SMS's put virtually no load at all on the network infrastructure For the most of the year you are right, however a mobile phone operator will not agree with you on 24th-25th of December and on the New Year... sometimes the load leads to temporary DOS.
Hey, actually not a bad idea. Imagine a button labeled "I am feeling bored" with a function like 'random page' on Wikipedia... it will take you to a random page on the internet with not-so-high ranking. And for example, analyzing time you spend on that page before you return to Google to press that button again it can optimize the offer. I bet you can reach some interesting pages this way that you would not reach otherwise. There will be lots of rubbish of course, but you are bored anyway, so it should not bother you:-)
What about population growth? Surely current number of users is much less than 2^32, but number of possible users is not number of people in the world at this time. Imagine that the world has exactly 2^32 inhabitants and everyone has a facebook account. What would you do with new-borns? Will you reuse accounts?
There is difference between user accounts and active user accounts. Number of active user accounts can not be larger than actual population of the world, if we consider maximum of one account per user. However, total number of accounts in history can be much much larger.
well... if only the GNUstep related articles were not rejected or left pending for weeks... this article is my second sumbission, not counting submissions of other steppers.
Hm, what about computing checksum of the actual media contents? For example, compute checksum only for sound data in MP3 or image data in image files, ignore all other data/metadata. Usualy media files are containers for smaller objects or data streams... Resampled or modified contents would not be detected though.
Many times I read about UI inconsistency in Apple applications, such as those mentioned in the post: Mail, Safari, iTunes. I note it as well, that they look different. However, I realize that I do not feel the inconsistency whle working with them, I do not notice it. Strange, how come? How it is possible, that I was feeling the inconsistency on my Linux machine even there was unified look of all applications and I am still feeling inconsistency on any Windows machine where is unified look as well? I found out, that it is not about the look, but more about the feel, more about the behavior of applications, more about expectations how the applications will react to your commands, how the applications understand your intentions.
I agree, UI look in Apple applications is not consistent, but the behavior is in majority cases consistent. And that is what counts. While working, you do not notice whether the app is brushed metal, Aqua or grayish plastic.
can be used on MS Windows, Linux or other systems with UNIX taste as well
AFAIR, there was a project going on that will even convert your X Code files into GNUmakefiles that can be used directly on MS Windows, or at least someone was planning to do that. Contact the lists mentioned on their homepage for more information.
You are right. And now try to shift your statement to higher level: replace C with Smalltalk/Java/PHP/... and Assembler with C/C++. Arguing about native languages vs. interpreted languages is like arguing about C vs. assembler.
Every language has its place. Problem usualy is not that a "language is bad", but the problem usualy is the lack of interfaces between languages. Nowdays, each higher level (higher than assembler) language has its own set of libraries, own concpets inside those libraries. Lack of glue leads developers to use one language only for whole project. Or perhaps it is not lack of glue, but lack of interest to use glue...
How it should be? Write fast routines in assembler, glue them with C and provide C libraries. Write application building blocks in C/C++, glue them with Java/Smalltalk/PHP to create applications...
Well, I have not read the book, but I think that by trees they mean hierarchical structures, usualy implemented in one table:
id_employee | id_superior | employee_name |...
Keyword for traversing such structure is CONNECT BY.
Yes. And then, after 6 months or a year, slashdot editors should collect statistics of styles usage and set the default style to the one most used. Or at least, it would be interesting to see evolution of the statistics...
One more thing: if they are patenting one column = one-screen, then they are patenting following code in Objective-C/Cocoa, of which equivalend is used on another digital device:
And putting the iPodBrowser view inside a full-screen window without titlebar... Classes required: NSBrowser, NSWindow and NSScreen. Available in OpenStep before Apple bought NeXT.
The column view (browser view) has been in NeXTSTEP since 1989. Apple acquired NeXT in the mid-90s. I do not say that Apple holds patent on it nor invented it (Xerox Smalltalk class browser?). I just want to say, that the column has been here for a while and it was somehow related to Apple too.
