Window cloning is a poor substitute for the Netscape middle-mouse-click that opens a *different* page in a new window.
I use IE all the time and I never use window cloning, I use the pop-up menu that has an item (3rd one down, "open in a new window") and I wish every day that they had middle mouse click!
CIELab is not polar coordinates, the a and b are perpendicular axis that describe a location in the "hue" plane (L is the lightness). Hue is sometimes done as an angle but not here.
CIELab space is only perceptually uniform for very small distances. Ie a tiny distance would be considered "about equal in difference" anywhere in the space.
But over long distances it is an integral of all these small "about equal" values and that adds up to a very large variation in perceived distance, so it is not perceptually uniform for long distances.
In fact I suspect that such a perceptually uniform space could not be represented in three dimensions.
A better approach may be to take XYZ (which I think does represent the response of the cones in the human eye) and do a lot of math on the two XYZ sets to deliver an "amount different" value. Don't think about spaces, your goal is to produce this single number, losing the actual colors.
I am not sure if laws forcing companies to behave in a certain way (release all their interfaces) are a good idea. Laws directed at only monopolies like MicroSoft might work but only solves the problem for the monopolies. A solution I would prefer is that the government have a purchasing requirement that all interfaces used by any software and hardware they purchase be open and specified. Companies are then free to close their interfaces as long as they don't want to sell anything to the government.
Another thing driving me mad is that I can't select more keyboard key-bindings for *the same* action, for example to have Ctrl+V
and SHIFT+INS assigned to "Paste" operation. You know, those years on Winsuck wannabe-operating-system did their damage
on my personality.
If this is true, this is a disease that has been on Unix UI design since the first days. The problem is programming that says "what key does this?" rather than "what does this key do?". The main result is that only one key can do each action. Ever wonder why the terminal can't take *both* backspace and delete as erase? This stupidity has been around forever (it is also in lots of Windows programs that are configurable as well...)
However I am under the impression that KDE was pretty much fixed in it's key assignments, like Windows, and they have certainly copied Windows slavishly, so I am suprised if this is not working (it works on my Qt programs). If KDE 3.0 has botched it in some misguided attempt to allow the users to "configure" the key bindings, well, that is their mistake, and a bad one at that.
Nope, that is under the Posix subsystem. Any programs that run under that cannot make Win32 calls, which makes them virtually useless.
In case anybody else launches this bullshit, here is what a symbolic link under Windows should do:
Take a MicroSoft word document, and make a "symbolic link" to it. Lets call the linke "a.msw" and the word document "b.msw".
Without recompiling any programs, when MicroSoft Word opens "a" and opens "b" it gets the SAME document.
Also when you use VC++ and read in "a" and "b" into the debugger, you get the SAME binary dump.
And using VC++ and you make a program that reads both "a" and "b" and does a checksum of the entire contents, you get the SAME result. And you can rewrite the program to use open(), fopen(), or FileOpen(), and it still works. And you can recompile it with GCC under the cygwin libraries and it *still* works.
Got it? Don't make yourself look like an idiot by suggesting anything less and saying "they have symbolic links".
It is increasingly obvious that MicroSoft refuses to do this, and deleted functions that sort of worked (the MSDOS assign command) because it would allow Unix compatability. There is no other plausible reason for them to not implement a very simple addition.
Notice that I am talking about *symbolic* links. Unix "hard" links are unnecessary and definately user-unfriendly and there is no reason for Windows to copy them.
Old GL (from SGI before OpenGL) did have calls that created windows and read input devices. There was a design problem so that programs pretty much had to run busy loops and read variable devices, but the idea was there. Vastly simpler than X or Win32GDI. It is really too bad SGI did not think that these calls should be part of OpenGL.
On those old machines, which ran at maybe 5Mhz, the entire interface (buttons, menus, text editing, etc) was done in GL, and as far as I can tell it works as well as modern X does on 1000Mhz machines. And if you wanted 3D you did not have to learn anything new!
