I did not have the opportunity to work with Qt 4 yet, but I have used Qt 3 extensively. One minor disappointment with Signals and Slots is that they require the use of a special tool (qmake) to produce some C++ code which is then fed to the real compiler.
My company has purchased Qt 3.0.5 for my department, and that version comes with integration with Visual Studio 6. But VS6 is really an old dog, with many bugs both in the compiler and the IDE, and VS8 is much better. So in order to use Qt 3 with VS8 I had to either invoke qmake manually, which is very tedious, or write a piece of code to connect Qt's signals with slots like the ones in boost.
We chose the 2nd option, i.e. to write code that invokes boost slots from Qt signals, and we found it very pleasing.
So, here is my question: in Qt 4, can we do signals and slots programmatically, or do we still have to use qmake?
The Qt library is the C++ SDK that the C++ language is missing. I would pay to see the C++ Standards Committee adopt it as the standard C++ toolkit. Now if only C++ got real garbage collection and lambda functions (two features that are really necessary for high end development)...
So AI bots will be illegal in the future?
on
Who Owns Software?
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· Score: 1
Supposing that AI gets a break and there can be programs that can play games successfully, will they be illegal in the future? even if their behavior is almost the same as that of human players?
Of course it is, which is because DirectX is the fastest way to draw stuff on the screen in Win32! In the same vein you could say that Gtk is "an API over OpenGL" (because Gtk uses Cairo, which can use OpenGL as a renderer).
Since a great portion of the new APIs are native, what prevents Microsoft from exposing a C/C++ API? nothing. But it's.NET for marketing reasons.
It's not a "simple layer". DirectX provides much, much lower-level primitives than what WPF exposes to the user. With DirectX, you deal with surfaces and textures and screen buffers; with WPF, you deal with complex geometric shapes (including curves), gradients, text glyphs, and, on top of all that, an entire widget set with data binding.
But it is still not integrated. Another library could do the same thing over DirectX.
The article is about how development for Windows sucks compared to development for Mac. Which is at best subjective, and broadly just plain untrue.
The article is about how development for Windows sucks, period. The Mac references are very few and are only used as examples.
That includes operating system kernels, compilers and programming languages, and office applications. Why do they want to be Google? BillG and SteveB got enough money to buy the whole planet over several times. They should say 'enough' and simply improve on what they have.
No concept of what.NET really is, misleading users.
Actually, the article is very accurate on what.NET is. He even says that.NET could run in other operating systems, because it's a virtual machine.
No mention or acknowledgement of WPF/WCF or the new APIs that are and 'set' to replace Win32/Win64
Why are new APIs needed? if.NET 2.0 was good, then new APIs would not be required.
But wait a minute. Is WPF/XAML really the API or is it a layer on top of a managed API that does the job? according to this article, the Media Integration Layer, the media codecs, the presentation framework are unmanaged code! And the whole thing is nothing more than an API over DirectX!
So Microsoft does provide some new APIs, but the O/S is really a mess. DirectX does not know about Win32 and vice versa. So perhaps the article is right after all...
Completely misleads users about API concepts and features of OS X compared to Windows, for example XAML/XPS concepts compared to Display Postscript is a massive difference in display technologies that are part of the new Windows API sets, that Carbon or Cocoa cannot provide to developers.
XAML is a markup language for graphical displays. Display Postscript is a markup language for graphical displays. The concept is exactly the same, the implementation is different.
Let alone how it is an integrated aspect of the video API system in Vista, making programming freaky simple for advanced features and new UI platforms like 3D
It's not an integrated aspect, it's a simple layer over DirectX.
The author then jumps into UI consistency with dialog wording, and doesn't mention OS Xs lack of keyboard support, consistency of delete/backspace or 100 other things more important than dialog wording which is also NOT PART of Win32 inherently.
True, and the Mac interface has many problems as well. But the article is about Windows. As a Windows programmer, I feel the author is right. Programming for Windows is a mess.
Author doesn't realize Microsoft and IBM wrote most of the GUI and UI guidelines that OS X even uses today.
Office 2007 is a new direction in GUI paradigms, and is WELL accepted in the business world. Not something to make fun of when OS X is still using old MENU (textual word lists) concepts
Well accepted? who's saying that? do you have any numbers to back that up? I've tried it, I was not impressed. So have my colleagues, and almost every person I know above 25 that uses a computer.
