Well, Easy Software, who makes CUPS, makes a Open Source product called EPM (Easy Package Managment) which is a "Meta" package management system. Target EPM, and then EPM is designed to generate appropriate packages for all major Unix platforms.
Classic Mac OS used the resource fork for storing associated files, but still had an OS wide location for preference files (MacHD:System:Preference). Sure, no registry, but frankly, LOTS of OS's don't have a registry.
Mac OS X has bundles which resemble AppDir's (That Rox uses) a great deal, but OS X got them from NeXT not OS 9, and NeXT got it from RISC, which is the OS that Rox is trying to emulate in the first place. Mac OS emulation is the farthest thing from Thomas's mind, I assure you.
The real interesting technology isn't the AppDir's anyway, it's ZeroInstall, which allows you to view the internet as a file system from which you can directly run applications.
I probably shouldn't post this late in the thread, but dammnit, sometimes you gotta.
The article is pretty perceptive about some things, specifically, seeing the underlying attitude in Raymond's article which was itself the cause of Raymonds problem.
Here's the thing though: he points out that usability and UT design are arts, and require gifted, talented people to perform. I have this to say.
THE SAME FOR WRITING SOFTWARE YOU, POMPOUS ASS.
Have you read the Mythical Man Month? You just can't throw developers at a project to make it better. The author here seems to think that this is how OSS operates - lots of developers ameleorating their overall mediocrit. And yet Open Source is still churning out high quality software at a rate to make MS blush, and only a food would think that the quality of the Linux kernel was entirely about the number of developers working on it. So, clearly, we must have strong leadership and good talent working for us. Why hasn't the same thing happened for usability?
It will. The fact that Slashdot posts articles about usability shows how the community is turning the furor of a thousand keyboards in the direction of usability. Once again, someone misunderstands "Open Source", and begins to say what it can and cannot do. I say wait and see.
Firefox and Thunderbird are going to be a while till they are production ready. And by production ready, we don't just mean fast/stable, we also mean featureful, containing all of the core functionality of the Moz suite.
Until then, development will continue on the main Moz branch. This work benefits the other projects anyway, no major overhauls of the code are planned which don't have direct bearing on the two "mini" versions (that I know of), and this gives Moz the chance to prepare the developer and user community with lots of warning, transitional versions of app suite, and tech previews.
Ack! And I had mod points. Drat. Sometimes you gotta bite the bait . ..
1) Have you looked at the older GTK file selector? What other OS's file selector does it remind you of?
2) Have you ever looked at complaints about the OS X widget set? What's the most common complaint about a single individual widget do you see?
3) You need to access everything from the keyboard - with no third party extensions, which widget set do you pick, OS X's or GTK+?
4)In terms of functionality and ease of use, what does OS X's widget set have that GTK+ doesn't? No fair pointing to the windowing system (Quartz vs X). I'm honestly curious.
My suspicion that the "snappier" feeling comes from the massive prelinking that the OS goes though when installing stuff.
While OS X has nothing approaching the DLL hell of Windows, prelinking associations can at least theoretically break, and I am fairly sure that the entire OS is only prelinked when installing a major update. Otherwise installing apps would take even longer than usual
Yeah - for example RiscOS kernel was in ROM. The classic MacOS toolkit was in ROM. In that sense this is nothing new.
Increasing what a piece of hardware knows about itself and can do by itself makes writing drivers (potentially) easier and more robust, and pushes that responsibility back to the hardware manufacturer in an OS neutral way.
If more devices had something like Vesa mode as well, then the road to basic hardware functionality would be easier for all sorts of software producers.
Unfortunately, as logical as ISO dates are, they are hard for our American brains, spoiled by years of idiocy, to parse. I prefer this
1 - May - 2004
Unambiguous to everyone, but may make you look like a Scientologist
Well, actually VMs are the way of the past - in research circles the VM has been around forever.
However, for what it's worth, Parrot's relationship to the JVM and the.Net VM is rather small. JVM/.Net are designed from the ground up to support systems languages (like Java and C#). They optimize for static typing and languages where most complexity happens at compile time. Parrot is a VM for languages like Perl, Python, and Ruby, (and TCL, and Lisp etc) whose typing is weaker, and where a runtime eval is a moderately common occurance.
What specifically about the JVM puts you off? Or is it the host language that bothers you?
XServer is an experimental project, based off of KDrive. It is -
1) An experimental driver architecture
2) An expertimental set of X extensions, dependent on the new driver architecture for performance reasons
3) The umbrella for the Keiths more mainstream extensions to X, including XDamage (which is a dependency for the compositing extension).
According to the guys on the XServer list, the XServer is not only not ready for prime time, but it may not ever be a real canidate for an XFree replacement because of it's experimental nature.
