Excuse me sir, I'd like to have some of what you're smoking.
The Fedora Project was started in 1999; by September 2001, a significant framework was already in place -- significant enough to warrant a $1 million grant for a "sophisticated digital object repository system" based on Fedora. The May 2003 date was for the public version 1.0 release, and has nothing to do with the inception of the project. Fedora Linux was not started until December 2002. When you consider that the Fedora name was also already trademarked by the university, you can see why they have a strong point.
One of the interesting facts is that there are several documented cases of people swallowed alive by whales who lived to tell the story; and yes, there are historical documents according to the article that support this story, one of which is cited as being from the Babylonian historian Berosus.
We've plenty of relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, mSQL, HyperSQL to name just four), and plenty of flatfile databases (gdbm, ndbm, Berkeley DB, Sleepycat DB to name another four). We've even got GIS databases (eg: GRASS and PostGRASS) and any number of other specialized database products (LDAP, SNMP, etc). We don't need any more! Please!
Rekall is not a database! It is an Access-like front end to other databases, and currently supports MySQL and PostgreSQL.
If we need database products, we need object oriented databases, heirarchical databases, things that are in relatively short supply, where what is out there is limited in usefulness, so ancient it won't compile, or too hideous to contemplate.
There is at least one open source OO database out there, and there was even a slashdot story about it. IIRC it has been forgotten since.
Instead of re-inventing the wheel, wouldn't it be a smarter use of time to invent the car? More effort into RAD tools for existing database products, and/or enhancements into those that were already there, would be far more productive use of time.
Which is exactly what Rekall is: a RAD tool for existing database products.
Now quit your whining and go find something productive to do.
I'd hardly think calling anything similar to MS Access a complement. Access is barely what I would call a database...and I truly wish it would be banished from the desktop!!
Rekall is not a database. It is just a database frontend, with the features of Access. It still makes use of a proper relational database backend like MySQL or PostgreSQL. What's the problem? You don't like easy-to-create forms and reports? Yeah, the MDB format sucks. But otherwise Access has certain features that are essential in many office environments that are comprised of merely windows desktops.
[i] Composition isn't window manager or desktop environment specific anyways-- all of them will use the X Server's compositor.[/i]
No, the compositing manager is a client application and will likely be either part of the window manager package or an independent application. All the X server provides is an extension that makes that facility possible, not the actual manager.
Understood, but that's not the point. I did not mean to imply that software is faster than hardware -- with the hardware we have these days, that would be a ridiculous postulation.
The point is that even though you *can* use hardware (and in fact this will be possible... nothing stops the compositing manager from using OpenGL once the server has support for it), it is very possible for software rendering to be done well enough to do compositing without poor performance. Check out Imlib2 and Evas sometime if you don't believe it. A lot of code out there is very unoptimized... everyone keeps depending on hardware for performance. There is no reason why a compositing manager cannot run decently on moderate hardware (e.g. Pentium II class system without a modest GPU like an ATi Mach64).
The issue is not really the speed increase (although yes, it will be faster). The point is that this will give you *TRUE* alpha channel-enabled visuals. What KDE and a couple of other projects like the Enlightenment DR15/16 series have done in the past is a "pseudo-transparency" hack done by grabbing the root pixmap and using it to blend. By using a compositing manager and adding true 32bit ARGB visuals, a window can say exactly how transparent each pixel should be, and the compositing manager combines everything together to produce the final display. Semi-transparent windows are overrated: this gives you a LOT more potential for snazzy effects (for starts, how about shaped windows that have antialiased edges?).
[i]Can someone tell me, are they doing it the right way, or the all-software way? The right way uses the innate RGBA capabilities of the video card (probably through OpenGL) to do the compositing. The software way is good to have if the computer in question doesn't have a decent GPU, but if it also doesn't have a decent CPU, slowness is going to ensue.[/i]
The objectives of Xouvert and the freedesktop.org Xserver are different. Xouvert is intended to be an experimental "bleeding edge" branch of XFree86 with opportunities for developers to contribute easily and will remain in sync with XFree. Xserver on the other hand has no connection or relationship with XFree and is wholly an alternative (not a fork... this code is based on Keithp's own XDrive server which has a brand new core, not XFree86, although some code is reused I believe). In other words they are in fact separate projects.
I'm not sure exactly how the Xouvert folks respond to this, but I believe they are interested in eventually collaborating with this effort in the future, from, my discussions with a couple of them.
And no, it's not just FB/Vesa. There are servers available for r128, mga, mach64, and a couple of older cards (S3 savage/trio and trident).
That he is not even Nigerian -- he is a Canadian. The last guy they arrested was Australian I think. Not that there are no Nigerians sending these emails -- it's just that they are not being caught because of the poor state of law enforcement in the country at the moment. But the fact is that this is becoming more than just a "Nigerian" scam, it has become a very international scam.
