Sure -- you can buy a commercial license. Then you can embed to your heart's content. Still, in the end, you never own the code -- you're constrained in what you can do with it.
Being GPL is not nearly as nice as being BSD. That's a big advantage of PostgreSQL (but not MySQL). In other words, if you want to sell an application which includes an embedded DB, then GPL is no good.
As far as I know, PostgreSQL is the only truly free database (in this licensing sense).
But I could be wrong -- I'm standing by to be corrected...
Was there a particular reason to be insulting Bush? Or is that just sort of taken as given -- that we all hate Bush?
Re:The paralyzing FEAR of wrong choices
on
wxWindows vs. MFC
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· Score: 1
Write solid code for any platform of your choice, it will only take you a fraction of the time to re-do your UI for other platforms you plan to target.
It's important to make wise choices about development platforms, because it takes a significant amount of time to master a development platform. For example, little that you learn in mastering MFC will carry over to a different GUI system (say, Qt, Java, etc.). So, it's wise to think strategically up front. A single person developing alone has only so much bandwidth -- you don't want to squander it uselessly. Once you've mastered your development platform, you can pour your efforts into your unique creation, and be highly effective. But mastering the platform can be very time consuming, and frustrating.
So, think alot about your development platform, and think strategically.
From what I can tell, I'd say go with wxWindows
on
wxWindows vs. MFC
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Sounds like you've got a pet project you'd like to develop in order to get your feet wet. Which I heartily recommend. And maybe it will lead to bigger and better things, as time goes on -- maybe even commercial possibilities -- who knows? Or if not, at least it will be fun.
I've used MFC and wxWindows quite alot. MFC is quite primitive by comparison to wxWindows -- the MFC design is old, and it shows. For example, try making a resizeable dialog in MFC! If you use MFC, you'll be stuck with Windows. Porting the app to wxWindows (or any other GUI framework) will be non-trivial -- you'll be writing from scratch, using your MFC app as a model. Not that that would be all bad -- it's one way to iterate toward a good design. But really, there are faster ways to get to a good design. So, MFC is basically bad, mostly because it ties to you Windows, and secondly because the GUI framework is excessively primitive.
wxWindows is free. Not GPL -- just plain old free, almost anyway (you'll have to read the fine print -- I think you have to give attribution, etc -- but there is no restriction on selling your creation). That trumps Qt, which is a much GUI framework (on technical merits alone, Qt is hands-down the best C++ framework that I've seen). The problem with Qt is that you must decide up-front whether you're going to create a forever-free (GPL-style) app, or whether you might want to charge for it some day. If you start creating it as a free app, it must forever remain so. What a horrible license. So, for most small-time operators with potential commercial aspirations, that puts Qt firmly out of reach (their developer's license is, or was, around $1000).
If you go with wxWindows, then by all means you _must_ get wxDesigner - a proprietary GUI builder. I think it's $50-$100 or so (it was $50 when I bought it). What a great program! Once you become fluent with the layout paradigm (which I found to be quite natural), you'll be very productive with it -- much more productive than with MFC.
Well, I could go on and on.
A couple of quick thoughts: As someone else pointed out -- you should probably check out wxPython, which makes the wxWindows API available to Python. You'd probably be alot more productive that way -- development with C++ can be very slow (especially on Linux!). If you go the wxPython route, you'll be able to reuse all your GUI design -- wxDesigner can produce both C++ and Python code.
In short, if you want to have fun, and explore the world of GUI programming, stay away from MFC. It has little to offer. If you want the best, and you're ready to GPL your software, go with Qt, which is the best GUI framework hands-down. If you want to keep your options open, especially in terms of which platforms you want to deliver on, then go with wxWindows (and look into wxPython).
Yes, but have you ever seen a Windows PC preloaded with that software? It might not be feasible, license-wise -- I don't understand the GPL well enough to know for sure, though...
