Reusing the existing graphics routines, such as Win32 calls, is not necessarily a bad thing. If you already have graphics routines that are written and do what you want, why rewrite them, why reinvent the wheel? Some people think that just because some code is old and was used in a previous API that it cannot be good to use it as the foundation for a new API. This is quite absurd, if the old code works fine and is implemented well, it would be a waste of time to reimplemented the functionality just for a new API. It is a fallacy to think that just because software is old that it must not be good, often older software is often the best. The whole idea of modularity and libraries is to facilitate reuse of existing code rather than rewriting what is essentially the same functionality over and over agian.
As far as the things we plug into wall outlets, I think it would be very wise for all electric devices that uses a transformer to use an external transformer rather than build it directly into the device. this way, if you later switch to solar you can run the device directly off the DC from the solar panel, only perhaps having to adjust the voltage. DC is preferable with solar technology, which produces DC output, whenever possible, since an invertor to convert from DC to AC cuases you to lose energy and are somewhat innefficient. DC works best with short runs as well, such as from the panels into your house. AC for distribution was chosen since the voltages can be easily stepped down after high voltage runs, since high voltage carries better over long distances. It would be great if we could find clean, renewable, safe, practical, non-toxic energy sources, like improved solar, so we could get rid of AC and its EMF fields and all of those ugly high voltage power lines crossing the country.
The law already provides penalties for making copies of copyrighted materials *and* distributing them, especially for commercial purposes. The law makes the act illegal. Technology to copy material is just a tool which in itself is innately good or bad. A DVD recorder can be used for perfectly legitimate uses such as recording a TV program for later viewing and archival for purely personal and private use, which should be well within consumer rights. Its not the technology that should be illegal, but the certian acts which infringe upon copyright, which is mass redistribution of the material.
I believe it is completely unacceptable to force manufacturers to restrict the features of the technology so the user cannot record or copy material. Recording and copying, and archiving of copyrighted material is not and should not be illegal for personal use. I believe an individual should have the right to copy, archive, store, and modify copyrighted material for their own personal, private use. This is a right consumers should have. Interfering with hardware by requiring its features be restricted so the user cannot do this violates the users legitimate rights.
It seems like the way to fix the problem (make the encrypted data difficult enough to decode using brute force methods) is to move up to stronger algorithms. This happens continuously, it doesnt mean that the old alogorithm was initially flawed, but rather it has become obsolete due to increasing computing power. As computing power increases, this means it takes less time to decode an algorithm using a trail and error brute force process.
The user should be able to choose from several algorithms depending on their needs, their are tradeoffs for each. A stronger one will require more computing power but will be more difficult to decode using a brute force attack, and will tend to last longer agianst increasing processing power of computers. A weaker one will be much faster but also it is more trivial to decode it with a brute force attack, and as computing power increases it will become more trivial to decode via an attack. Thus there is a constant interaction between CPU speed and algorithms, as faster CPUs arise, this means stronger algorithms are needed as the older ones which were too impractical to easily attack on older CPUs have become trivial to decode on newer CPUs. However, since the CPUs have since become faster, it also means that it takes less time to encrypt the data in any particular algorithm, so while stronger algorithms are needed due to increasing CPU power, those algorithms also become more practical due to increasing CPU power.
Give user choice and control over software
on
What Makes a Good UI?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I believe that a key to good UI design is allowing the extensive options and a high degree of control over the software through both a graphical user interface, and a command line interface.
With GUI design it is important to not throw up to many options at once but provide a rich and complete set of options but place the most commonly used ones on main screens, and then put lesser used ones on "advanced" or "expert" screens. Organise and categorise options and cofiguration settings, and features and make them all easily accessible, but with most commonly used ones most prominant. Include a toolbar with commonly used features, then on the menu bar you can include the commonly used options and advanced options in "advanced" menus and submenus. This way, the average user isnt bombarded with options, but the user if they desire can set the more advanced options and features if they wish. The software should give users complete flexibility and control as possible and let them configure everything, but only if they want to. If all the user wants to do is jump right in and start doing what the software is supposed to do, they should be able to do so and the software should use reasonable defaults. The idea is to give the user the choice and freedom, if the user wants to control every aspect of the program, they should be able to do so, but if the user just wants to start using it withonly having to make a bare minimum of choices, they should also be able to do so. You can give users both. The program should be as simple or as complex as the user wants it to be, and allow the software to work the way the user wants it to work rather than enforcing limitations and restrictions on the user.
The command line interface allows for the programs features to be more easily scripted and integrated into other programs and as well eisier remote ssh and command line access to the programs features for those who desire it. Agian, no one is forced to use it as it is an advanced feature, they can still use the GUI, but it is there if someone wants to use it.