Also X seriously blows when even new input devices are considered, and these are things that were well known even when X was being designed (back then most graphics workstations had a bunch of dials and toggle switches and joysticks). The XDevice interface is a typical "extension" with enormously complex controls that NOBODY uses (this should be apparent as we were forced to make the mouse wheel pretend to click buttons 4 & 5 on the mouse, this interface was better and easier to program for than XDevice and without it I doubt you would see any mousewheel support on Linux).
GL (not OpenGL) had it pretty much right. There should be a call that is "tell me what all the devices are". Each device can produce a single value that is either a number or 0-1 true/false (ie a typical mouse is 5 devices: x, y, and three on/off buttons). Each device has a string name, and it is up to the program to figure out if a device is interesting (ending horizontal things with x and vertical things with y and other pseudo-standards would make this almost transparent to the user). The program can then say "I am interested in this device" and it now gets an X event every time that device changes value. SIMPLE!
There are more bits than normal CDROMs output to the computer. These are the "error correction" bits. Since the computer cannot see these bits it does not get all the data.
I think what they are really doing is they put enough errors in a sample that the CD player gives up and "interpolates" across the sample, but for some reason the data player does not do this, and does not report the fact that the sample has an error. It is also possible that the data players never use the error corrector bits but this would have made ripping scratched CD's a problem too, anybody know?
I expect it will be a very short time before "professional CD readers" are available that report all the bits, or at least report that a sample had too many errors to correct, and this scheme will be thwarted. Not only that, since only some people will be able to afford these expensive CD players, the normal user will be forced to go to the net to get an MP3 of a song, rather than copying their own disk, and this will actually reduce sales and increase piracy!
The problem is that the person who invented the zipper had the idea of using interlocking items on the two sides for months, or even years, ahead of time. That idea is obvious. There were literally hundreds of other manufacturers working on the same idea.
What the inventor did was figure out the exact shape and composition to make those interlocking things go together, stay together, and not come apart.
The problem with modern patents is that somebody can go (in software) and in effect patent the idea of making a device that holds the two edges together. They can then spend their idle time working on making the zipper actually work, or just sit on the idea and prevent anybody from inventing the zipper.
Apparently the common solution is to add a paragraph of "exceptions" to the start of the LGPL and say this is your license. The exceptions basically say "as a special exception to the following rules, you can statically link your program with the library and release it without source".
I don't like this, it is another license, and as far as I can tell the vast majority of people writing LGPL would be happy with this modification. I wish there was an official modification of LGPL to say this.
Forward/Back should be exactly like multiple windows. Use the same code to remember all items in the current history list as is used to keep track of the contents of many windows, and when the person moves between items in the history, jump to them just as though the user de-iconized the window.
If no-cache was a security problem then using the 2nd mouse button to avoid it would be a security problem. It isn't.
This would be great if it worked as I always use middle-mouse button to open another window just to avoid the page reload when I go back. If I could get this in a single window automatically I would be really happy!
The entire BIOS assembly code was printed in the manual for the IBM PC. The code was copyrighted so nobody could make a clone, but anybody could read it and use that information to program the machine.
What Compaq did was "reverse engineer" it by having the reverse-engineers ask questions of other people who could look at the assmbly code and answer the questions. They could also test things on a PC, but they could not look at the assembly itself. This was a legal workaround of the copyright and allowed Compaq to make a clone.
Even per trip the casualty rate for cars is higher than for airplanes. Another way to put it is that you are more likely to be killed driving to the airport than flying across the country.
In the US I think something like 50,000 people are killed a year in car accidents. This is equivalent to a fully-loaded 747 crashing every other day.
They are not using Linux as "their operating system", a normal PS2 has "PS2-OS" (or whatever it might be called). Neither Linux or BeOS is really of any importance to Sony and is not used in the "real" product.