I wouldn't suggest VNC -- at least for Windows. It is just _too_slow_! I mean, it's perfectly fine for doing odd jobs. But you'd never want to use it as your main user interface!
Of course, another advantage of a PC, vs a canned hardware device (if you know what you're doing) is that you can do alot more (e.g. play Ogg files, or do remote control with your browser, or play Internet radio, or whatever you can think of).
But at $100 -- you're right -- its getting close to the point where I might just buy one to have a quickie solution.
On the other hand, I hvae about 10 old PC's laying around -- I have to think of _something_ to do with them!
I use a dedicated computer in my stereo cabinet for that purpose. It has no keyboard, mouse or monitor -- its controlled via VNC. Cost, including shipping, was around $50.
It's a bit of a pain having to boot it up each time I want to use it. But I've found it works fine to just power the thing off (without doing a shutdown).
It would be nice if I could set it up so it would start playing the last-played playlist automatically after booting. You'd turn it on, and a couple minutes later, it would start playing something. No need for VNC access until you want to change playlists. That would be nice...
I think the general idea of using a web browser as an application front-end is a very good idea. Mozilla has pioneered this idea with XUL. A XUL page consists of widgets, plus JavaScript as the control language, plus hooks to regular HTML, custom widgets (XBL), and (eventually) vector graphics (SVG). I'll be interested to see how Flash's product compares.
Of course, Mozilla is Open Source (with a more forgiving license -- MPL -- than the GPL), which is a big advantage over anything Flash will produce.
Gnutella isn't truly self-discovering. You need the address of at least one other Gnutella node to get hooked in. Perhaps there is some novelty in terms of the self-balancing mechanics, but I wouldn't be surprised to find even that isn't novel.
And if self-discovery is the key ingredient, then that definitely eliminates Napster and SETI@Home.
Personally, I think the term P2P is best thought of in socio-political terms, rather than technological terms. It refers to a program (or a system of programs) designed to run on large numbers of PCs, doing things traditionally only done by servers. It empowers the Common Man -- letting groups of like-minded Common Men (ok, People) do things which traditionally required a powerful, expensive, legally-constrained central server.
On that basis, DNS and UUCP clearly fail. So do FTP, telnet, and NetMeeting. Gnutella and FreeNet are clearly in. SETI@Home and Napster are not clearly in (they require that central server, even though the power comes from millions of the Common Man).
I basically agree with ESR. But I think he neglects another important phenomenon -- households with multiple PC's. It has already become prohibitive for me, for example, to upgrade all my PC's to XP. I'm often running 5 PCs at home (mine, my wife's, the stereo, the basement file-server-cum-backup-box, and our daughter's). My sister has 4 networked PCs. Yes, some of these PCs are sort of slow (133 MHz), but they do the job!
Upgrading just these to XP would be absurd, cost-wise. Realising that I will never be able to afford the Windows upgrade path, I've begun experimenting using Linux. In the long run, it will mean I will always be able to afford an up-to-date OS. I mean, come _on_ -- I can buy a 133 MHz, 1 GB machine for $50, including shipping! Paying anything for the OS in that case looks like a pretty ridiculous proposition.
So it's not just that new PCs are getting cheaper, but also the advent of home networks with many older PCs. The average number of PCs per household is (I imagine) increasing.
OK -- let's look at the case where the same nodes are both client and server. That's exactly how DNS or UUCP "servers" work. With DNS, the "peers" are distributing a huge dynamic database of IP addresses. With UUCP, they're distributing messages. In both cases, the peers are symmetrical -- same "binaries" running on all machines (of course, the machines may be different architectures, running different versions of the software, etc., so they're not really the same binaries -- but you know what I mean...)
But, you may argue, DNS and UUCP aren't truly P2P, because they themselves are servers. Is that the only thing which differentiates the new wave of P2P apps? The fact that they are monolithic? What if you split a Gnutella client into two parts -- a "server" which does the communication with other Gnutella nodes, and a "client" which is the GUI front-end? In that case, you'd have a system which was pretty much exactly analogous to UUCP and DNS. Especially if you could run the Gnutella client on a different machine from the Gnutella server.