None of the Ninetendo Series systems ever had backwards compat. They handled this by having huge increases in power between releases.
MS has never made money on the X-Box - it's vastly undersold pricewise compared to its hardware, hence everyone keeps trying to get an OS on it. Short term and medium term financial losses are part of MS's long term strategies for 90% of all its product lines.
MS owns one of the most popular x86 emulators around for PPC.
If you port, say, DirectX, to PPC then emulated applications which spend most of the time in DirectX will run close to original speed on the PPC hardware. I would imagine that games spend huge amounts of time inside DirectX.
Mind you, I'm not saying that XB2 will run on PPC, just that is far more reasonable decision for MS to make than you might think.
It's not just stability. Windows crappy file locking semantics mean that program installation almost always requires reboots. Keeping up with MS security patches, even at the relatively slow rate some bugs are patched, leads to several reboots a week.
I think the real "empowerment" issue comes back to the fact that your average mom and pop user doesn't understand, and is mostly incapable of utilizing the p2p nature of the pre NAT internet. Sure, those of us who can are being left out in the cold, most people are happy. Besides, now that ISPs view nodes as "consumers" instead of "peers", it seems less justified to provide decent upstream bandwidth for individual nodes. It's in many an ISPs EULA to ban the running of a "server" for client machines, a distinction which practically makes no sense for p2p applications, like IM and file sharing.
The internet has become telephone and television rolled into one. IPv6 couldn't have changed it, only the continued exclusion of the internet from the masses, which I am unconvinced is a good thing. Ultimately, it's more cultural than technological.
The user is continually flabbergasted that I know the answer. I then tell them that I just used Google, how I used it and that they could too - for some reason they still call me... go figure.
I am a tier two tech support agent for a large ISP. When a frontline tech calls me for assistance, the exact same thing occurs.
Yeah, I hate mismatched apps too, but mostly because I'm blind as a bat - if I can make multiple toolkits obey font and widget sizes appropriately I'm happy.
Sure, the OS, in order to look slick and professional should provide a consistant look and feel. But on Windows, it's not long before that's lost. Outlook implements it's own widget set, and so does IE, though IE blends better. Notepad and Windows Explorer use different widgets - look at the menus.
And what about Windows "Distributions"? OEM versions of Windows are what most people see as the Operating System, just as people see Distributions as Linux. Have you seen what the OEM includes, and what most users accept without thought? In all my years of tech support I've never heard one user complain about the fact that Symantec's products have their own (fugly) neon yellow widgets, and Norton Antivirus came preinstalled on their machine.
Allowing Widget kits to share settings is fabulous, having multiple toolkits to promote a higher rate of toolkit evolution is also fabulous.
It doesn't matter how the EFF handles GPL violations since they are not the licensor. If they were, then unequal application of the GPL would only invalidate (if it did invalidate) the licence of the GPL software owned by the EFF.
If Linus is unequal in his pursuit of his intellectual property rights vis a vis the GPL that only renders Linus property rights at issue, not the GPL. The GPL is a licence (like the Microsoft Shared Source Licence, or even EULA) and not an institution. Since the GPL is one of the more innovative licences we often lose sight of that fact.
The Toshiba reactor specs liquid sodium - hasn't that been an issue in the past?
Sure, Toshiba says that the chance of a meltdown is tiny, but in the case of liquid sodium, when you need to dump in lots of additional coolant to prevent a meltdown, you can't just dump on readily available water. You have to use more liquid sodium, else the sodium will react volitily.
Damnit! Replying to myself. I forgot about the coolest feature. The proxy checks for inline ads by a similar algorithm that Moz uses, and removes them. Not only are the ads gone, but since it is server side, it cuts down on download size.
I hate to conflict with the general Slashdot opinion that this technology is somehow bad, but the truth is this stuff rocks
I've seen Internet Connection's acheive compression rates and acceleration rates breaking 130Kbs (equivalant).
We've talked some about compression rates, but there is more to it than that. This stuff does:
Serverside image regression. Images have their quality reduced (at variable levels) on the server, thus reducing download times. And with good IE integration you can pick individual images or pages to restore to full quality.
Persistant connections. And by that, I am refering to TCP/IP sockets. A surprising amount of traffic on a dial up connection is renegotiating TCP sockets, because the reduced bandwidth results in lots of TCP/IP time outs. The ISP's server is on a broadband connection, so it can maintain those TCP sockets, and the only thing the client has to maintain is a single socket to the ISP's accellerated proxy. This cuts out that additional TCP overhead.
Smart caching. These systems usually maintain a seperate cache from the browser. This cache is smart. It rates documents based on the frequency of download, and removes those that aren't often viewd, while preloading highly viewed images and documents into memory on load to increase performance.
And finally, ridiculous compression rates, the natural evolution of the good ol' v.42 related standards.