Moreover! Filtering data using a column view is also quite old. It has been used in data-warehousing as way of drilling-down. In the music player it is nothing more, nothing less: it is drilling-down through your song database. Just ask Bill Inmon or Ralph Kimball:-) It is the same to drill-down by region, store and date or by genre, artist and album. They are just different terms.
Concerning the shortcuts - I would say, that apple has more logical shortcuts than windows: to make computer perform something using keyboard, you press 'Command', that is, you say: 'I command you to do this...' and then press a shortcut for the desired command. You use other modifiers with the command key to have more shortcuts. In windows it is total mess: some shortucts are with Alt, other with Ctrl. I think, Windows should polish shortcuts, not Apple.
I hope you are kidding with the Start menu. It is just a workaround for messy organisation of application files. In OS X you have Applications folder with everything you need. Also, Spotlight is pretty nice for finding apps you do not have in your dock and you do not want to search under Applications folder.
Right mouse button? Have you ever connected a two-button mouse to a mac? It works the same as you expect it to work in windows. Anyway, everything in an application should be doable using only one mouse button. Right-mouse button actions and menus should be used only as shortcuts.
Uninstall? As other mentioned here: grab an application and put it into the trash. You are done. Can it be simplier?
Using px for 2 (or any other number of) pixels per pixel is plainly stupid. Pixel is just a pixel. If web developers used px as measurement, and now they are realising that their design would not work with higher resolutions, it is their stupidity. They should have used device independent units, such as points, millimeters, inches, centimeters, furlongs, miles or whatever is possible to use in CSS.
Why to divide the internet by geographical boundaries?Geographical boundaries are somehow held only because we are used to them. It is a completely new world.
I think that there will be some boundaries on the internet, some analogy to "real world" states, unions, federations, republics... But they will not be geographically based, but "intellectualy" based. That is, people will, well they actually are, group by interests, projects, workgroups, communities, language... New groups will be created, some will die, some will merge. Within larger groups with intensive life, policies will start to emerge. Similary roles of people within communities will emerge as well: some will be respected, some will have various kinds of powers, some will have to respect others. As the communities would like to keep their integrity, "boundaries" will emerge.
If there are going to be geographical boundaries on the internet, then they are going to be not natural - forced by local governments.
GNUstep is a cross-platform, object-oriented set of frameworks for desktop application development. The set of frameworks, based on OpenStep (now Cocoa), enables developers to rapidly build sophisticated software by employing a large library of reusable software components. GNUstep is already used in production environments at several organizations.
You can write your applications that would be portable to:
Linux
OS X (almost nativeli, with native OS X Cocoa frameworks, no need for GNUstep in some/most of the cases)
BSD
MS Windows
Basic GNUstep/OpenStep/Cocoa frameworks are FoundationKit and AppKit.
More information about GNUstep frameworks can be found on the project wiki pages.
Moreover, if you take care about stuff you use in Cocoa, you can deploy on multiple platforms by using GNUstep - cross-platform set of frameworks that have Cocoa compatible core. Works on Linux, BSD and MS Windows too... So you are not tied to OS X only.
"If you were to attempt to use GPL software (say an encryption library) to create a DRM package, you would be in violation of the GPL. At that point, you would be forced to stop using the encryption library in your package, and could be liable for damages."
I understand the new GPL the same way. Unfortunately.
At the beginning, I was completely against DRM, until I came to a problem: I wanted to do do something through internet what I can do in the real life. In real life, you can easily show a document to someone, let him look at some diagrams, pages, etc. and not let him take the document with him, nor keep or copy the diagrams. It is quite real situation, besides others, you can imagine a session with your potential business partner, where you are showing him a proposal... At this moment, I have not seen any way how I can do that electronically.
I would appreciate an application/system that would allow me to do that. The application should be free as in both, beer or freedom, so anyone can use it - something like Acrobat reader. An application where I would be able to define what should be done to the document, for example, how and how long it should be viewed, what can and can not be printed, etc... I know this is not simple task, as it would require not only an application, but also some set of servers to check and store the information. But let us ignore that fact at the moment and assume that all is needed is an application.
But if I understand it correctly, such application should not be written using GPL nor using other GPLed code. Hey, but why? It does not harm anyone, it helps me to control my documents I send to other people.