The joke was in Star Trek IV. They had time-travelled to the present day and were trying to build something, and were wondering what materials the primitive present-day Earth had. One character (?who?) said "what about transparent aluminium" and the other (scotty?) said "they don't even have *that* yet".
I agree with this. If MicroSoft thinks some of the Mono code is superior and copies it, they are making the open-source version and their version more compatable. This can only help the open-source version.
Actually if this really works, MicroSoft may eventually be forced to copy the open-source version. This is because that source code may be used as the "reference implementation" that everybody tries to debug their.net problems to. Customers may actually complain if the MicroSoft solution seems to conflict with the only usable documentation they have, which is the open-source code.
In my experience VC++ has produced noticably faster code than gcc. This is for *OPTIMIZED* code (ie -O5 in gcc and whatever the equivalent is in VC++).
You are certainly right about the compatability problems. All too often we need to turn off the optimizations on VC++ and the result is slower code (for unknown reasons debug VC++ output is probably more than TWO times slower than debug gcc output).
Re:No, it needs a better install package
on
Wired Talks Wine
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· Score: 2
99% of the computer users out there could not install Windows, either. The reason they can use it at all was that it was installed when they bought the machine.
Unfortunately this is an aspect of MicroSoft's monopoly. They do not allow OEM's to build machines with multiple systems installed, and there is little to no market for the common user for Linux-only. If MicroSoft allowed this Linux may be a common option (especially if they provide an easy way to wipe it and use the disk space for Windows). Much more likely if MicroSoft had allowed this there would be a popular closed-source "game" system from another manufacturer and all systems would dual-boot to this.
This (preventing accidents by naieve users is the reason for protection) was sort of true once, but nowadays I think about 100% of the thought about permissions is to try to prevent the hostile user from damaging things. No "confirm" box on NT is going to stop that!
Also to all the idiots who keep posting "XP has permissions", well of course it does. The complaint here is that Lindows would be like an XP setup that purposely turned all those permissions off!
Actually an "IDE" that produced a simple, readable, and editable file would probably do everything you can do with Makefiles. This is because it would be easy to write programs that could find all the source code and thus run doxygen and the other stuff you are mentioning.
Unfortunately most people are familiar with and copying VC++ and the horrid and huge "project" files it creates, that cannot be edited. I would use and IDE in a second if I could copy those files and I could edit them in a text editor to quickly add, remove, and rename source files. But just because MicroSoft software is written by morons does not mean you cannot make an IDE that is usable by real engineers.
I can assure you that our company would pay *right now* for a compiler that produces faster Linux code.
It will also have to support stl and other C++ stuff as well as GCC. Because we are also doing Windoze stuff and use MSVC++ we don't use any GCC extenstions. I also would not care if the.o format and libraries was completely different and did not link with gcc output (except glibc) and did not work with the debugger.
IDE's are useless for us, due to the need to develop on Windows/NT as well. It is impossible to manage a set of source files in multiple IDE's. We use gmake (cygwin gmake on NT). I also think it would be nice if the IDE's could be seperated from the compiler. Make up some standard way to feed the compiler source and have it report errors so we can choose the IDE and compiler seperately!
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I use IE all the time and I never use window cloning, I use the pop-up menu that has an item (3rd one down, "open in a new window") and I wish every day that they had middle mouse click!
CIELab is not polar coordinates, the a and b are perpendicular axis that describe a location in the "hue" plane (L is the lightness). Hue is sometimes done as an angle but not here.
But over long distances it is an integral of all these small "about equal" values and that adds up to a very large variation in perceived distance, so it is not perceptually uniform for long distances.
In fact I suspect that such a perceptually uniform space could not be represented in three dimensions.
A better approach may be to take XYZ (which I think does represent the response of the cones in the human eye) and do a lot of math on the two XYZ sets to deliver an "amount different" value. Don't think about spaces, your goal is to produce this single number, losing the actual colors.