So how is Gnutella different, exactly? What if you made a combined UUCP client-and-server? You use the same program to both connect other UUCP nodes (downloading newsgroups or whatever), and to read the news. Would _that_ be a full-fledged P2P app? If so, the definition for P2P seems pretty lame.
Is the P2P innovation merely the integration of a traditional server with a traditional client?
If FTP is client-server, then Gnutella & Co. must be too. You select a file from a list of available files on a remote machine, and download it. And if NetMeeting is P2P, then so is telnet: you're invoking a communication channel directly to a remote machine.
Not that there's anything wrong with client-server. Or P2P. But what do the terms really mean? Perhaps client-server is more usefully described as a system where a 3rd party (the "server") intermediates, while P2P requires only the 2 directly-involved machines. So, ICQ is client-server, to the extent that a message is sent to a 3rd party (an ICQ server), before being retrieved by the recipient. (Of course, ICQ communications can also be P2P).
Or is P2P really a statement about a web of peers acting in concert? This becomes a bit problematical -- is DNS P2P? Is UUCP? Perhaps what distinguishes P2P is that the participants need to be the only players (i.e. not themselves acting as servers)? But now we're really splitting hairs.
Perhaps P2P just isn't a new phenomenon at all. It seems that as soon as you try to really define it, it disappears on you!
Should I be RESPONSIBLE to support this shit ? To an entity that is making money off it ? AND then have them ACT LIKE IM OBLIGED TO ?
Sounds like a good opportunity for you to do some paid consulting. It seems to me it's a good thing, for you and everyone else, if money can be made off of your code. It's just a matter of negotiating a reasonable arrangement with the people doing the marketing...
One thing which I'd _really_ like to see is a book which surveys all the great Open Source projects. It would have a chapter on each of the, say, 20 major areas (e.g. databases, GUI frameworks, encryption, games, etc.). For each project, it would give a history, the scope (size, etc), the license, how active it is, what the mailing lists/websites of interest are, etc. Ideally, it would give insights into the direction of the project, with short interviews.
Such a book could easily become a yearly series -- a Farmer's Almanac of software. Sounds like a good little earner to me...
I, for one, plan to switch the family network over to Linux as soon as all our critical Windows apps can be reliably run. At that point, we'll be buying Linux-only software. But we'd buy Windows software which we knew to be Wine-compatible.
Has there been any thought put into that marketing idea by the Wine project? It seems like it could be a money maker, for one thing. Companies would pay to have their apps checked out for Wine compatibility, purchasing the right to display the Wine-Ready logo.
If you have a better idea of what to label that checkbox, I'd be glad to read it -- there's been a lot of suggestions so far, but they've all been either too wordy, too obscure, or (as in your case) just plain wrong.
How about "Enable pop-ups/pop-unders"?
I think that would neatly capture the intent of this checkbox. In fact, what would be particularly nice about it is that, as time goes on, and other means are developed for defeating "pop-ups" (whatever people come to understand that to mean), it would be possible to roll that functionality into that pre-existing checkbox.
Actually, here's what I _really_ think. You should leave all that fine-grained JavaScript control stuff as it is, and where it is (under Advanced). What is needed is an "enable pop-ups/pop-unders" checkbox in, say, the main navigator preferences screen. This is a "digestified" function, i.e. it may do various things, which are not precisely-defined, but whose intent is to defeat what people commonly refer to as "pop-ups" or "pop-unders".
When you teach them to use software that is completely irrelevant outside of school, you are crippling them for life as they have to retrain themselves on all the applications that school had taught them in order to use something as commonplace as Office.
Crippling them for life? By teaching them something? Kids are smarter than you give them credit for. So are adults.
What kids need to learn about computers is not what keystroke combination does what in Application X. Teach them the principles of computer operation.