(Full disclosure: I am a Nigerian, and it brings me grief to no end that the first thing people think of when my country is mentioned is 419 scams).
Not only that, but she seems to think legalization of marijuana is a more important issue than restoring the California economy, claims gay marriage is "superior" to normal civil unions and completely ignored the issue of how to address the colossal budget deficit.
To cap it all, she actually thinks she stands a chance of winning, and is obviously more excited about answering vi vs emacs questions than addressing what really matters. It doesn't get any more idiotic than this.
I'm sorry, but she doesn't strike me as being much more than a geeky left-wing troll.
I see this as a welcome development, especially seeing the SBC company is rapidly growing into a huge communications monopoly right before our eyes and until now nobody has raised questions. For those who don't know, SBC has controlling ownership of Cingular Wireless and are already bundling residential phone service with wireless, and as if that's not enough, they are now jumping into the satellite TV market as well. The plan is to have people buy their home phone, cell phone, high speed Internet and satellite TV (and God knows what next) from the same company, paying one combined bill.
If that isn't leveraging monopoly power in one market into other markets to gain undue advantage (through bundling), I don't know what is. There better be more antitrust lawsuits, because this one barely scratches the surface of SBC's monopoly power.
Whereas this seems to be a long time coming, the WASTE issue clearly seems to be the reason behind this:
The company controls what I do with my code [in the past, it seemed I had freedom, but it turns out all of that was not really the case--rather, I was somehow avoiding the control illicitly (for 4 years)]
I completely support him here...he sees code as a form of expression, and being censored is one of the worst things you can get paid to do.
Besides, I guess we have an answer to the question of whether Nullsoft is a legal entity free from the tentacles of AOL or not... he's only been lucky so far!
I am from West Africa (Nigeria in particular) and it irks me every time I see one of these morons talk about the place like it's a hapless mass of poor, depraved and illiterate morons fighting with each other all the time. It is for the same reason I refused to go see Bruce Willis' Tears of the Sun.
You only need to get to some areas of Lagos where there are approximately 5 to 10 cybercafes PER BLOCK to understand what the hell is going on. Since the launch of mobile telecoms in Nigeria, the country has had by far the fastest cellphone industry growth rate ever recorded, injecting $1 billion into the economy within the first year alone, and leaving the 2 or 3 providers struggling under demand.
The point is people need to communicate. Africans are a very smart set of people (just compare the average knowledge/IQ of an american high-schooler to that of a Nigerian high-schooler and you'll see what I'm talking about). And even the illiterate ones still frequent cybercafes to send email and use VoIP phones to communicate all over the world.
I could slap the face of anyone who makes retarded comments as "let's teach them to READ first" or rubbish like that.
Q. How many Pentium designers does it take to screw in a light bulb? A. 1.99999289345, but that's close enough for non-technical people.
Q. The Pentium conforms to IEEE standards for floating point math. If you fly in an airplane designed using a Pentium, what's the correct pronounciation of IEEE? A. Aiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Q. What's another name for the Intel Inside sticker they put on PCs? A. The warning label.
Couple of comments/quick summary
on
State of the E-nion
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
- As Mandrake pointed out, a new patch has just been committed to CVS that will enable E 0.16 to support new KDE/GNOME Window Manager hints. For the uninitiated, this means that it will finally be possible for you to use Enlightenment as your window manager in GNOME 2 or KDE 3 (and get the best of both worlds, if you wish). So expect an 0.16.6 release very soon.:)
- E17 as present is a moderately functional window manager, with few features but great looks. Expect this present window manager to be eventually nuked pending completion of the underlying libraries, to make way for the real Enlightenment.
- There are several other libraries and apps that are being worked on, notably ebg, ebits, ecore, ewl (widget library), evidence (file manager, although a fairly separate project presently), entrance (login/display manager) and so on.
Want to see what E17 looks like? Check out my collection of screenshots here and here.
And if you've ever done some sort of GUI programming, you need to check Evas out NOW!:)
Slashdot Mirror
Excuse me sir, I'd like to have some of what you're smoking.
The Fedora Project was started in 1999; by September 2001, a significant framework was already in place -- significant enough to warrant a $1 million grant for a "sophisticated digital object repository system" based on Fedora. The May 2003 date was for the public version 1.0 release, and has nothing to do with the inception of the project. Fedora Linux was not started until December 2002. When you consider that the Fedora name was also already trademarked by the university, you can see why they have a strong point.