Menus were a hack to make features available in a GUI context, but are a draw back to non-graphical UIs. Vista and Office 2007 moving away from word lists (MENUS) is the right direction, too bad Apple isn't innovating on UI and just keeps throwing the same UI slop at users and telling them it is good.
Last time I checked, humanity still uses text to communicate. Pretty pictures add glitz to a user interface, but when I want to work, I prefer text, because it's much easier to distinguish than pictures. For this reason, the Dock sucks, and the Task Bar is better (and yes, I am a Mac user as well as a Windows and Linux user).
(And don't even mention multi-touch UI, go watch the freaking TED conferences Apple ripped the ideas off from several years ago, let alone the MS multi-touch work that also preceded the TED conference. MS Research has and is doing more with UI than any other think tank in the world.)
The multitouch screen is a nice gimmick, but I don't want to use both hands on the screen (or two pens for that matter), I don't w
You and I know this, but the average Joe does not. If MacGyver starts playing with a black box, the average Joe would think that's possible.
On the other hand, if the writers are clever, they can use whatever today's technology has available. Many online systems are vulnerable to various kinds of attacks, many black boxes have hidden-in-plain-sight holes in them (admin password for CISCO routers, for example) etc.
Many moons ago, when most slashdotters were nippers, a British company named INMOS provided an extensible hardware and software platform that solved the problem of parallelism, in many ways similar to CUDA.
Ironically, some of the first demos I saw using transputers was raytracing demos.
The problem of parallelism and the solutions available are quite old (more than 20 years), but it's only now that limits are reached that we see the true need for it. But the true pioneers is not NVIDIA, because there were others long before them.
The Actor model, where each object is a separate thread, is the way to the future. When an actor sends a message to another actor, the message is stored in the target actor's message queue and the thread that represents the target actor is woken up to process the message. Results are delivered with future values.
With the Actor model, whatever data parallelization is there in a program is automatically exposed.
D) there are already en route to Earth and will show up in a few hundred thousand years. You see, they only recently detected the creation of higher intelligence beings. By 'recently', I mean perhaps 100 thousand years ago.
They may even show up in the next century, for example, and then the whole Drake equation argument will go down the drains.
I also do not understand why we expect aliens to already be here since we are space-conscious for the last 50 years. 50 years is nothing in the grand time scale of the universe. Perhaps aliens were here in the past, they left and they will come back in the future.
We really don't know, and the Drake equation/Fermi Paradox/Great Filter does not make any sense.
I agree with your line of thought, but 200 million light years is extremely far away. Our galaxy is 100000 light years across, and there are millions of planets within the radius of 10000 light years from Earth.
Most of Star Trek takes place within the boundaries of 10000 to 20000 light years from Earth, and that's already huge, with a huge number of civilizations.
This galaxy alone may contain more than 200000000000 stars (that's 2 hundred billion!)...
The web may be in its infancy, but I don't see any big changes coming along. I mean, I don't see how the web can be improved so much that it will be radically different from now and transform our lives in another way. Basically, the WWW is a medium where text flows from one place to another, no matter what technologies are used to deliver that text (http, xml, etc). Since text is the primary medium of transporting information (since the dawn of civilization), I don't see it being replaced with anything else. It may become more dynamic, but it's still text.
You are contradicting yourself. From one side, you are saying that MDI cuts down the useful screen estate, and from the other side you say that you prefer your windows to be not in full screen mode, because it allows you to see two things at once, but that limits the useful screen estate!!!
Yes, I prefer to have my windows maximized, because I usually work at one thing at a time. It's very rare that I need to work at a document while looking at another document all the time, and when I need that, I put the two windows side by side. In either case, my screen is not cluttered with windows as in the case of the Mac.
The rooting out of middlemen is the job of the government, it should not be the job of the people. In an organized society, it's the State that creates and enforces the laws about competitive practices and monopolies. What you say is like if Microsoft's anti-competitive practices where hunted by the people themselves and not the authorities.
The reason such cases exist in India and in other countries (middlemen that buy products in very low prices and sell them in very high practices) is because of the lack of any sort of organized checking on what goes about in the markets. It only shows how disorganized the Indian government is. That technology helped solve the problem does not make the issue go away.
No, no and no. Economic development is the result of the distribution of wealth, not the result of advanced technological programs. I am all for space exploration and I back NASA and ESA up, because they have solved a big percentage of the problems of their people (although both USA and Europe are in decline)...but India? there is a large percentage of the population that still live in great poverty. Instead of throwing the money to space, they could have improved the social infrastructure, build better roads, schools and hospitals, and those things would be much more beneficial to Indians than launching satellites.