Indeed, that is a groundbreaking new concept. I am sure Microsoft would be very interested in this as its core technology on which to build its next generation OS. We have to keep our CPUs fully utilised and this is an increasing challenge for Microsoft, how to make sure that the OS uses as much resources as possible so those resources dont go to waste on other less worthy tasks, for instance writing documents, serving up webpages, and other such worthless uses.
Seriously, though, embracing and extending can be okay, as long as you make the software open source and provide excellent open source documentation, try to follow an existing implementations interface if possible, and with the realisation that when the extension is standardised it is the responsibilkity of the producer of it to support the new standard fully. I say this for this reason: if we waited for standards organisations to standardise something before we implemented it, I dont know if any innovations or advancements would ever be made or they would happen at a far slower pace than they do now. Standards organisations are slow, and also imperfect meaning they can also leave out important features. The need for a certian feature might not be foreseen when a standard is ratified. The incompatability between netscape and IE was mutually each parties fualt, since each one refused to support the others extensions.
I agree completely. I have used Perl and it is one of the eisiest to use languages I have found, and it does not encourage one to write bad code. If someone is going to write bad code, they will write bad code in any language they use, they will find a way. Creating a restrictive language actually I believe can make the language worse, by placing a lot of arbitrary limitations on what can be done, the language can be made much more difficult for the programmer to use when they really do need to do something unusual, probably increasing the chances of an ugly hack. Perl makes simple things simple but if you need to do something more complex and demanding it doesnt make those things more complex than they need to be by saying, to borrow a phrase from 2001, "Sorry, I can't let you do that, Dave", placing a bunch of limitations on you.
I have written very readable Perl applications and I have found that when I show and teach other people Perl they too also write well written and readable applications, its quite natural, Perl makes writing well written applications that are clear quite easy, in fact, to me, it is eiser to read and understand a Perl program than it is a C or C++, far eisier in fact.
Perl also gives me a powerful environment that allows me to easily write powerful and large applications which are yet still maintainable, easily and quickly with minimal fuss.
Perl does things a bit differently than some other languages, especially in regards to its OO usage. But just because something is different doesnt mean it is bad. Some people it seems automatically if something is different they automatically think it is bad. However, i think perls OO system is actually very elegant and useable, at least as much so as the OO systems in Ruby, Python etc.
Perl, to me anyway, is powerful, rich, easy to use, and in which it is quite natural to write readable code, and has allowed me to write better code faster.
HTML of course can be relatively simple to use, but problems arise when Microsoft begins "embracing and extending" it with all of its proprietary extensions, and no one else supports those extensions. In fact, this is a greater problem with Javascript, some are thinking of Javascript when they refer to HTML, the incompatable DOMs and extensions to Javascript that Microsoft has added is what can often make working with these things rather complex.
I can certianly use 1 TB of storage!!!! Youve got to be kidding, right? I can definitely use 1 TB of storage per disk, this has unlimited applications and uses and will be vastly important and useable. A full length DVD movie can consume several gigabytes of storage space. Now consider a collection of hundreds of such movies, instead of having hundreds of DVDs lying around you can put it on a single holographic disk. Not to mention HDTV and the huge storage requirements of storing HDTV movies! THis technology isnt just useful, its desperately needed! And access and throughput should be fast, allowing for faster random data access.
Think about all of the uses this technology will have. This medium will likely last a lot longer than hard disks and other magnetic storage, so it will be great for archiving data. It would be quite useful as well for CVS like revision history type applications and other archive stores. It will also be crucial to video on demand services. One of the barriers to implementing more complete video on demand services where you can choose from selections of tens of thousands of movies and stored media from you TV and have it delivered over the wire in minutes has been the limitations of storage technology, video media has huge storage requirements so it has been difficult to offer large selections via video on demand services. This should make it much eisier to provide such services.
The useful applications of this technology will go on and on and people will benefit from having this capacity in their computers, and it would hopefully further drive down data storage costs.
This technology is long needed and we should be rejoicing.
Microsoft's claim is of course, absurd, and the exact opposite of reality. Windows is one of the most un-interoperable operating systems avialable, it doesnt support well and clearly documented standard APIs, rather it seems they intentionally design the APIs to be hard to duplicate. A key ingredient in OS interoperability is a well documented API, such as POSIX and Single Unix Specification Unix APIs which ought to be supported by Linux, the BSDs, Darwin, AmigaOS, Solaris, AIX, etc. Furthermore the nature of open source software lends itself to interoperability far more than proprietary software, since the actual code used to implement the APIs is avialable for all to see and is avialable for re-use in other implementations, making it far eisier, along with good documentation, to build a independant compatable implementation.