PS: I would like to discuss this issue more. If someone is interested, or wants to give his contra or pro arguments, do not hesitate to contact me: stefan at agentfarms net.
Hm...perhaps you are right, but once I heard a story, that in the 18-19th century people in London were very afraid about the future. By increasing horse traffic in the city, the vision of the future was, that the city would be filled with heaps horse shit. The shit pollution with increasing shit layer on the streets would be so large that it would not be possible to live in the city.
How it is now? Another kind of pollution, but no horse shit. You will allways have some kind of waste, either from a material you take energy from or from equipment taking the energy a source.
Fear is in place, however it should be used as a drive for invention, not for technology refusal...
First, let me congratulate the Gimp for its 10 years.
Second, the splash screen is really annoying as well as slow application loading. What abou lazy initialisation of everything that is not needed at the moment and is not essential for basic application run? Just load information about plug-ins, such as name, description, menu entries or tool icons at app startup. Then load tools/plug-ins/scripts when the user first needs them.
When I launch an application I want to use it immediately. I am fine with half or whole second when I am going to use a tool once or twice for the very first time.
On the other hand, why should not application learn something about me and my habits? For this simple task, at the beginning, you do not need anything fancy, just collect statistics about tool/feature usage. With this, application can optimallise the lazy initialisation...for example, loading when idle, or preloading only frequently used, or... (imagine).
I wish all splashcreens go away and applications start learning something about their users...
First: ugly appearance is not equal to non-funcionality. Flashy and colorful does not mean functional. If you want it to be pretty, use Camaelon as depicted here. The Camaelon bundle is in the progress of being included into the main GNUstep distribution. Themability was low priority to the project, compared to functionality.
Besides that, if you would like to know, then I have seen many expert applications that are "ugly" because of some obsolete GUI toolkits. And guess what? The experts use it and do not care about the appearance at all, but about the functionality.
And how it competes with KDE? By different application development approach, by different point of view on objects (C++ objects vs. Objective-C/Smalltalk-like), by another objective runtime, by different paradigms... If it had everything that KDE has, it would be KDE, not GNUstep. It is different so developers can have an alternative. Can you imagine a world where everyone would be the same?
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, actually not a bad idea. Imagine a button labeled "I am feeling bored" with a function like 'random page' on Wikipedia ... it will take you to a random page on the internet with not-so-high ranking. And for example, analyzing time you spend on that page before you return to Google to press that button again it can optimize the offer. I bet you can reach some interesting pages this way that you would not reach otherwise. There will be lots of rubbish of course, but you are bored anyway, so it should not bother you :-)
What about population growth? Surely current number of users is much less than 2^32, but number of possible users is not number of people in the world at this time. Imagine that the world has exactly 2^32 inhabitants and everyone has a facebook account. What would you do with new-borns? Will you reuse accounts?
There is difference between user accounts and active user accounts. Number of active user accounts can not be larger than actual population of the world, if we consider maximum of one account per user. However, total number of accounts in history can be much much larger.
well ... if only the GNUstep related articles were not rejected or left pending for weeks... this article is my second sumbission, not counting submissions of other steppers.
Hm, what about computing checksum of the actual media contents? For example, compute checksum only for sound data in MP3 or image data in image files, ignore all other data/metadata. Usualy media files are containers for smaller objects or data streams... Resampled or modified contents would not be detected though.
Many times I read about UI inconsistency in Apple applications, such as those mentioned in the post: Mail, Safari, iTunes. I note it as well, that they look different. However, I realize that I do not feel the inconsistency whle working with them, I do not notice it. Strange, how come? How it is possible, that I was feeling the inconsistency on my Linux machine even there was unified look of all applications and I am still feeling inconsistency on any Windows machine where is unified look as well? I found out, that it is not about the look, but more about the feel, more about the behavior of applications, more about expectations how the applications will react to your commands, how the applications understand your intentions.
I agree, UI look in Apple applications is not consistent, but the behavior is in majority cases consistent. And that is what counts. While working, you do not notice whether the app is brushed metal, Aqua or grayish plastic.
It is just my observation...