The first two require a proxy server setup, the second two are just plain good ideas that haven't made it into the wild. For example, the smart cacheing could be implemented by Moz, or even by a Firebird extension. The last could be handled by a certain standards body implementing much more aggresive changes in terms of compression instead of features like the ones introduced in the v.92 standard.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, Easy Software, who makes CUPS, makes a Open Source product called EPM (Easy Package Managment) which is a "Meta" package management system. Target EPM, and then EPM is designed to generate appropriate packages for all major Unix platforms.
That's pretty damn standardized.
Uh . . . . no.
Classic Mac OS used the resource fork for storing associated files, but still had an OS wide location for preference files (MacHD:System:Preference). Sure, no registry, but frankly, LOTS of OS's don't have a registry.
Mac OS X has bundles which resemble AppDir's (That Rox uses) a great deal, but OS X got them from NeXT not OS 9, and NeXT got it from RISC, which is the OS that Rox is trying to emulate in the first place. Mac OS emulation is the farthest thing from Thomas's mind, I assure you.
The real interesting technology isn't the AppDir's anyway, it's ZeroInstall, which allows you to view the internet as a file system from which you can directly run applications.
I probably shouldn't post this late in the thread, but dammnit, sometimes you gotta.
The article is pretty perceptive about some things, specifically, seeing the underlying attitude in Raymond's article which was itself the cause of Raymonds problem.
Here's the thing though: he points out that usability and UT design are arts, and require gifted, talented people to perform. I have this to say.
THE SAME FOR WRITING SOFTWARE YOU, POMPOUS ASS.
Have you read the Mythical Man Month? You just can't throw developers at a project to make it better. The author here seems to think that this is how OSS operates - lots of developers ameleorating their overall mediocrit. And yet Open Source is still churning out high quality software at a rate to make MS blush, and only a food would think that the quality of the Linux kernel was entirely about the number of developers working on it. So, clearly, we must have strong leadership and good talent working for us. Why hasn't the same thing happened for usability?
It will. The fact that Slashdot posts articles about usability shows how the community is turning the furor of a thousand keyboards in the direction of usability. Once again, someone misunderstands "Open Source", and begins to say what it can and cannot do. I say wait and see.
Firefox and Thunderbird are going to be a while till they are production ready. And by production ready, we don't just mean fast/stable, we also mean featureful, containing all of the core functionality of the Moz suite.
Until then, development will continue on the main Moz branch. This work benefits the other projects anyway, no major overhauls of the code are planned which don't have direct bearing on the two "mini" versions (that I know of), and this gives Moz the chance to prepare the developer and user community with lots of warning, transitional versions of app suite, and tech previews.
. . .no
Ack! And I had mod points. Drat. Sometimes you gotta bite the bait . . .
1) Have you looked at the older GTK file selector? What other OS's file selector does it remind you of?
2) Have you ever looked at complaints about the OS X widget set? What's the most common complaint about a single individual widget do you see?
3) You need to access everything from the keyboard - with no third party extensions, which widget set do you pick, OS X's or GTK+?
4)In terms of functionality and ease of use, what does OS X's widget set have that GTK+ doesn't? No fair pointing to the windowing system (Quartz vs X). I'm honestly curious.
My suspicion that the "snappier" feeling comes from the massive prelinking that the OS goes though when installing stuff.
While OS X has nothing approaching the DLL hell of Windows, prelinking associations can at least theoretically break, and I am fairly sure that the entire OS is only prelinked when installing a major update. Otherwise installing apps would take even longer than usual
Yeah - for example RiscOS kernel was in ROM. The classic MacOS toolkit was in ROM. In that sense this is nothing new.
Increasing what a piece of hardware knows about itself and can do by itself makes writing drivers (potentially) easier and more robust, and pushes that responsibility back to the hardware manufacturer in an OS neutral way.
If more devices had something like Vesa mode as well, then the road to basic hardware functionality would be easier for all sorts of software producers.
So, all in all, a nifty idea
Unfortunately, as logical as ISO dates are, they are hard for our American brains, spoiled by years of idiocy, to parse. I prefer this 1 - May - 2004 Unambiguous to everyone, but may make you look like a Scientologist
It worked for the iPod Mini
This is scary?
This is a dragon?
Well, actually VMs are the way of the past - in research circles the VM has been around forever.
.Net VM is rather small. JVM/.Net are designed from the ground up to support systems languages (like Java and C#). They optimize for static typing and languages where most complexity happens at compile time. Parrot is a VM for languages like Perl, Python, and Ruby, (and TCL, and Lisp etc) whose typing is weaker, and where a runtime eval is a moderately common occurance.
However, for what it's worth, Parrot's relationship to the JVM and the
What specifically about the JVM puts you off? Or is it the host language that bothers you?