What is particularly important in good OS interoperability is source compatability, via the standard programmer interfaces (APIs), and standard suite of command line and a standard base graphics system ( X Windows). This is to assure that an application can be recompiled on any OS that supports these standard APIs. The APIs however define the standard programmer interfaces in the human readable code which is then compiled into machine code, the APIs being substituted with ABIs, the Application Binary Interface is the actual low level interface between the software and kernel and it is inserted into compiled code at compile time, via the C and system libraries. This allows a standard API to be provided by all OSs, while not affecting underlying OS design at all, since the APIs are abstracted from the underlying OS architecture by the compile step, an OS canimplement its own ABIs for communication between programs and kernels while providing a standard API.
Google wouldnt necessarily have to write a client from the ground up, they could take one of the existing ones and improve upon it. Preferably, one written in a platform indepedant language like Tcl/Tk or Perl/Tk which can run on a wide range of platforms. The performance of such clients is quite acceptable, I have used such programs on 486s with good performance.
Furthermore, XMPP is the Jabber protocol, XMPP is the name that it has been standardised under. Sorry for the confusion.
Supporting XMPP/Jabber could integrate nicely with the other things they are doing, like gmail. They could write XMPP extensions for searchable chat room directories and user directories for instance.
I wish Google would start an instant messaging service based on XMPP. They then could build as well a web based client front end to XMPP, so we could have the benefit of both a structured protocol like XMPP and as well a browser interface and people could use them simultaneously. Google could apply its knowledge of search facilities to XMPP extensions, searchable chat rooms, user directories, come to mind, as well as being able to search ones own chat room. A web interface could be built for all of that as well. It would be good to see Google get behind XMPP, being the interoperable IM protocol it is, like -email you can communicate with people on different servers.
Fewer keys a step back in useability for many
on
New Standard Keyboard
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
For many, including me, having to use a keyboard with fewer keys would actually be a step backwards. I like to have a lot of extra keys that I can map to do interesting things and special function keys, these are great timesavers. I often look for keyboards that have more keys, not less, Ive had a keyboard from Gateway 2000 from years ago which allowed you to remap the keys on the keyboard and had several extra keys which I found quite useful. Often it is nice to be able to map macros to certian keys so when they are pressed they can reproduce several characters These can actually save time.
For people to use MNG, first it has to be implemented on browsers.:-) How can people use it if Firefox and other browsers dont support it? First implement it, then it will be used.
I am glad to see Firefox recieving this well deserved success and I hope Firefox continues to improve.
I think it would be nice to see Firefox include SVG and MNG support in the standard install. These two standards address many need I believe that web designers have in in being able to produce rich formatting and content, if these needs are not fulfilled by an open standards means developers tend to turn to propriatary solutions such as Flash to do these things. By fulfilling these needs, we can encourage the use of open standards. SVG includes good support for vector graphics while MNG supports image animation and several different encoding schemes which provide much needed capabilities for image creation.
It is real pity that this p2p application is not open source. Without it being open source there is no way to know if something installs spyware or whatever else and no way to port the software to other OSs, for it to be inspected for security issues, and so on. As such, this is of little use for those who want to use something that gives them free software freedom (as in free speech).
I am glad to see the issue of the EMF fields brought up, even though the effects are disputed I believe its better to be safe on this issue and go with the lowest emission technology. CRTs emit all kinds of fields like X-Rays and who knows what else. They have a huge high voltage cable inside of them and high charged components. LCDs are all low voltage and emit far less fields. Plus, they are better on my eyes, ive noticed.
Yes, I certianly agree. I should have researched AmigaOS and I do apologise for my oversight. Since AmigaOS it appears does have a solid multitasking foundation that is very viable today, it makes sense to continue to develop it. What is important is POSIX support so Amiga users can share the Unix application base. This of course is no problem. I certianly dont think Linux is the only thing out there, and I think OS choice is a wonderful thing and I am glad that AmigaOS is such a good OS and hopefully it will continue to improve its POSIX support. OS choice and diversity is what Unix should be about.
At one point I recall that Amiga was going to use Linux as a base for its operating system similar to how Apple uses FreeBSD as a base for its operating system. It doesnt sound like this still holds true today since I hear no mention of Linux in regards to Amiga's OS. It probably would have been a good choice for them to go with some established OS like FreeBSD or Linux rather than try to build something from the ground up, then they could have also benefited from sharing an application pool with other Unix-type OSs. It would have also allowed them to get a product out the door quicker with their limited development resources. If each minority OS has its own proprietary API and requires its own applications and cannot share applications with other OSs, there is not as a good of a chance they can compete agianst the huge Windows monopoly, but if all of these small OSs follow POSIX and other Unix standards and share the same application community, they will have a much better chance of being able to compete.