I am not sure if laws forcing companies to behave in a certain way (release all their interfaces) are a good idea. Laws directed at only monopolies like MicroSoft might work but only solves the problem for the monopolies. A solution I would prefer is that the government have a purchasing requirement that all interfaces used by any software and hardware they purchase be open and specified. Companies are then free to close their interfaces as long as they don't want to sell anything to the government.
and SHIFT+INS assigned to "Paste" operation. You know, those years on Winsuck wannabe-operating-system did their damage
on my personality.
If this is true, this is a disease that has been on Unix UI design since the first days. The problem is programming that says "what key does this?" rather than "what does this key do?". The main result is that only one key can do each action. Ever wonder why the terminal can't take *both* backspace and delete as erase? This stupidity has been around forever (it is also in lots of Windows programs that are configurable as well...)
However I am under the impression that KDE was pretty much fixed in it's key assignments, like Windows, and they have certainly copied Windows slavishly, so I am suprised if this is not working (it works on my Qt programs). If KDE 3.0 has botched it in some misguided attempt to allow the users to "configure" the key bindings, well, that is their mistake, and a bad one at that.
In case anybody else launches this bullshit, here is what a symbolic link under Windows should do:
Take a MicroSoft word document, and make a "symbolic link" to it. Lets call the linke "a.msw" and the word document "b.msw".
Without recompiling any programs, when MicroSoft Word opens "a" and opens "b" it gets the SAME document.
Also when you use VC++ and read in "a" and "b" into the debugger, you get the SAME binary dump.
And using VC++ and you make a program that reads both "a" and "b" and does a checksum of the entire contents, you get the SAME result. And you can rewrite the program to use open(), fopen(), or FileOpen(), and it still works. And you can recompile it with GCC under the cygwin libraries and it *still* works.
Got it? Don't make yourself look like an idiot by suggesting anything less and saying "they have symbolic links".
It is increasingly obvious that MicroSoft refuses to do this, and deleted functions that sort of worked (the MSDOS assign command) because it would allow Unix compatability. There is no other plausible reason for them to not implement a very simple addition.
Notice that I am talking about *symbolic* links. Unix "hard" links are unnecessary and definately user-unfriendly and there is no reason for Windows to copy them.
On those old machines, which ran at maybe 5Mhz, the entire interface (buttons, menus, text editing, etc) was done in GL, and as far as I can tell it works as well as modern X does on 1000Mhz machines. And if you wanted 3D you did not have to learn anything new!
Oh well...
Also X seriously blows when even new input devices are considered, and these are things that were well known even when X was being designed (back then most graphics workstations had a bunch of dials and toggle switches and joysticks). The XDevice interface is a typical "extension" with enormously complex controls that NOBODY uses (this should be apparent as we were forced to make the mouse wheel pretend to click buttons 4 & 5 on the mouse, this interface was better and easier to program for than XDevice and without it I doubt you would see any mousewheel support on Linux).
GL (not OpenGL) had it pretty much right. There should be a call that is "tell me what all the devices are". Each device can produce a single value that is either a number or 0-1 true/false (ie a typical mouse is 5 devices: x, y, and three on/off buttons). Each device has a string name, and it is up to the program to figure out if a device is interesting (ending horizontal things with x and vertical things with y and other pseudo-standards would make this almost transparent to the user). The program can then say "I am interested in this device" and it now gets an X event every time that device changes value. SIMPLE!
I think what they are really doing is they put enough errors in a sample that the CD player gives up and "interpolates" across the sample, but for some reason the data player does not do this, and does not report the fact that the sample has an error. It is also possible that the data players never use the error corrector bits but this would have made ripping scratched CD's a problem too, anybody know?
I expect it will be a very short time before "professional CD readers" are available that report all the bits, or at least report that a sample had too many errors to correct, and this scheme will be thwarted. Not only that, since only some people will be able to afford these expensive CD players, the normal user will be forced to go to the net to get an MP3 of a song, rather than copying their own disk, and this will actually reduce sales and increase piracy!
