I'm fairly confident MS will bring out a Win 8 for Desktop edition. When apps needed are desktop apps, going through Metro with every Win-key press is just untolerable for productivity in many ways, and needing to use external tool to get "normal" desktop usability back is a barrier to upgrade in many ways, especially for businesses.
All it would take is, allow metro to be windowed to desktop, and bring back some kind of start menu.
I also want Aero glass back, but maybe that's just me.
That's the problem with not-for-profit software. Few developers are willing to go to the extra effort to test it under different environments. And I guess that's just fine too with OSS, let the community test and report (which you seem to be doing, great!) , and preferably fix, if there is a community that cares. And if there is not, why should the developer care about it more than new features or bugs that actually bother him/her?
. Python accepts either spaces or tabs, specifically because you can't get agreement on one or the other. The same argument applies here, too.
Indeed, but doing something which is basically "worst of both worlds" is neither simple nor all that sensible, no matter the reason. Fortunately practical impact is quite minor, at worst it costs a bit more work from people who have plenty of free time for such fun things anyway, when submitting or merging patches with different indentation conventions, and when tweaking editor settings back and forth.
That's not simple, and I'd argue it's not sensible either. Sensible thing is to specify that there is just one indentation character, and for practical reasons it has to be space (tabs can always be converted to space only by any programming editor, but spaces can't be converted to tab-only by common editors). Problem solved.
It would be neat if all indentation was tabs, and tab width would be purely visual thing, up to each individual looking at the code, much like font is. Then meaning of tab in source code would be "exactly one indentation level", and programming world would be a better place. But alas, real world conflicts with that ideal.
This happens pretty much every update cycle. The new OS is still terrible and unfamiliar and incompatible, and the old OS still has good availability. The only difference this time is that somebody wrote an article about.
For the record: I'm an OSX, Android and 360 user. I don't particularly LIKE MS, but this is not the world-shaking revelation that the article and the rest of the comments are going to make it out to be.
This is not just getting used to it. Win8 mixes two totally different GUIs, the UI-previously-known-as-Metro, and the stripped down Vista/Win7 UI. And boy, do they integrate badly. To be able to use it, printed out cheat sheet of keyboard shortcuts is a must, the GUI is not going to help you get things done. And better learn to give keyboard commands "blind", because transition animations will make the display lag behind.
Win8 would be brilliant with two small improvements: ability to run Metro in a window with other desktop apps, and a sensible start menu implementation for desktop mode. Even alone either of these would make a world of difference, together they'd make Win8 a must have OS even as upgrade.
I would argue that once a distribution has gone "dark" in the manner that Ubuntu and its parent company Canonical have, measures like these are a moot point... Yes, you can block their servers. Now. If they decide to write a daemon that watches the host file for alterations and automatically restores it to a protected backup, what then?
I'd be willing to grant they are only shady, not really dark, until they actually do put in measures (beyonf having opt-out instead of opt-in) which make it hard to disable this. That is an important distinction. Now by default they make people do it "their way", but that's always how it is, there's always default for everything except dialogs which force making a choice before "Next->" button becomes enabled. Doing it this way with spy feature is bad, but it's still a far cry from stopping people from changigng it.
I steer clear of Unity anyway, it didn't really do it for me when I gave it a try, so this is not really any kind of issue for me in practice, it only makes sure I'm not going to give it another try in future.
My point is, this isn't "going dark", it's just bad service to (mostly non-paying) customers.
I don't quite grasp the concept of switching distro based on default DE, when alternative is just one apt-get away (at least kubuntu, xubuntu and lubuntu variants). Though I sure am glad I ditched Unity as soon as it had finished installation, due to the issue of TFA, so I guess I share your sentiment a bit anyway. As it is, I'll keep using Ubuntu (without Unity) as long as it is the most convenient and widely supported distro for getting software packages outside official repositories.
It's been implied that Ron Paul has knowingly benefitted from operation of this domain. I don't know if it means anything legally, but it does mean Ron Paul has morally validated the situation, and indicated he has no problem with it. So, what he does now is both hypocritical, unethical, and demonstration of why libertarianism will never work: even its most ardent supporters are willing to use non-libertarian methods to get their way, when there's a way and a reason. And there always is a way, even in pure anarchy, and reasons always appear too. Always.