Implementing and improving satellite technology will not result directly to improving the economy and the social state of the poor people, for the simple reasons that the benefits are not distributed to the people. The benefits go to the private corporations that are behind the technologies, the government that gets paid for launching satellites and those that use the satellites. The common folks have nothing to gain from it, even if the weather is monitored and crops are improved.
How do you know what I did and what I did not this week to help those people?
I like./...the epitome of justice, the American way. You get modded 5, insightful, because you reversed the question and asked me what I've done for the poor, while I ask the same question not to you, but to those people that throw their money away for 'space' (as if a few 100 km above the Earth's surface is actually space), and I get modded troll, -1.
It's the syndrome of guilt, I can understand that...
Slashdot Mirror
Boehm's GC does not work well for two reasons:
1) it does not work well with dlls. I tried it (look here: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.programming.garbage-collection.boehmgc/2016/focus=2027).
2) it provides a great opportunity for DoS attacks, as another poster says.
Please mod parent up! a real reason why Boehm's gc is not very good...
I did not have the opportunity to work with Qt 4 yet, but I have used Qt 3 extensively. One minor disappointment with Signals and Slots is that they require the use of a special tool (qmake) to produce some C++ code which is then fed to the real compiler.
My company has purchased Qt 3.0.5 for my department, and that version comes with integration with Visual Studio 6. But VS6 is really an old dog, with many bugs both in the compiler and the IDE, and VS8 is much better. So in order to use Qt 3 with VS8 I had to either invoke qmake manually, which is very tedious, or write a piece of code to connect Qt's signals with slots like the ones in boost.
We chose the 2nd option, i.e. to write code that invokes boost slots from Qt signals, and we found it very pleasing.
So, here is my question: in Qt 4, can we do signals and slots programmatically, or do we still have to use qmake?
Agreed, but a minor note: QT usually stands for QuickTime, Qt for Trolltech's library.
The Qt library is the C++ SDK that the C++ language is missing. I would pay to see the C++ Standards Committee adopt it as the standard C++ toolkit. Now if only C++ got real garbage collection and lambda functions (two features that are really necessary for high end development)...
Supposing that AI gets a break and there can be programs that can play games successfully, will they be illegal in the future? even if their behavior is almost the same as that of human players?
It's a gravity-based game...not much different than Bridge Builder (http://www.bridgebuilder-game.com) for example...
You're right, it's all about the stock market. Half of today's problems are due to stock market games.
That includes operating system kernels, compilers and programming languages, and office applications. Why do they want to be Google? BillG and SteveB got enough money to buy the whole planet over several times. They should say 'enough' and simply improve on what they have.
Actually, the article is very accurate on what .NET is. He even says that .NET could run in other operating systems, because it's a virtual machine.
Why are new APIs needed? if .NET 2.0 was good, then new APIs would not be required.
But wait a minute. Is WPF/XAML really the API or is it a layer on top of a managed API that does the job? according to this article, the Media Integration Layer, the media codecs, the presentation framework are unmanaged code! And the whole thing is nothing more than an API over DirectX!
So Microsoft does provide some new APIs, but the O/S is really a mess. DirectX does not know about Win32 and vice versa. So perhaps the article is right after all...
XAML is a markup language for graphical displays. Display Postscript is a markup language for graphical displays. The concept is exactly the same, the implementation is different.
It's not an integrated aspect, it's a simple layer over DirectX.
True, and the Mac interface has many problems as well. But the article is about Windows. As a Windows programmer, I feel the author is right. Programming for Windows is a mess.
Nope. Xerox did.
Well accepted? who's saying that? do you have any numbers to back that up? I've tried it, I was not impressed. So have my colleagues, and almost every person I know above 25 that uses a computer.
Last time I checked, humanity still uses text to communicate. Pretty pictures add glitz to a user interface, but when I want to work, I prefer text, because it's much easier to distinguish than pictures. For this reason, the Dock sucks, and the Task Bar is better (and yes, I am a Mac user as well as a Windows and Linux user).
The multitouch screen is a nice gimmick, but I don't want to use both hands on the screen (or two pens for that matter), I don't w
William Shatner!!!!
"I...can...do...it!!!!...I...am...Kirk!"
You and I know this, but the average Joe does not. If MacGyver starts playing with a black box, the average Joe would think that's possible.