I did a little scouring around and did find this article:
s /8jonah.html.
http://www.grmi.org/renewal/Richard_Riss/evidence
One of the interesting facts is that there are several documented cases of people swallowed alive by whales who lived to tell the story; and yes, there are historical documents according to the article that support this story, one of which is cited as being from the Babylonian historian Berosus.
RTFA before you start ranting off on a tangent.
We've plenty of relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, mSQL, HyperSQL to name just four), and plenty of flatfile databases (gdbm, ndbm, Berkeley DB, Sleepycat DB to name another four). We've even got GIS databases (eg: GRASS and PostGRASS) and any number of other specialized database products (LDAP, SNMP, etc). We don't need any more! Please!
Rekall is not a database! It is an Access-like front end to other databases, and currently supports MySQL and PostgreSQL.
If we need database products, we need object oriented databases, heirarchical databases, things that are in relatively short supply, where what is out there is limited in usefulness, so ancient it won't compile, or too hideous to contemplate.
There is at least one open source OO database out there, and there was even a slashdot story about it. IIRC it has been forgotten since.
Instead of re-inventing the wheel, wouldn't it be a smarter use of time to invent the car? More effort into RAD tools for existing database products, and/or enhancements into those that were already there, would be far more productive use of time.
Which is exactly what Rekall is: a RAD tool for existing database products.
Now quit your whining and go find something productive to do.
I'd hardly think calling anything similar to MS Access a complement. Access is barely what I would call a database...and I truly wish it would be banished from the desktop!!
Rekall is not a database. It is just a database frontend, with the features of Access. It still makes use of a proper relational database backend like MySQL or PostgreSQL. What's the problem? You don't like easy-to-create forms and reports? Yeah, the MDB format sucks. But otherwise Access has certain features that are essential in many office environments that are comprised of merely windows desktops.
I have to say that ReckAll has exceeded all of our expections.
With a name like that, I'm not surprised it exceeded your expectations.
See here.
:)
Cool, it has a proper report designer and scripting. Not your average lame db frontend
You can now start making fun of me for using those stupid bbcode tags and not previewing. :)
[i] Composition isn't window manager or desktop environment specific anyways-- all of them will use the X Server's compositor.[/i]
No, the compositing manager is a client application and will likely be either part of the window manager package or an independent application. All the X server provides is an extension that makes that facility possible, not the actual manager.
Understood, but that's not the point. I did not mean to imply that software is faster than hardware -- with the hardware we have these days, that would be a ridiculous postulation.
... nothing stops the compositing manager from using OpenGL once the server has support for it), it is very possible for software rendering to be done well enough to do compositing without poor performance. Check out Imlib2 and Evas sometime if you don't believe it. A lot of code out there is very unoptimized ... everyone keeps depending on hardware for performance. There is no reason why a compositing manager cannot run decently on moderate hardware (e.g. Pentium II class system without a modest GPU like an ATi Mach64).
The point is that even though you *can* use hardware (and in fact this will be possible
Err correcting myself: Keith Packard's server was called KDrive, not XDrive.
The issue is not really the speed increase (although yes, it will be faster). The point is that this will give you *TRUE* alpha channel-enabled visuals. What KDE and a couple of other projects like the Enlightenment DR15/16 series have done in the past is a "pseudo-transparency" hack done by grabbing the root pixmap and using it to blend. By using a compositing manager and adding true 32bit ARGB visuals, a window can say exactly how transparent each pixel should be, and the compositing manager combines everything together to produce the final display. Semi-transparent windows are overrated: this gives you a LOT more potential for snazzy effects (for starts, how about shaped windows that have antialiased edges?).
[i]Can someone tell me, are they doing it the right way, or the all-software way? The right way uses the innate RGBA capabilities of the video card (probably through OpenGL) to do the compositing. The software way is good to have if the computer in question doesn't have a decent GPU, but if it also doesn't have a decent CPU, slowness is going to ensue.[/i]
I beg to differ: You do not *have to* use hardware acceleration to get good performance if software is done right. And from my understanding, the actual compositing manager is a client application, not part of the server itself. So there's nothing that says OpenGL cannot be used (when it is supported).
The objectives of Xouvert and the freedesktop.org Xserver are different. Xouvert is intended to be an experimental "bleeding edge" branch of XFree86 with opportunities for developers to contribute easily and will remain in sync with XFree. Xserver on the other hand has no connection or relationship with XFree and is wholly an alternative (not a fork ... this code is based on Keithp's own XDrive server which has a brand new core, not XFree86, although some code is reused I believe). In other words they are in fact separate projects.
I'm not sure exactly how the Xouvert folks respond to this, but I believe they are interested in eventually collaborating with this effort in the future, from, my discussions with a couple of them.
And no, it's not just FB/Vesa. There are servers available for r128, mga, mach64, and a couple of older cards (S3 savage/trio and trident).