Actually MicroSoft, despite other sins, has been very good about patents. So in this case this is not MicroSoft getting their just desserts...
What the inventor did was figure out the exact shape and composition to make those interlocking things go together, stay together, and not come apart.
The problem with modern patents is that somebody can go (in software) and in effect patent the idea of making a device that holds the two edges together. They can then spend their idle time working on making the zipper actually work, or just sit on the idea and prevent anybody from inventing the zipper.
Symbolic links would help a lot but MicroSoft will not add them because that would allow Windows to be Unix-compatable.
I don't like this, it is another license, and as far as I can tell the vast majority of people writing LGPL would be happy with this modification. I wish there was an official modification of LGPL to say this.
If no-cache was a security problem then using the 2nd mouse button to avoid it would be a security problem. It isn't.
This would be great if it worked as I always use middle-mouse button to open another window just to avoid the page reload when I go back. If I could get this in a single window automatically I would be really happy!
The entire BIOS assembly code was printed in the manual for the IBM PC. The code was copyrighted so nobody could make a clone, but anybody could read it and use that information to program the machine.
What Compaq did was "reverse engineer" it by having the reverse-engineers ask questions of other people who could look at the assmbly code and answer the questions. They could also test things on a PC, but they could not look at the assembly itself. This was a legal workaround of the copyright and allowed Compaq to make a clone.
In the US I think something like 50,000 people are killed a year in car accidents. This is equivalent to a fully-loaded 747 crashing every other day.
They are not using Linux as "their operating system", a normal PS2 has "PS2-OS" (or whatever it might be called). Neither Linux or BeOS is really of any importance to Sony and is not used in the "real" product.
The joke was in Star Trek IV. They had time-travelled to the present day and were trying to build something, and were wondering what materials the primitive present-day Earth had. One character (?who?) said "what about transparent aluminium" and the other (scotty?) said "they don't even have *that* yet".
Actually if this really works, MicroSoft may eventually be forced to copy the open-source version. This is because that source code may be used as the "reference implementation" that everybody tries to debug their .net problems to. Customers may actually complain if the MicroSoft solution seems to conflict with the only usable documentation they have, which is the open-source code.
Isn't 1998 later than when MicroSoft did it? I may be confusing the dates, however.
You are certainly right about the compatability problems. All too often we need to turn off the optimizations on VC++ and the result is slower code (for unknown reasons debug VC++ output is probably more than TWO times slower than debug gcc output).
Unfortunately this is an aspect of MicroSoft's monopoly. They do not allow OEM's to build machines with multiple systems installed, and there is little to no market for the common user for Linux-only. If MicroSoft allowed this Linux may be a common option (especially if they provide an easy way to wipe it and use the disk space for Windows). Much more likely if MicroSoft had allowed this there would be a popular closed-source "game" system from another manufacturer and all systems would dual-boot to this.
Also to all the idiots who keep posting "XP has permissions", well of course it does. The complaint here is that Lindows would be like an XP setup that purposely turned all those permissions off!
Unfortunately most people are familiar with and copying VC++ and the horrid and huge "project" files it creates, that cannot be edited. I would use and IDE in a second if I could copy those files and I could edit them in a text editor to quickly add, remove, and rename source files. But just because MicroSoft software is written by morons does not mean you cannot make an IDE that is usable by real engineers.
It will also have to support stl and other C++ stuff as well as GCC. Because we are also doing Windoze stuff and use MSVC++ we don't use any GCC extenstions. I also would not care if the .o format and libraries was completely different and did not link with gcc output (except glibc) and did not work with the debugger.
IDE's are useless for us, due to the need to develop on Windows/NT as well. It is impossible to manage a set of source files in multiple IDE's. We use gmake (cygwin gmake on NT). I also think it would be nice if the IDE's could be seperated from the compiler. Make up some standard way to feed the compiler source and have it report errors so we can choose the IDE and compiler seperately!