I've been thinking a good deal about open source software these days. Where it makes sense and where it falls on its face. Gimp is a real mixture of both. It does all these amazing things, but it has nothing in the way of focus. It looks like a tool that 1000 people worked on!
Contrast this with a shrink wrapped app like Photoshop which has real focus. After working with one tool, I have a pretty good understanding of how the next tool is going to work. And how other Adobe apps are going to work. I just don't get that with Gimp, or any other OSS graphics tool for that matter.
How do you structure an OSS project to harness the power of 1000 people coding like mad without the end result looking like it?
Where did you come up with this one?! Multibutton mouse support is alive and well in MacOS X thank you very much. Cocoa has supported this for a long time and there are new events in Carbon. And if the rumors on yesterday's MacOSRumors site are to be trusted, Apple's new mice will support guestures well beyond 'right' clicking and context menus.
I disagree. The shades get lost behind everything and you end up having move/windowshade/close all the windows in front to find what you wanted to maximize...
Re:What's wrong with reference counting?
on
The New Garbage Man
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· Score: 1
Cocoa (OpenStep) solves this pretty easily. Anytime an element is added to a data structure, it is retained. When the stucture is released, everything iside it is released as well. If that drops the reference count of the object to 0, it is freed. Cocoa also has an autorelease pool that is emptied between cycles of the event loop, so you can keep memory around for temporary operations.
I understand that this is working at a higher level than a garbage collector would work at, but it works very well.
Agreed. Although I think it's funny that the "Consumer OS" will probably also score higher technically (in terms of working multi-processing, graphics subsystems, etc).
Neither of those points make any sense in the real world. Apple only stands to loose money when its look and feel are ripped off and ported to another platform. Apple doesn't need more trademark visibility. It's right up there with McDonalds and Coke. And from what I've seen no measure of bending over for the "Renegade Power User" is going to gain their respect. Slashdot has proven this repeatedly!
They've spent a great deal of time and money creating aqua and IMO deserve the right to protect that investment.
This geekier than thou attitude really pisses me off. It's a tool damn it! Not a way of life. The only good thing about this whole mess is that linux has created the possibility in people's minds that there CAN be a better OS than windows and that it's somehow hip to switch to it. However, it's my opinion that in the end regular users won't be switching to linux, but rather something like MacOS X. A tool just as powerful but one designed to be approachable by everybody.
Java in a Nutshell is an amazing reference, once you know what your doing. In that squishy in between time, there is no better than Sun's own core java series.
I don't think that's correct. Swing was created because the AWT was such a mess. In fact, if you read the first chapter or so of Sun's big ol' swing book, they say it was implemented in something like 6 weeks! So, the AWT has nothing to do with it. All swing widgets are lightweight (read NOT AWT), except for things like JPanel...You're more than able to put AWT controls on top of swing containers, but there are issues with that (heavy weight AWT drawing on top of Swing, etc)
I started checking out the GNUStep pages a few weeks ago and saw your site. It was really eeri! I work on the "other" InterfaceBuilder. It's pretty cool (to me at least) that there's this parallel universe going on.
I use it every single day. It's amazing! I almost didn't take the job because I didn't really want to learn it, but it has proven to be very easy and VERY powerful. Find a bug or want to add a feature to the framework you're using? Write a category against it!
It really shines when you use it with Cocoa (Apple's set of oo frameworks). I thought Steve Job's whole bit about "putting the developer 10 floors above the rest" was stretching it, but I have to admit it's true. I've been able to implement inherently dynamic stuff like drag and drop in a matter of a few hours. That same task is excruciating in MFC. I hope it gets more use now that Apple is betting the farm on it. We need another viable language for large scale apps, since I don't see Java pulling it off.
You've never had the need to right click on anything in Windows? I kind of doubt that. Three buttons for an interface is too much, one I think is a little limiting. Here's hoping Apple will take the cue and add a contextual menu button (a right mouse button) to their mice. Much better idea than holding down the control or option key. 3 years of contextual menus on the mac and I still never get it right the first time! Scott.
Now I have to return my nice SprintPCS phone...just when they got the web hooked up to it too. MCI gobbles up half way decent companies and leaves only steaming piles of broken billing and customer service departments in its wake. What I want to know is how many times consumers have to be screwed before the government puts the brakes on at least one of these big mergers?!