Example of GNUstep cross-platform in action
GNUmail installer, GNUmail application on Windows, GNUmail on OS X.
GNUmail itself: http://www.collaboration-world.com/gnumail/
- majority of Cocoa classes implemented
- can use OS X NIB files (user interface)
- uses Objective C - OS X "native" language
- can be used on MS Windows, Linux or other systems with UNIX taste as well
AFAIR, there was a project going on that will even convert your X Code files into GNUmakefiles that can be used directly on MS Windows, or at least someone was planning to do that. Contact the lists mentioned on their homepage for more information.See also: GNUstep and Cocoa
What about this http://www.leconjugueur.com/?
Yes: http://www.gnustep.org/
You are right. And now try to shift your statement to higher level: replace C with Smalltalk/Java/PHP/... and Assembler with C/C++. Arguing about native languages vs. interpreted languages is like arguing about C vs. assembler.
Every language has its place. Problem usualy is not that a "language is bad", but the problem usualy is the lack of interfaces between languages. Nowdays, each higher level (higher than assembler) language has its own set of libraries, own concpets inside those libraries. Lack of glue leads developers to use one language only for whole project. Or perhaps it is not lack of glue, but lack of interest to use glue...
How it should be? Write fast routines in assembler, glue them with C and provide C libraries. Write application building blocks in C/C++, glue them with Java/Smalltalk/PHP to create applications...
Keyword for traversing such structure is CONNECT BY.
Yes. And then, after 6 months or a year, slashdot editors should collect statistics of styles usage and set the default style to the one most used. Or at least, it would be interesting to see evolution of the statistics...
One more thing: if they are patenting one column = one-screen, then they are patenting following code in Objective-C/Cocoa, of which equivalend is used on another digital device:
NSBrowser *iPodBrowser;
[iPodBrowser setMaxVisibleColumns:1];
[iPodBrowser setHasHorizontalScroller:NO];
And putting the iPodBrowser view inside a full-screen window without titlebar... Classes required: NSBrowser, NSWindow and NSScreen. Available in OpenStep before Apple bought NeXT.
The column view (browser view) has been in NeXTSTEP since 1989. Apple acquired NeXT in the mid-90s. I do not say that Apple holds patent on it nor invented it (Xerox Smalltalk class browser?). I just want to say, that the column has been here for a while and it was somehow related to Apple too.
:-) It is the same to drill-down by region, store and date or by genre, artist and album. They are just different terms.
Moreover! Filtering data using a column view is also quite old. It has been used in data-warehousing as way of drilling-down. In the music player it is nothing more, nothing less: it is drilling-down through your song database. Just ask Bill Inmon or Ralph Kimball
Concerning the shortcuts - I would say, that apple has more logical shortcuts than windows: to make computer perform something using keyboard, you press 'Command', that is, you say: 'I command you to do this...' and then press a shortcut for the desired command. You use other modifiers with the command key to have more shortcuts. In windows it is total mess: some shortucts are with Alt, other with Ctrl. I think, Windows should polish shortcuts, not Apple.
I hope you are kidding with the Start menu. It is just a workaround for messy organisation of application files. In OS X you have Applications folder with everything you need. Also, Spotlight is pretty nice for finding apps you do not have in your dock and you do not want to search under Applications folder.
Right mouse button? Have you ever connected a two-button mouse to a mac? It works the same as you expect it to work in windows. Anyway, everything in an application should be doable using only one mouse button. Right-mouse button actions and menus should be used only as shortcuts.
Uninstall? As other mentioned here: grab an application and put it into the trash. You are done. Can it be simplier?
Using px for 2 (or any other number of) pixels per pixel is plainly stupid. Pixel is just a pixel. If web developers used px as measurement, and now they are realising that their design would not work with higher resolutions, it is their stupidity. They should have used device independent units, such as points, millimeters, inches, centimeters, furlongs, miles or whatever is possible to use in CSS.
Why to divide the internet by geographical boundaries?Geographical boundaries are somehow held only because we are used to them. It is a completely new world.