Part of the *nix philosophy I believe is interoperability and choice provided by source compatability, the ability to compile software on any OS that complies with POSIX and other unix standards. This preserves peoples choice since they can choose what OS and computer plaftorm to use while being able to access the same community of software programs. It is also essential to small OSs with small userbases. Not being able to use certian programs on certian OSs because of non-standard system APIs is a major cause of OS lock in and limited freedom in OS choice, hence Windows. I believe if independant OSs really want to be viable and to compete against MS, they need to support POSIX, X11 and other Unix source compatability standards, these standard furthermore allow an OS designer to use their own internal architecture, since the standards mostly affect APIs visible to the programmer and command line suite rather than the interal OS design. This is why we see so many different filesystems avialable on Linux for instance while applications can use them without having to know the particulars of each one, and how changes to the underlying system can be made without requiring rewriting of the apps.
I haven't used many Mac programs, lately, however on Windows, X11, and most other platforms, there ussually does seem to be some variation on where a certian menu item or button is between programs. But the concept of the menu bar, buttons, and standard UI elements tends to be similar and although the user may have to browse a few menus to see where everything is, often the same features are there but they might be in a different place. This is what users always seem to have to do when using a new program, like switching from IE to Firefox.
We also could say that one of the advantages of Open Office is it has the same layout on multiple OSs so no matter what OS you happen to be using at a certian time it works the same. I am sure there are other applications that run on say both Windows and Mac that do the same thing.
I do agree that installation needs to be seamless on every platform, and this means seamless installation of X11 if it is not already there without the user having to do that seperately. This could be done in various ways, such as including X11 on the CD or having the installer download and install it automatically if its not already installed. It would be less work to do this than try to deal with porting the same program to multiple incompatible APIs. The development costs of doing this can be intense and drain resources from improving the software.
Eventually the limitations of magnetic storage will be reached, so I have been wondering, what other storage technologies are avialable that all greater density.
One technology i have heard of is storing data holographically in perhaps crystalline medium. This has several advantage, it is very reliable since there are few moving parts, the crystal does not tend to degrade much, and from what I have heard there are very fast access speeds. I even heard that due to something to with the holographic nature of the storage it would be very useful for search engines. This technology seems to address many of the issues with magnetic storage. I havent heard much about this technology being applied, unfortunately. I dont know what technical issues have to be resolved for it to be feasible.
I really dont see what the problem is with using the X11 version of OpenOffice on Mac OS X. Maintaining a seperate version of Open Office for another proprietary API would have consumed more precious developer resources which could instead be used to add new features to Open Office rather than endlessly reinventing the wheel to port old features to a million different OS dependant APIs. X11 is the most widely avialable GUI system and is available on most OSs, and works perfectly fine.
Some have said that the X11 version is "ugly", but the Open Office developers have only themselves to blame for that, there are numerous beautiful graphics toolkits avialable on X11 which wonderful and georgeous user interfaces can be created with. Its not like X11 actually restricts user interface design, in fact, X11 provides a stable, time tested and refined platform which doesnt limit the beautiful user interfaces that you can implement on top of it.
As far as performance, I get excellant performance from X11 on my systems, ussually better than Windows on the same hardware. X11 itself actually does not consume much memory or resources at all on your system. The X Server core consumes under 3 MB (this is around the executable size of the Xnest server which includes just the Xserver core, no hardware drivers).
In fact, It wouldnt bother me at all if Open Office was run on Windows using the cygwin X11 servers rather than have a native windows port. And, i do use Windows and Cygwin all the time, I would much rather see developer resources go to adding new features to one X11 open API based port rather than maintaining a bunch of native ports for proprietary closed OS dependant APIs like Windows and Mac. The overall result would be a much better quality product on all operating systems. Such is part of the beauty of the standardised, OS indepedant X11 API, it allows the same GUI work to be used across many platforms.
Perhaps, it could be said that DCE is surpassed by CORBA if CORBA implements a superset of DCEs capabilities. Do open source CORBA implementations provide the same capabilites as DCE or greater, such as security capability? Furthermore, it would seem to me that CORBA is the sort of technology which would benefit and provide a foundation for web technologies, not be replaced by web technologies. When I think "web technologies" I think HTTP, HTML, etc, which are not a replacement for a good generalised distributed API system. A system like CORBA tend to be powerful because they can work in many different applications/environments, rather than be locked into one sort of use.
I think it would be a great thing if they did opebn source this, it is quite likely that someone might want to continue developing the software and improving on it. If they did open source, they may even still be able to make money from it by providing subscriptions to the service they could provide with the server.