On the other hand, if the writers are clever, they can use whatever today's technology has available. Many online systems are vulnerable to various kinds of attacks, many black boxes have hidden-in-plain-sight holes in them (admin password for CISCO routers, for example) etc.
Many moons ago, when most slashdotters were nippers, a British company named INMOS provided an extensible hardware and software platform that solved the problem of parallelism, in many ways similar to CUDA.
Ironically, some of the first demos I saw using transputers was raytracing demos.
The problem of parallelism and the solutions available are quite old (more than 20 years), but it's only now that limits are reached that we see the true need for it. But the true pioneers is not NVIDIA, because there were others long before them.
The Actor model, where each object is a separate thread, is the way to the future. When an actor sends a message to another actor, the message is stored in the target actor's message queue and the thread that represents the target actor is woken up to process the message. Results are delivered with future values.
With the Actor model, whatever data parallelization is there in a program is automatically exposed.
*BANG* ...nope.
You forgot one case:
D) there are already en route to Earth and will show up in a few hundred thousand years. You see, they only recently detected the creation of higher intelligence beings. By 'recently', I mean perhaps 100 thousand years ago.
They may even show up in the next century, for example, and then the whole Drake equation argument will go down the drains.
I also do not understand why we expect aliens to already be here since we are space-conscious for the last 50 years. 50 years is nothing in the grand time scale of the universe. Perhaps aliens were here in the past, they left and they will come back in the future.
We really don't know, and the Drake equation/Fermi Paradox/Great Filter does not make any sense.
I agree with your line of thought, but 200 million light years is extremely far away. Our galaxy is 100000 light years across, and there are millions of planets within the radius of 10000 light years from Earth.
Most of Star Trek takes place within the boundaries of 10000 to 20000 light years from Earth, and that's already huge, with a huge number of civilizations.
This galaxy alone may contain more than 200000000000 stars (that's 2 hundred billion!)...
The web may be in its infancy, but I don't see any big changes coming along. I mean, I don't see how the web can be improved so much that it will be radically different from now and transform our lives in another way. Basically, the WWW is a medium where text flows from one place to another, no matter what technologies are used to deliver that text (http, xml, etc). Since text is the primary medium of transporting information (since the dawn of civilization), I don't see it being replaced with anything else. It may become more dynamic, but it's still text.
You are contradicting yourself. From one side, you are saying that MDI cuts down the useful screen estate, and from the other side you say that you prefer your windows to be not in full screen mode, because it allows you to see two things at once, but that limits the useful screen estate!!!
Yes, I prefer to have my windows maximized, because I usually work at one thing at a time. It's very rare that I need to work at a document while looking at another document all the time, and when I need that, I put the two windows side by side. In either case, my screen is not cluttered with windows as in the case of the Mac.
The rooting out of middlemen is the job of the government, it should not be the job of the people. In an organized society, it's the State that creates and enforces the laws about competitive practices and monopolies. What you say is like if Microsoft's anti-competitive practices where hunted by the people themselves and not the authorities.
The reason such cases exist in India and in other countries (middlemen that buy products in very low prices and sell them in very high practices) is because of the lack of any sort of organized checking on what goes about in the markets. It only shows how disorganized the Indian government is. That technology helped solve the problem does not make the issue go away.
No, no and no. Economic development is the result of the distribution of wealth, not the result of advanced technological programs. I am all for space exploration and I back NASA and ESA up, because they have solved a big percentage of the problems of their people (although both USA and Europe are in decline)...but India? there is a large percentage of the population that still live in great poverty. Instead of throwing the money to space, they could have improved the social infrastructure, build better roads, schools and hospitals, and those things would be much more beneficial to Indians than launching satellites.
Implementing and improving satellite technology will not result directly to improving the economy and the social state of the poor people, for the simple reasons that the benefits are not distributed to the people. The benefits go to the private corporations that are behind the technologies, the government that gets paid for launching satellites and those that use the satellites. The common folks have nothing to gain from it, even if the weather is monitored and crops are improved.
Anything else out of yer arse???
How do you know what I did and what I did not this week to help those people?
./...the epitome of justice, the American way. You get modded 5, insightful, because you reversed the question and asked me what I've done for the poor, while I ask the same question not to you, but to those people that throw their money away for 'space' (as if a few 100 km above the Earth's surface is actually space), and I get modded troll, -1.
I like
It's the syndrome of guilt, I can understand that...