I think that there will be some boundaries on the internet, some analogy to "real world" states, unions, federations, republics ... But they will not be geographically based, but "intellectualy" based. That is, people will, well they actually are, group by interests, projects, workgroups, communities, language... New groups will be created, some will die, some will merge. Within larger groups with intensive life, policies will start to emerge. Similary roles of people within communities will emerge as well: some will be respected, some will have various kinds of powers, some will have to respect others. As the communities would like to keep their integrity, "boundaries" will emerge.
If there are going to be geographical boundaries on the internet, then they are going to be not natural - forced by local governments.
You can write your applications that would be portable to:
Basic GNUstep/OpenStep/Cocoa frameworks are FoundationKit and AppKit.
More information about GNUstep frameworks can be found on the project wiki pages.
Moreover, if you take care about stuff you use in Cocoa, you can deploy on multiple platforms by using GNUstep - cross-platform set of frameworks that have Cocoa compatible core. Works on Linux, BSD and MS Windows too... So you are not tied to OS X only.
I understand the new GPL the same way. Unfortunately.
At the beginning, I was completely against DRM, until I came to a problem: I wanted to do do something through internet what I can do in the real life. In real life, you can easily show a document to someone, let him look at some diagrams, pages, etc. and not let him take the document with him, nor keep or copy the diagrams. It is quite real situation, besides others, you can imagine a session with your potential business partner, where you are showing him a proposal... At this moment, I have not seen any way how I can do that electronically.
I would appreciate an application/system that would allow me to do that. The application should be free as in both, beer or freedom, so anyone can use it - something like Acrobat reader. An application where I would be able to define what should be done to the document, for example, how and how long it should be viewed, what can and can not be printed, etc... I know this is not simple task, as it would require not only an application, but also some set of servers to check and store the information. But let us ignore that fact at the moment and assume that all is needed is an application.
But if I understand it correctly, such application should not be written using GPL nor using other GPLed code. Hey, but why? It does not harm anyone, it helps me to control my documents I send to other people.
PS: I would like to discuss this issue more. If someone is interested, or wants to give his contra or pro arguments, do not hesitate to contact me: stefan at agentfarms net.
Hm...perhaps you are right, but once I heard a story, that in the 18-19th century people in London were very afraid about the future. By increasing horse traffic in the city, the vision of the future was, that the city would be filled with heaps horse shit. The shit pollution with increasing shit layer on the streets would be so large that it would not be possible to live in the city.
How it is now? Another kind of pollution, but no horse shit. You will allways have some kind of waste, either from a material you take energy from or from equipment taking the energy a source.
Fear is in place, however it should be used as a drive for invention, not for technology refusal...
First, let me congratulate the Gimp for its 10 years.
Second, the splash screen is really annoying as well as slow application loading. What abou lazy initialisation of everything that is not needed at the moment and is not essential for basic application run? Just load information about plug-ins, such as name, description, menu entries or tool icons at app startup. Then load tools/plug-ins/scripts when the user first needs them.
When I launch an application I want to use it immediately. I am fine with half or whole second when I am going to use a tool once or twice for the very first time.
On the other hand, why should not application learn something about me and my habits? For this simple task, at the beginning, you do not need anything fancy, just collect statistics about tool/feature usage. With this, application can optimallise the lazy initialisation...for example, loading when idle, or preloading only frequently used, or ... (imagine).
I wish all splashcreens go away and applications start learning something about their users...
Well ... not exact explanation, but you can find some answers to your question here and here.
First: ugly appearance is not equal to non-funcionality. Flashy and colorful does not mean functional. If you want it to be pretty, use Camaelon as depicted here. The Camaelon bundle is in the progress of being included into the main GNUstep distribution. Themability was low priority to the project, compared to functionality.
Besides that, if you would like to know, then I have seen many expert applications that are "ugly" because of some obsolete GUI toolkits. And guess what? The experts use it and do not care about the appearance at all, but about the functionality.
And how it competes with KDE? By different application development approach, by different point of view on objects (C++ objects vs. Objective-C/Smalltalk-like), by another objective runtime, by different paradigms... If it had everything that KDE has, it would be KDE, not GNUstep. It is different so developers can have an alternative. Can you imagine a world where everyone would be the same?