Slashdot Mirror
Reusing the existing graphics routines, such as Win32 calls, is not necessarily a bad thing. If you already have graphics routines that are written and do what you want, why rewrite them, why reinvent the wheel? Some people think that just because some code is old and was used in a previous API that it cannot be good to use it as the foundation for a new API. This is quite absurd, if the old code works fine and is implemented well, it would be a waste of time to reimplemented the functionality just for a new API. It is a fallacy to think that just because software is old that it must not be good, often older software is often the best. The whole idea of modularity and libraries is to facilitate reuse of existing code rather than rewriting what is essentially the same functionality over and over agian.
As far as the things we plug into wall outlets, I think it would be very wise for all electric devices that uses a transformer to use an external transformer rather than build it directly into the device. this way, if you later switch to solar you can run the device directly off the DC from the solar panel, only perhaps having to adjust the voltage. DC is preferable with solar technology, which produces DC output, whenever possible, since an invertor to convert from DC to AC cuases you to lose energy and are somewhat innefficient. DC works best with short runs as well, such as from the panels into your house. AC for distribution was chosen since the voltages can be easily stepped down after high voltage runs, since high voltage carries better over long distances. It would be great if we could find clean, renewable, safe, practical, non-toxic energy sources, like improved solar, so we could get rid of AC and its EMF fields and all of those ugly high voltage power lines crossing the country.
Correction: I meant to say that the technology is not innately good or bad.
The law already provides penalties for making copies of copyrighted materials *and* distributing them, especially for commercial purposes. The law makes the act illegal. Technology to copy material is just a tool which in itself is innately good or bad. A DVD recorder can be used for perfectly legitimate uses such as recording a TV program for later viewing and archival for purely personal and private use, which should be well within consumer rights. Its not the technology that should be illegal, but the certian acts which infringe upon copyright, which is mass redistribution of the material.
I believe it is completely unacceptable to force manufacturers to restrict the features of the technology so the user cannot record or copy material. Recording and copying, and archiving of copyrighted material is not and should not be illegal for personal use. I believe an individual should have the right to copy, archive, store, and modify copyrighted material for their own personal, private use. This is a right consumers should have. Interfering with hardware by requiring its features be restricted so the user cannot do this violates the users legitimate rights.
It seems like the way to fix the problem (make the encrypted data difficult enough to decode using brute force methods) is to move up to stronger algorithms. This happens continuously, it doesnt mean that the old alogorithm was initially flawed, but rather it has become obsolete due to increasing computing power. As computing power increases, this means it takes less time to decode an algorithm using a trail and error brute force process.
The user should be able to choose from several algorithms depending on their needs, their are tradeoffs for each. A stronger one will require more computing power but will be more difficult to decode using a brute force attack, and will tend to last longer agianst increasing processing power of computers. A weaker one will be much faster but also it is more trivial to decode it with a brute force attack, and as computing power increases it will become more trivial to decode via an attack. Thus there is a constant interaction between CPU speed and algorithms, as faster CPUs arise, this means stronger algorithms are needed as the older ones which were too impractical to easily attack on older CPUs have become trivial to decode on newer CPUs. However, since the CPUs have since become faster, it also means that it takes less time to encrypt the data in any particular algorithm, so while stronger algorithms are needed due to increasing CPU power, those algorithms also become more practical due to increasing CPU power.
I believe that a key to good UI design is allowing the extensive options and a high degree of control over the software through both a graphical user interface, and a command line interface.
With GUI design it is important to not throw up to many options at once but provide a rich and complete set of options but place the most commonly used ones on main screens, and then put lesser used ones on "advanced" or "expert" screens. Organise and categorise options and cofiguration settings, and features and make them all easily accessible, but with most commonly used ones most prominant. Include a toolbar with commonly used features, then on the menu bar you can include the commonly used options and advanced options in "advanced" menus and submenus. This way, the average user isnt bombarded with options, but the user if they desire can set the more advanced options and features if they wish. The software should give users complete flexibility and control as possible and let them configure everything, but only if they want to. If all the user wants to do is jump right in and start doing what the software is supposed to do, they should be able to do so and the software should use reasonable defaults. The idea is to give the user the choice and freedom, if the user wants to control every aspect of the program, they should be able to do so, but if the user just wants to start using it withonly having to make a bare minimum of choices, they should also be able to do so. You can give users both. The program should be as simple or as complex as the user wants it to be, and allow the software to work the way the user wants it to work rather than enforcing limitations and restrictions on the user.
The command line interface allows for the programs features to be more easily scripted and integrated into other programs and as well eisier remote ssh and command line access to the programs features for those who desire it. Agian, no one is forced to use it as it is an advanced feature, they can still use the GUI, but it is there if someone wants to use it.