Open source, in my opinion, is of immense use in education, precisely because it is open. Students can not only learn to use apps, but can delve as far into the system as their curiosity takes them.
Schools should not be vocational training centers (for the most part). I mean, sure, there could be a Microsoft Office class, to learn how to use that software suite. That would be a vocational class, and it could have its place. But it shouldn't be the focus. Schools should not be fundamentally vocational.
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Sure -- you can buy a commercial license. Then you can embed to your heart's content. Still, in the end, you never own the code -- you're constrained in what you can do with it.
Being GPL is not nearly as nice as being BSD. That's a big advantage of PostgreSQL (but not MySQL). In other words, if you want to sell an application which includes an embedded DB, then GPL is no good.
As far as I know, PostgreSQL is the only truly free database (in this licensing sense).
But I could be wrong -- I'm standing by to be corrected...
Was there a particular reason to be insulting Bush? Or is that just sort of taken as given -- that we all hate Bush?
So, think alot about your development platform, and think strategically.
Sounds like you've got a pet project you'd like to develop in order to get your feet wet. Which I heartily recommend. And maybe it will lead to bigger and better things, as time goes on -- maybe even commercial possibilities -- who knows? Or if not, at least it will be fun.
I've used MFC and wxWindows quite alot. MFC is quite primitive by comparison to wxWindows -- the MFC design is old, and it shows. For example, try making a resizeable dialog in MFC! If you use MFC, you'll be stuck with Windows. Porting the app to wxWindows (or any other GUI framework) will be non-trivial -- you'll be writing from scratch, using your MFC app as a model. Not that that would be all bad -- it's one way to iterate toward a good design. But really, there are faster ways to get to a good design. So, MFC is basically bad, mostly because it ties to you Windows, and secondly because the GUI framework is excessively primitive.
wxWindows is free. Not GPL -- just plain old free, almost anyway (you'll have to read the fine print -- I think you have to give attribution, etc -- but there is no restriction on selling your creation). That trumps Qt, which is a much GUI framework (on technical merits alone, Qt is hands-down the best C++ framework that I've seen). The problem with Qt is that you must decide up-front whether you're going to create a forever-free (GPL-style) app, or whether you might want to charge for it some day. If you start creating it as a free app, it must forever remain so. What a horrible license. So, for most small-time operators with potential commercial aspirations, that puts Qt firmly out of reach (their developer's license is, or was, around $1000).
If you go with wxWindows, then by all means you _must_ get wxDesigner - a proprietary GUI builder. I think it's $50-$100 or so (it was $50 when I bought it). What a great program! Once you become fluent with the layout paradigm (which I found to be quite natural), you'll be very productive with it -- much more productive than with MFC.
Well, I could go on and on.
A couple of quick thoughts: As someone else pointed out -- you should probably check out wxPython, which makes the wxWindows API available to Python. You'd probably be alot more productive that way -- development with C++ can be very slow (especially on Linux!). If you go the wxPython route, you'll be able to reuse all your GUI design -- wxDesigner can produce both C++ and Python code.
In short, if you want to have fun, and explore the world of GUI programming, stay away from MFC. It has little to offer. If you want the best, and you're ready to GPL your software, go with Qt, which is the best GUI framework hands-down. If you want to keep your options open, especially in terms of which platforms you want to deliver on, then go with wxWindows (and look into wxPython).
Yes, but have you ever seen a Windows PC preloaded with that software? It might not be feasible, license-wise -- I don't understand the GPL well enough to know for sure, though...
> Of course, I don't know why you wouldn't just pop in a bootdisk...
Because then you can flip back and forth between Windows and Linux... (a Poor Man's VMWare)
Yes -- at least over a local net, XFree86 is fantastic! Never tried it over the Internet, though. How well does that work out?
I wouldn't suggest VNC -- at least for Windows. It is just _too_slow_! I mean, it's perfectly fine for doing odd jobs. But you'd never want to use it as your main user interface!
