs4all.nl/~svdwal/Pdf/Pdf.htm
If you leave aside the copyright issue (which is probably different for any other country), I suggest to standardize DTD's for all kinds of texts (novel, short story, poem, song lyrics, play) and convert the existing etexts to XML.
Although there are tons of texts available, most of them are distributed as HTML with lots of unncessary layout. Often they are split over many small HTML files which makes it hard to download them (not everybody has low online costs).
Once you have them stored as XML files you can create different XSL files to view them the way you like them or print them if that's what you want. In combination with an XML parser it might also be very easy to convert them to some proprietary binary etext or word processing format (if you really need that). With the transformation language for XML it might even be possible to automatically convert a complete novel to LaTeX and get some nice PostScript file!
Algorithms differ in what they offer at what price:
Gzip is a good general-purpose compressor with the additional quality of being written in C and availalbe under the GPL.
So you have to choose according to your needs.
Hmm... While I see that there are some prominent German KDE developers, I seriously doubt that it has a 'German' look. Too many other people involved there... And I really think many things simply look a lot like the Windows GUI (which is basically a good thing IMHO). But that's very subjective. Could it be that KDE resembles whatever QT has to offer?!
I felt that KDE was too ``german'' in it's looks and feels (no offence meant to germans, but I'm sure some of you know what I mean).
Um, care to explain it to the rest of us?!
Very interesting list indeed, although a bit US-specific.
;-) And no, they're not ten years old!
Except for one thing:
They can't imagine what hard contact lenses are.
I'm wearing some right now