Indeed, that is a groundbreaking new concept. I am sure Microsoft would be very interested in this as its core technology on which to build its next generation OS. We have to keep our CPUs fully utilised and this is an increasing challenge for Microsoft, how to make sure that the OS uses as much resources as possible so those resources dont go to waste on other less worthy tasks, for instance writing documents, serving up webpages, and other such worthless uses.
Seriously, though, embracing and extending can be okay, as long as you make the software open source and provide excellent open source documentation, try to follow an existing implementations interface if possible, and with the realisation that when the extension is standardised it is the responsibilkity of the producer of it to support the new standard fully. I say this for this reason: if we waited for standards organisations to standardise something before we implemented it, I dont know if any innovations or advancements would ever be made or they would happen at a far slower pace than they do now. Standards organisations are slow, and also imperfect meaning they can also leave out important features. The need for a certian feature might not be foreseen when a standard is ratified. The incompatability between netscape and IE was mutually each parties fualt, since each one refused to support the others extensions.
I agree completely. I have used Perl and it is one of the eisiest to use languages I have found, and it does not encourage one to write bad code. If someone is going to write bad code, they will write bad code in any language they use, they will find a way. Creating a restrictive language actually I believe can make the language worse, by placing a lot of arbitrary limitations on what can be done, the language can be made much more difficult for the programmer to use when they really do need to do something unusual, probably increasing the chances of an ugly hack. Perl makes simple things simple but if you need to do something more complex and demanding it doesnt make those things more complex than they need to be by saying, to borrow a phrase from 2001, "Sorry, I can't let you do that, Dave", placing a bunch of limitations on you.
I have written very readable Perl applications and I have found that when I show and teach other people Perl they too also write well written and readable applications, its quite natural, Perl makes writing well written applications that are clear quite easy, in fact, to me, it is eiser to read and understand a Perl program than it is a C or C++, far eisier in fact.
Perl also gives me a powerful environment that allows me to easily write powerful and large applications which are yet still maintainable, easily and quickly with minimal fuss.
Perl does things a bit differently than some other languages, especially in regards to its OO usage. But just because something is different doesnt mean it is bad. Some people it seems automatically if something is different they automatically think it is bad. However, i think perls OO system is actually very elegant and useable, at least as much so as the OO systems in Ruby, Python etc.
Perl, to me anyway, is powerful, rich, easy to use, and in which it is quite natural to write readable code, and has allowed me to write better code faster.
HTML of course can be relatively simple to use, but problems arise when Microsoft begins "embracing and extending" it with all of its proprietary extensions, and no one else supports those extensions. In fact, this is a greater problem with Javascript, some are thinking of Javascript when they refer to HTML, the incompatable DOMs and extensions to Javascript that Microsoft has added is what can often make working with these things rather complex.
I can certianly use 1 TB of storage!!!! Youve got to be kidding, right? I can definitely use 1 TB of storage per disk, this has unlimited applications and uses and will be vastly important and useable. A full length DVD movie can consume several gigabytes of storage space. Now consider a collection of hundreds of such movies, instead of having hundreds of DVDs lying around you can put it on a single holographic disk. Not to mention HDTV and the huge storage requirements of storing HDTV movies! THis technology isnt just useful, its desperately needed! And access and throughput should be fast, allowing for faster random data access.
Think about all of the uses this technology will have. This medium will likely last a lot longer than hard disks and other magnetic storage, so it will be great for archiving data. It would be quite useful as well for CVS like revision history type applications and other archive stores. It will also be crucial to video on demand services. One of the barriers to implementing more complete video on demand services where you can choose from selections of tens of thousands of movies and stored media from you TV and have it delivered over the wire in minutes has been the limitations of storage technology, video media has huge storage requirements so it has been difficult to offer large selections via video on demand services. This should make it much eisier to provide such services.
The useful applications of this technology will go on and on and people will benefit from having this capacity in their computers, and it would hopefully further drive down data storage costs.
This technology is long needed and we should be rejoicing.
Microsoft's claim is of course, absurd, and the exact opposite of reality. Windows is one of the most un-interoperable operating systems avialable, it doesnt support well and clearly documented standard APIs, rather it seems they intentionally design the APIs to be hard to duplicate. A key ingredient in OS interoperability is a well documented API, such as POSIX and Single Unix Specification Unix APIs which ought to be supported by Linux, the BSDs, Darwin, AmigaOS, Solaris, AIX, etc. Furthermore the nature of open source software lends itself to interoperability far more than proprietary software, since the actual code used to implement the APIs is avialable for all to see and is avialable for re-use in other implementations, making it far eisier, along with good documentation, to build a independant compatable implementation.