Myself and a few thousand other people were completely left in the lurch when MCI sold its dial up service to Cable and Wireless...Neither company had a full accounting of their subscribers, but that didn't keep both sides from debiting money from my checking account for services never rendered! I had to close my bank account to stop it!
What's really sad is the freakin' Chicago Board of Trade got the same clueless response I did! It was always some other group's problem when I called. My account number started with a J and whoever was on the phone didn't handle J accounts. I must have talked to 10 different finance groups between MCI and C&W before I found somebody who knew what was going on...
The business weasels in charge probably wouldn't have heard about the outage if the stock hadn't tanked that day.
The rasterizer was written in postscript...that's why in some printer dialogs you could check the "Download TrueType Rasterizer" box.
Even though we were a Mac based print shop, we discouraged the use of True Type. It's fine for laser printers but it starts to exhibit jaggies at high resolutions (imagesetters running at > 2000 dpi). Type 1 fonts don't do this.
No, pushing to "software" isn't slower! That's the whole point to RISC! Optimize the hell out of a few simple instructions to the point where the four instructions execute faster, cheaper and cooler than the 1 CISC instruction. The more granular the instructions the easier it is to schedule and pipepine.
My understanding of Merced is that much of its speed comes from the compiler building in hints for out of order execution. In which case 1) Assembler by hand will be harder anyway and 2)Old software will need to be recompiled to get the most out of the chip.
The first point doesn't bother me. I did a bunch of MIPS assembler in school. That was enough. Compilers these days do a pretty good job. Let them!
The second point doesn't really matter for linux because we've got the source for damn near everything. It's not so easy for Windows where there's tons of assembler everywhere and updates will cost the end user...
They've shown the data at every macworld and WWDC since the iMac's introduction. ~33% of iMacs (iBooks) are bought by new computer users, or those who had previously bought wintel. These are machines designed for NEW people. You think the OLD mac users liked it when they threw out ADB, SCSI and serial ports?! We bitched and moaned and bought Blue G3's!
It's like you're all a bunch of old men in your tan shorts complaining how flashy the world has gotten. "In my day we didn't need a GUI! We moved our cursor around with the arrow keys and we liked it!"
Do me a favor and DON'T buy one so there's more left for the rest of us!
But you've got to admit it looks like the Heaven's Gate's kids came down off their comet and put together one last web page. (it even looks like their site)
Slashdot Mirror
You mean like Gimp? I guess there is truth in some advertising...
Contrast this with a shrink wrapped app like Photoshop which has real focus. After working with one tool, I have a pretty good understanding of how the next tool is going to work. And how other Adobe apps are going to work. I just don't get that with Gimp, or any other OSS graphics tool for that matter.
How do you structure an OSS project to harness the power of 1000 people coding like mad without the end result looking like it?
Where did you come up with this one?! Multibutton mouse support is alive and well in MacOS X thank you very much. Cocoa has supported this for a long time and there are new events in Carbon. And if the rumors on yesterday's MacOSRumors site are to be trusted, Apple's new mice will support guestures well beyond 'right' clicking and context menus.
Exactly! Somebody moderate this up above all the BSD Devil vs Linux penguin crap...
who was the first to put a computer on the desktop?)
Apple...
I disagree. The shades get lost behind everything and you end up having move/windowshade/close all the windows in front to find what you wanted to maximize...
Cocoa (OpenStep) solves this pretty easily. Anytime an element is added to a data structure, it is retained. When the stucture is released, everything iside it is released as well. If that drops the reference count of the object to 0, it is freed. Cocoa also has an autorelease pool that is emptied between cycles of the event loop, so you can keep memory around for temporary operations.
I understand that this is working at a higher level than a garbage collector would work at, but it works very well.
What's wrong with reference counting?
Agreed. Although I think it's funny that the "Consumer OS" will probably also score higher technically (in terms of working multi-processing, graphics subsystems, etc).
They've spent a great deal of time and money creating aqua and IMO deserve the right to protect that investment.
This geekier than thou attitude really pisses me off. It's a tool damn it! Not a way of life. The only good thing about this whole mess is that linux has created the possibility in people's minds that there CAN be a better OS than windows and that it's somehow hip to switch to it. However, it's my opinion that in the end regular users won't be switching to linux, but rather something like MacOS X. A tool just as powerful but one designed to be approachable by everybody.