Of course, another advantage of a PC, vs a canned hardware device (if you know what you're doing) is that you can do alot more (e.g. play Ogg files, or do remote control with your browser, or play Internet radio, or whatever you can think of).
But at $100 -- you're right -- its getting close to the point where I might just buy one to have a quickie solution.
On the other hand, I hvae about 10 old PC's laying around -- I have to think of _something_ to do with them!
I use a dedicated computer in my stereo cabinet for that purpose. It has no keyboard, mouse or monitor -- its controlled via VNC. Cost, including shipping, was around $50.
It's a bit of a pain having to boot it up each time I want to use it. But I've found it works fine to just power the thing off (without doing a shutdown).
It would be nice if I could set it up so it would start playing the last-played playlist automatically after booting. You'd turn it on, and a couple minutes later, it would start playing something. No need for VNC access until you want to change playlists. That would be nice...
Why would he want to do that?
I think the general idea of using a web browser as an application front-end is a very good idea. Mozilla has pioneered this idea with XUL. A XUL page consists of widgets, plus JavaScript as the control language, plus hooks to regular HTML, custom widgets (XBL), and (eventually) vector graphics (SVG). I'll be interested to see how Flash's product compares.
Of course, Mozilla is Open Source (with a more forgiving license -- MPL -- than the GPL), which is a big advantage over anything Flash will produce.
Two thoughts:
Gnutella isn't truly self-discovering. You need the address of at least one other Gnutella node to get hooked in. Perhaps there is some novelty in terms of the self-balancing mechanics, but I wouldn't be surprised to find even that isn't novel.
And if self-discovery is the key ingredient, then that definitely eliminates Napster and SETI@Home.
Personally, I think the term P2P is best thought of in socio-political terms, rather than technological terms. It refers to a program (or a system of programs) designed to run on large numbers of PCs, doing things traditionally only done by servers. It empowers the Common Man -- letting groups of like-minded Common Men (ok, People) do things which traditionally required a powerful, expensive, legally-constrained central server.
On that basis, DNS and UUCP clearly fail. So do FTP, telnet, and NetMeeting. Gnutella and FreeNet are clearly in. SETI@Home and Napster are not clearly in (they require that central server, even though the power comes from millions of the Common Man).
I basically agree with ESR. But I think he neglects another important phenomenon -- households with multiple PC's. It has already become prohibitive for me, for example, to upgrade all my PC's to XP. I'm often running 5 PCs at home (mine, my wife's, the stereo, the basement file-server-cum-backup-box, and our daughter's). My sister has 4 networked PCs. Yes, some of these PCs are sort of slow (133 MHz), but they do the job!
Upgrading just these to XP would be absurd, cost-wise. Realising that I will never be able to afford the Windows upgrade path, I've begun experimenting using Linux. In the long run, it will mean I will always be able to afford an up-to-date OS. I mean, come _on_ -- I can buy a 133 MHz, 1 GB machine for $50, including shipping! Paying anything for the OS in that case looks like a pretty ridiculous proposition.
So it's not just that new PCs are getting cheaper, but also the advent of home networks with many older PCs. The average number of PCs per household is (I imagine) increasing.
OK -- let's look at the case where the same nodes are both client and server. That's exactly how DNS or UUCP "servers" work. With DNS, the "peers" are distributing a huge dynamic database of IP addresses. With UUCP, they're distributing messages. In both cases, the peers are symmetrical -- same "binaries" running on all machines (of course, the machines may be different architectures, running different versions of the software, etc., so they're not really the same binaries -- but you know what I mean...)
But, you may argue, DNS and UUCP aren't truly P2P, because they themselves are servers. Is that the only thing which differentiates the new wave of P2P apps? The fact that they are monolithic? What if you split a Gnutella client into two parts -- a "server" which does the communication with other Gnutella nodes, and a "client" which is the GUI front-end? In that case, you'd have a system which was pretty much exactly analogous to UUCP and DNS. Especially if you could run the Gnutella client on a different machine from the Gnutella server.