That he is not even Nigerian -- he is a Canadian. The last guy they arrested was Australian I think. Not that there are no Nigerians sending these emails -- it's just that they are not being caught because of the poor state of law enforcement in the country at the moment. But the fact is that this is becoming more than just a "Nigerian" scam, it has become a very international scam.
(Full disclosure: I am a Nigerian, and it brings me grief to no end that the first thing people think of when my country is mentioned is 419 scams).
According to what I heard on the news this evening, the FCC will be enforcing the list *in spite of* the courts.
This is beginning to get very interesting. After all, the executive branch is supposed to be the judiciary's teeth for enforcement anyway!
"50 million americans" vs. the opinion of a single benchwarmer...
There is a BookCooperative PostNuke module that does just this. See it in action at the UH IEEE web site (http://www.ieee.uh.edu).
Wow, you mean Mandrake 9.1 final is out already?? What next now, Red Hat 9? It's so hard to keep up with these releases, isn't it?
Not only that, but she seems to think legalization of marijuana is a more important issue than restoring the California economy, claims gay marriage is "superior" to normal civil unions and completely ignored the issue of how to address the colossal budget deficit.
To cap it all, she actually thinks she stands a chance of winning, and is obviously more excited about answering vi vs emacs questions than addressing what really matters. It doesn't get any more idiotic than this.
I'm sorry, but she doesn't strike me as being much more than a geeky left-wing troll.
Obviously RMS has been participating in their experimental study program for many years.
It seems the athletic thing didn't work too well for him though.
I see this as a welcome development, especially seeing the SBC company is rapidly growing into a huge communications monopoly right before our eyes and until now nobody has raised questions. For those who don't know, SBC has controlling ownership of Cingular Wireless and are already bundling residential phone service with wireless, and as if that's not enough, they are now jumping into the satellite TV market as well. The plan is to have people buy their home phone, cell phone, high speed Internet and satellite TV (and God knows what next) from the same company, paying one combined bill.
If that isn't leveraging monopoly power in one market into other markets to gain undue advantage (through bundling), I don't know what is. There better be more antitrust lawsuits, because this one barely scratches the surface of SBC's monopoly power.
I completely support him here...he sees code as a form of expression, and being censored is one of the worst things you can get paid to do.
Besides, I guess we have an answer to the question of whether Nullsoft is a legal entity free from the tentacles of AOL or not
HB 2892 ... HB 2982 ... HB 2892 ... HB 2892 ... HB 2982
Perhaps we might actually get this bill through if we managed to figure out what the correct number is for once.
I completely agree.
I am from West Africa (Nigeria in particular) and it irks me every time I see one of these morons talk about the place like it's a hapless mass of poor, depraved and illiterate morons fighting with each other all the time. It is for the same reason I refused to go see Bruce Willis' Tears of the Sun.
You only need to get to some areas of Lagos where there are approximately 5 to 10 cybercafes PER BLOCK to understand what the hell is going on. Since the launch of mobile telecoms in Nigeria, the country has had by far the fastest cellphone industry growth rate ever recorded, injecting $1 billion into the economy within the first year alone, and leaving the 2 or 3 providers struggling under demand.
The point is people need to communicate. Africans are a very smart set of people (just compare the average knowledge/IQ of an american high-schooler to that of a Nigerian high-schooler and you'll see what I'm talking about). And even the illiterate ones still frequent cybercafes to send email and use VoIP phones to communicate all over the world.
I could slap the face of anyone who makes retarded comments as "let's teach them to READ first" or rubbish like that.
Q. How many Pentium designers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A. 1.99999289345, but that's close enough for non-technical people.
Q. The Pentium conforms to IEEE standards for floating point math. If you fly in an airplane designed using a Pentium, what's the correct pronounciation of IEEE?
A. Aiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Q. What's another name for the Intel Inside sticker they put on PCs?
A. The warning label.
- As Mandrake pointed out, a new patch has just been committed to CVS that will enable E 0.16 to support new KDE/GNOME Window Manager hints. For the uninitiated, this means that it will finally be possible for you to use Enlightenment as your window manager in GNOME 2 or KDE 3 (and get the best of both worlds, if you wish). So expect an 0.16.6 release very soon. :)
:)
- E17 as present is a moderately functional window manager, with few features but great looks. Expect this present window manager to be eventually nuked pending completion of the underlying libraries, to make way for the real Enlightenment.
- There are several other libraries and apps that are being worked on, notably ebg, ebits, ecore, ewl (widget library), evidence (file manager, although a fairly separate project presently), entrance (login/display manager) and so on.
Want to see what E17 looks like? Check out my collection of screenshots here and here.
And if you've ever done some sort of GUI programming, you need to check Evas out NOW!