Java in a Nutshell is an amazing reference, once you know what your doing. In that squishy in between time, there is no better than Sun's own core java series.
I don't think that's correct. Swing was created because the AWT was such a mess. In fact, if you read the first chapter or so of Sun's big ol' swing book, they say it was implemented in something like 6 weeks! So, the AWT has nothing to do with it. All swing widgets are lightweight (read NOT AWT), except for things like JPanel...You're more than able to put AWT controls on top of swing containers, but there are issues with that (heavy weight AWT drawing on top of Swing, etc)
I started checking out the GNUStep pages a few weeks ago and saw your site. It was really eeri! I work on the "other" InterfaceBuilder. It's pretty cool (to me at least) that there's this parallel universe going on.
Scott.
It really shines when you use it with Cocoa (Apple's set of oo frameworks). I thought Steve Job's whole bit about "putting the developer 10 floors above the rest" was stretching it, but I have to admit it's true. I've been able to implement inherently dynamic stuff like drag and drop in a matter of a few hours. That same task is excruciating in MFC. I hope it gets more use now that Apple is betting the farm on it. We need another viable language for large scale apps, since I don't see Java pulling it off.
You've never had the need to right click on anything in Windows? I kind of doubt that. Three buttons for an interface is too much, one I think is a little limiting. Here's hoping Apple will take the cue and add a contextual menu button (a right mouse button) to their mice. Much better idea than holding down the control or option key. 3 years of contextual menus on the mac and I still never get it right the first time! Scott.
Now I have to return my nice SprintPCS phone...just when they got the web hooked up to it too. MCI gobbles up half way decent companies and leaves only steaming piles of broken billing and customer service departments in its wake. What I want to know is how many times consumers have to be screwed before the government puts the brakes on at least one of these big mergers?!
Myself and a few thousand other people were completely left in the lurch when MCI sold its dial up service to Cable and Wireless...Neither company had a full accounting of their subscribers, but that didn't keep both sides from debiting money from my checking account for services never rendered! I had to close my bank account to stop it!
What's really sad is the freakin' Chicago Board of Trade got the same clueless response I did! It was always some other group's problem when I called. My account number started with a J and whoever was on the phone didn't handle J accounts. I must have talked to 10 different finance groups between MCI and C&W before I found somebody who knew what was going on...
The business weasels in charge probably wouldn't have heard about the outage if the stock hadn't tanked that day.
MCI sucks, pass it on...
The rasterizer was written in postscript...that's why in some printer dialogs you could check the "Download TrueType Rasterizer" box.
Even though we were a Mac based print shop, we discouraged the use of True Type. It's fine for laser printers but it starts to exhibit jaggies at high resolutions (imagesetters running at > 2000 dpi). Type 1 fonts don't do this.
No, pushing to "software" isn't slower! That's the whole point to RISC! Optimize the hell out of a few simple instructions to the point where the four instructions execute faster, cheaper and cooler than the 1 CISC instruction. The more granular the instructions the easier it is to schedule and pipepine.
My understanding of Merced is that much of its speed comes from the compiler building in hints for out of order execution. In which case 1) Assembler by hand will be harder anyway and 2)Old software will need to be recompiled to get the most out of the chip.
The first point doesn't bother me. I did a bunch of MIPS assembler in school. That was enough. Compilers these days do a pretty good job. Let them!
The second point doesn't really matter for linux because we've got the source for damn near everything. It's not so easy for Windows where there's tons of assembler everywhere and updates will cost the end user...
They've shown the data at every macworld and WWDC since the iMac's introduction. ~33% of iMacs (iBooks) are bought by new computer users, or those who had previously bought wintel. These are machines designed for NEW people. You think the OLD mac users liked it when they threw out ADB, SCSI and serial ports?! We bitched and moaned and bought Blue G3's!
It's like you're all a bunch of old men in your tan shorts complaining how flashy the world has gotten. "In my day we didn't need a GUI! We moved our cursor around with the arrow keys and we liked it!"
Do me a favor and DON'T buy one so there's more left for the rest of us!
But you've got to admit it looks like the Heaven's Gate's kids came down off their comet and put together one last web page. (it even looks like their site)