So how is Gnutella different, exactly? What if you made a combined UUCP client-and-server? You use the same program to both connect other UUCP nodes (downloading newsgroups or whatever), and to read the news. Would _that_ be a full-fledged P2P app? If so, the definition for P2P seems pretty lame.
Is the P2P innovation merely the integration of a traditional server with a traditional client?
If FTP is client-server, then Gnutella & Co. must be too. You select a file from a list of available files on a remote machine, and download it. And if NetMeeting is P2P, then so is telnet: you're invoking a communication channel directly to a remote machine.
Not that there's anything wrong with client-server. Or P2P. But what do the terms really mean? Perhaps client-server is more usefully described as a system where a 3rd party (the "server") intermediates, while P2P requires only the 2 directly-involved machines. So, ICQ is client-server, to the extent that a message is sent to a 3rd party (an ICQ server), before being retrieved by the recipient. (Of course, ICQ communications can also be P2P).
Or is P2P really a statement about a web of peers acting in concert? This becomes a bit problematical -- is DNS P2P? Is UUCP? Perhaps what distinguishes P2P is that the participants need to be the only players (i.e. not themselves acting as servers)? But now we're really splitting hairs.
Perhaps P2P just isn't a new phenomenon at all. It seems that as soon as you try to really define it, it disappears on you!
The point is that there are gadzillions of x86 machines out there. Who wants to buy more hardware?
Sounds like a good opportunity for you to do some paid consulting. It seems to me it's a good thing, for you and everyone else, if money can be made off of your code. It's just a matter of negotiating a reasonable arrangement with the people doing the marketing...
One thing which I'd _really_ like to see is a book which surveys all the great Open Source projects. It would have a chapter on each of the, say, 20 major areas (e.g. databases, GUI frameworks, encryption, games, etc.). For each project, it would give a history, the scope (size, etc), the license, how active it is, what the mailing lists/websites of interest are, etc. Ideally, it would give insights into the direction of the project, with short interviews.
Such a book could easily become a yearly series -- a Farmer's Almanac of software. Sounds like a good little earner to me...
I, for one, plan to switch the family network over to Linux as soon as all our critical Windows apps can be reliably run. At that point, we'll be buying Linux-only software. But we'd buy Windows software which we knew to be Wine-compatible.
Has there been any thought put into that marketing idea by the Wine project? It seems like it could be a money maker, for one thing. Companies would pay to have their apps checked out for Wine compatibility, purchasing the right to display the Wine-Ready logo.
How about "Enable pop-ups/pop-unders"?
I think that would neatly capture the intent of this checkbox. In fact, what would be particularly nice about it is that, as time goes on, and other means are developed for defeating "pop-ups" (whatever people come to understand that to mean), it would be possible to roll that functionality into that pre-existing checkbox.
Actually, here's what I _really_ think. You should leave all that fine-grained JavaScript control stuff as it is, and where it is (under Advanced). What is needed is an "enable pop-ups/pop-unders" checkbox in, say, the main navigator preferences screen. This is a "digestified" function, i.e. it may do various things, which are not precisely-defined, but whose intent is to defeat what people commonly refer to as "pop-ups" or "pop-unders".
Crippling them for life? By teaching them something? Kids are smarter than you give them credit for. So are adults.
What kids need to learn about computers is not what keystroke combination does what in Application X. Teach them the principles of computer operation.
Open source, in my opinion, is of immense use in education, precisely because it is open. Students can not only learn to use apps, but can delve as far into the system as their curiosity takes them.
Schools should not be vocational training centers (for the most part). I mean, sure, there could be a Microsoft Office class, to learn how to use that software suite. That would be a vocational class, and it could have its place. But it shouldn't be the focus. Schools should not be fundamentally vocational.
Oh, so _that's_ why my browser's all screwed up! Time to patch the SlashDot code...