XServer is an experimental project, based off of KDrive. It is -
1) An experimental driver architecture
2) An expertimental set of X extensions, dependent on the new driver architecture for performance reasons
3) The umbrella for the Keiths more mainstream extensions to X, including XDamage (which is a dependency for the compositing extension).
According to the guys on the XServer list, the XServer is not only not ready for prime time, but it may not ever be a real canidate for an XFree replacement because of it's experimental nature.
Couple of notes -
None of the Ninetendo Series systems ever had backwards compat. They handled this by having huge increases in power between releases.
MS has never made money on the X-Box - it's vastly undersold pricewise compared to its hardware, hence everyone keeps trying to get an OS on it. Short term and medium term financial losses are part of MS's long term strategies for 90% of all its product lines.
MS owns one of the most popular x86 emulators around for PPC.
If you port, say, DirectX, to PPC then emulated applications which spend most of the time in DirectX will run close to original speed on the PPC hardware. I would imagine that games spend huge amounts of time inside DirectX.
Mind you, I'm not saying that XB2 will run on PPC, just that is far more reasonable decision for MS to make than you might think.
It's not just stability. Windows crappy file locking semantics mean that program installation almost always requires reboots. Keeping up with MS security patches, even at the relatively slow rate some bugs are patched, leads to several reboots a week.
I think the real "empowerment" issue comes back to the fact that your average mom and pop user doesn't understand, and is mostly incapable of utilizing the p2p nature of the pre NAT internet. Sure, those of us who can are being left out in the cold, most people are happy. Besides, now that ISPs view nodes as "consumers" instead of "peers", it seems less justified to provide decent upstream bandwidth for individual nodes. It's in many an ISPs EULA to ban the running of a "server" for client machines, a distinction which practically makes no sense for p2p applications, like IM and file sharing.
The internet has become telephone and television rolled into one. IPv6 couldn't have changed it, only the continued exclusion of the internet from the masses, which I am unconvinced is a good thing. Ultimately, it's more cultural than technological.
I am a tier two tech support agent for a large ISP. When a frontline tech calls me for assistance, the exact same thing occurs.
*sigh*
Eh, I don't buy it.
Yeah, I hate mismatched apps too, but mostly because I'm blind as a bat - if I can make multiple toolkits obey font and widget sizes appropriately I'm happy.
Sure, the OS, in order to look slick and professional should provide a consistant look and feel. But on Windows, it's not long before that's lost. Outlook implements it's own widget set, and so does IE, though IE blends better. Notepad and Windows Explorer use different widgets - look at the menus.
And what about Windows "Distributions"? OEM versions of Windows are what most people see as the Operating System, just as people see Distributions as Linux. Have you seen what the OEM includes, and what most users accept without thought? In all my years of tech support I've never heard one user complain about the fact that Symantec's products have their own (fugly) neon yellow widgets, and Norton Antivirus came preinstalled on their machine.
Allowing Widget kits to share settings is fabulous, having multiple toolkits to promote a higher rate of toolkit evolution is also fabulous.
D'oh!
It doesn't matter how the EFF handles GPL violations since they are not the licensor. If they were, then unequal application of the GPL would only invalidate (if it did invalidate) the licence of the GPL software owned by the EFF.
If Linus is unequal in his pursuit of his intellectual property rights vis a vis the GPL that only renders Linus property rights at issue, not the GPL. The GPL is a licence (like the Microsoft Shared Source Licence, or even EULA) and not an institution. Since the GPL is one of the more innovative licences we often lose sight of that fact.
(IANAL, of course)
X is great.
XFree86 needs a shakeup.
-Erik
The Toshiba reactor specs liquid sodium - hasn't that been an issue in the past?
Sure, Toshiba says that the chance of a meltdown is tiny, but in the case of liquid sodium, when you need to dump in lots of additional coolant to prevent a meltdown, you can't just dump on readily available water. You have to use more liquid sodium, else the sodium will react volitily.
Damnit! Replying to myself. I forgot about the coolest feature. The proxy checks for inline ads by a similar algorithm that Moz uses, and removes them. Not only are the ads gone, but since it is server side, it cuts down on download size.
I hate to conflict with the general Slashdot opinion that this technology is somehow bad, but the truth is this stuff rocks
I've seen Internet Connection's acheive compression rates and acceleration rates breaking 130Kbs (equivalant).
We've talked some about compression rates, but there is more to it than that. This stuff does:
The first two require a proxy server setup, the second two are just plain good ideas that haven't made it into the wild. For example, the smart cacheing could be implemented by Moz, or even by a Firebird extension. The last could be handled by a certain standards body implementing much more aggresive changes in terms of compression instead of features like the ones introduced in the v.92 standard.
Last I heard, she was retired.