What is particularly important in good OS interoperability is source compatability, via the standard programmer interfaces (APIs), and standard suite of command line and a standard base graphics system ( X Windows). This is to assure that an application can be recompiled on any OS that supports these standard APIs. The APIs however define the standard programmer interfaces in the human readable code which is then compiled into machine code, the APIs being substituted with ABIs, the Application Binary Interface is the actual low level interface between the software and kernel and it is inserted into compiled code at compile time, via the C and system libraries. This allows a standard API to be provided by all OSs, while not affecting underlying OS design at all, since the APIs are abstracted from the underlying OS architecture by the compile step, an OS canimplement its own ABIs for communication between programs and kernels while providing a standard API.
Google wouldnt necessarily have to write a client from the ground up, they could take one of the existing ones and improve upon it. Preferably, one written in a platform indepedant language like Tcl/Tk or Perl/Tk which can run on a wide range of platforms. The performance of such clients is quite acceptable, I have used such programs on 486s with good performance.
Furthermore, XMPP is the Jabber protocol, XMPP is the name that it has been standardised under. Sorry for the confusion.
Supporting XMPP/Jabber could integrate nicely with the other things they are doing, like gmail. They could write XMPP extensions for searchable chat room directories and user directories for instance.
I wish Google would start an instant messaging service based on XMPP. They then could build as well a web based client front end to XMPP, so we could have the benefit of both a structured protocol like XMPP and as well a browser interface and people could use them simultaneously. Google could apply its knowledge of search facilities to XMPP extensions, searchable chat rooms, user directories, come to mind, as well as being able to search ones own chat room. A web interface could be built for all of that as well. It would be good to see Google get behind XMPP, being the interoperable IM protocol it is, like -email you can communicate with people on different servers.
For many, including me, having to use a keyboard with fewer keys would actually be a step backwards. I like to have a lot of extra keys that I can map to do interesting things and special function keys, these are great timesavers. I often look for keyboards that have more keys, not less, Ive had a keyboard from Gateway 2000 from years ago which allowed you to remap the keys on the keyboard and had several extra keys which I found quite useful. Often it is nice to be able to map macros to certian keys so when they are pressed they can reproduce several characters These can actually save time.
For people to use MNG, first it has to be implemented on browsers. :-) How can people use it if Firefox and other browsers dont support it? First implement it, then it will be used.
I am glad to see Firefox recieving this well deserved success and I hope Firefox continues to improve.
I think it would be nice to see Firefox include SVG and MNG support in the standard install. These two standards address many need I believe that web designers have in in being able to produce rich formatting and content, if these needs are not fulfilled by an open standards means developers tend to turn to propriatary solutions such as Flash to do these things. By fulfilling these needs, we can encourage the use of open standards. SVG includes good support for vector graphics while MNG supports image animation and several different encoding schemes which provide much needed capabilities for image creation.
It is real pity that this p2p application is not open source. Without it being open source there is no way to know if something installs spyware or whatever else and no way to port the software to other OSs, for it to be inspected for security issues, and so on. As such, this is of little use for those who want to use something that gives them free software freedom (as in free speech).
I am glad to see the issue of the EMF fields brought up, even though the effects are disputed I believe its better to be safe on this issue and go with the lowest emission technology. CRTs emit all kinds of fields like X-Rays and who knows what else. They have a huge high voltage cable inside of them and high charged components. LCDs are all low voltage and emit far less fields. Plus, they are better on my eyes, ive noticed.
Yes, I certianly agree. I should have researched AmigaOS and I do apologise for my oversight. Since AmigaOS it appears does have a solid multitasking foundation that is very viable today, it makes sense to continue to develop it. What is important is POSIX support so Amiga users can share the Unix application base. This of course is no problem. I certianly dont think Linux is the only thing out there, and I think OS choice is a wonderful thing and I am glad that AmigaOS is such a good OS and hopefully it will continue to improve its POSIX support. OS choice and diversity is what Unix should be about.
At one point I recall that Amiga was going to use Linux as a base for its operating system similar to how Apple uses FreeBSD as a base for its operating system. It doesnt sound like this still holds true today since I hear no mention of Linux in regards to Amiga's OS. It probably would have been a good choice for them to go with some established OS like FreeBSD or Linux rather than try to build something from the ground up, then they could have also benefited from sharing an application pool with other Unix-type OSs. It would have also allowed them to get a product out the door quicker with their limited development resources. If each minority OS has its own proprietary API and requires its own applications and cannot share applications with other OSs, there is not as a good of a chance they can compete agianst the huge Windows monopoly, but if all of these small OSs follow POSIX and other Unix standards and share the same application community, they will have a much better chance of being able to compete.
Part of the *nix philosophy I believe is interoperability and choice provided by source compatability, the ability to compile software on any OS that complies with POSIX and other unix standards. This preserves peoples choice since they can choose what OS and computer plaftorm to use while being able to access the same community of software programs. It is also essential to small OSs with small userbases. Not being able to use certian programs on certian OSs because of non-standard system APIs is a major cause of OS lock in and limited freedom in OS choice, hence Windows. I believe if independant OSs really want to be viable and to compete against MS, they need to support POSIX, X11 and other Unix source compatability standards, these standard furthermore allow an OS designer to use their own internal architecture, since the standards mostly affect APIs visible to the programmer and command line suite rather than the interal OS design. This is why we see so many different filesystems avialable on Linux for instance while applications can use them without having to know the particulars of each one, and how changes to the underlying system can be made without requiring rewriting of the apps.
I haven't used many Mac programs, lately, however on Windows, X11, and most other platforms, there ussually does seem to be some variation on where a certian menu item or button is between programs. But the concept of the menu bar, buttons, and standard UI elements tends to be similar and although the user may have to browse a few menus to see where everything is, often the same features are there but they might be in a different place. This is what users always seem to have to do when using a new program, like switching from IE to Firefox.
We also could say that one of the advantages of Open Office is it has the same layout on multiple OSs so no matter what OS you happen to be using at a certian time it works the same. I am sure there are other applications that run on say both Windows and Mac that do the same thing.
I do agree that installation needs to be seamless on every platform, and this means seamless installation of X11 if it is not already there without the user having to do that seperately. This could be done in various ways, such as including X11 on the CD or having the installer download and install it automatically if its not already installed. It would be less work to do this than try to deal with porting the same program to multiple incompatible APIs. The development costs of doing this can be intense and drain resources from improving the software.
Eventually the limitations of magnetic storage will be reached, so I have been wondering, what other storage technologies are avialable that all greater density.
One technology i have heard of is storing data holographically in perhaps crystalline medium. This has several advantage, it is very reliable since there are few moving parts, the crystal does not tend to degrade much, and from what I have heard there are very fast access speeds. I even heard that due to something to with the holographic nature of the storage it would be very useful for search engines. This technology seems to address many of the issues with magnetic storage. I havent heard much about this technology being applied, unfortunately. I dont know what technical issues have to be resolved for it to be feasible.
I really dont see what the problem is with using the X11 version of OpenOffice on Mac OS X. Maintaining a seperate version of Open Office for another proprietary API would have consumed more precious developer resources which could instead be used to add new features to Open Office rather than endlessly reinventing the wheel to port old features to a million different OS dependant APIs. X11 is the most widely avialable GUI system and is available on most OSs, and works perfectly fine.
Some have said that the X11 version is "ugly", but the Open Office developers have only themselves to blame for that, there are numerous beautiful graphics toolkits avialable on X11 which wonderful and georgeous user interfaces can be created with. Its not like X11 actually restricts user interface design, in fact, X11 provides a stable, time tested and refined platform which doesnt limit the beautiful user interfaces that you can implement on top of it.
As far as performance, I get excellant performance from X11 on my systems, ussually better than Windows on the same hardware. X11 itself actually does not consume much memory or resources at all on your system. The X Server core consumes under 3 MB (this is around the executable size of the Xnest server which includes just the Xserver core, no hardware drivers).
In fact, It wouldnt bother me at all if Open Office was run on Windows using the cygwin X11 servers rather than have a native windows port. And, i do use Windows and Cygwin all the time, I would much rather see developer resources go to adding new features to one X11 open API based port rather than maintaining a bunch of native ports for proprietary closed OS dependant APIs like Windows and Mac. The overall result would be a much better quality product on all operating systems. Such is part of the beauty of the standardised, OS indepedant X11 API, it allows the same GUI work to be used across many platforms.
Perhaps, it could be said that DCE is surpassed by CORBA if CORBA implements a superset of DCEs capabilities. Do open source CORBA implementations provide the same capabilites as DCE or greater, such as security capability? Furthermore, it would seem to me that CORBA is the sort of technology which would benefit and provide a foundation for web technologies, not be replaced by web technologies. When I think "web technologies" I think HTTP, HTML, etc, which are not a replacement for a good generalised distributed API system. A system like CORBA tend to be powerful because they can work in many different applications/environments, rather than be locked into one sort of use.
I think it would be a great thing if they did opebn source this, it is quite likely that someone might want to continue developing the software and improving on it. If they did open source, they may even still be able to make money from it by providing subscriptions to the service they could provide with the server.