The thing is, Internet changes, world moves, and things (such as libraries) are interdependent. If you want both ultra-stable OS and recent software, you need two OSes. Which of course is just fine, just run Fedora or whatever in a VM, and reap benefits of up-to-date software where it matters, while having stable host OS for the "real work" (or whatever). No OS install needed even, just download pre-made VM image and you're set.
If it is at least a semi-normal PC workstation, one where user might want to use Chrome, then fact of life is, Internet moves, standards change, compilers and associated core libraries change, utility and framework libraries target the new core etc etc.
All in all, even that Ubuntu LTS 2 year upgrade cycle is pushing it and often requires either compromising or tinkering to get some software to work. Going longer than that with same OS core just isn't compatible with the real world. If both are needed, then two OSes are needed, one for "real work", other for interacting with rest of the world. Fortunately, virtual machines and obscene power of modern PCs make it easy to have that with one physical PC without noticeable performance penalty. Easy enough to dedicate an entire OS for running just Chrome.
Above you talked about 6-12 months, now it suddenly changed to 7 years... Do you seriously use that old disk images carried over to new HW, or do you perhaps re-install the OS from scratch to new HW a bit more often than that, after all?
I'm fairly happy with Ubuntu LTS (with a sane DE of your choice), and doing OS upgrade every two years (and I mean upgrade, not re-install), about half a year after each LTS has come out and most bugs have been weeded out.
If the meat did not come from an animal, which rolled in shit when it was growing up, and which then was panicking when it was lead for slaughter, then briefly (or not so briefly) screamed in pain when it was killed, it's not real meat. It's just some... substitute, though probably with less hormones, antibiotics and pesticide remnants, more tender yet less fatty, and with very few bacterial contaminants. But still, substitute!
Now excuse me while I go to the outhouse, the crops need fertilizer next year too.
We're running out of idiots? Surprise surprise surprise.
Yes. Even though idiots are a naturally renewing resource, one scammer can easily harvest money from hundreds of idiots. We may very well run out of idiots before we run out of scammers...
Not to mention we are at the dawn of the age of 3D printer. If you want to make money you should "short" the bricks. Maybe you can hedge that with an option.
Considering current speed of 3D printers, combined with the tolerances of Lego, we're quite a long way (I say a decade minimum) from having reasonably priced 3D printers which can produce real Lego-quality bricks, let alone counterfeits which could pass as the real thing (colors etc), never mind the unit cost of single brick.
And even if 3D printing drives Lego to bankruptcy, what do you think will happen to the prices of real Lego packets? Or even to prices of real used Lego bricks in a big bin? Are they going to go down?
Has anybody had success migrating their project from QWidgets to Qt Quick? Unless I see a strong compelling reason, I am sticking with QWidgets. It works really well for me.
For an existing project, I think the only compelling reason would be, if you want a bling-bling GUI for touch interaction. Think of flick scrolling, multi-finger zoom&pan, animated transitions. And then it would need to be a complete UI redesign.
But, in 1-2 years, I think almost all new displays even on desktop, and certainly on laptops, will be touch screens. I think this is a good time to start thinking about a full UI re-design for any application, where displaying information is important.
I doubt it. Qt is nice but depending on what's being developed, HTML5/JavaScript can be the superior solution.
I think there are very few different cases where HTML5+JavaScript is superior. Online cloud-backed apps running in browsers are obviously one case, removing the need for separate download, and on native side there's the case where HTML+JS is the only alternative supported by all platforms where the application needs to run...
But HTML (any XML) is klunky compared to QML if you want to go the declarative route, and for "real applications" like the much-mentioned Autodesk Maya, they're not even competing because one of them is not an option at all, and will not be for a decade at least.
HTML5+JavaScript will probably get there, once processing power and memory of (mobile) devices goes up a bit more, and once the standard stabilizes (assuming it stabilizes instead of fragmenting...), and mobile networks become faster, and once the JavaScript libraries develop to be more sophisticated, and support for non-networked data storage gets better. A decade, maybe, considering the inertia.
I don't think Boost has support for JS and Python.
Well, Boost is a C++ library. That said, you don't really need any special support for signals in JS or Python, because they already have functions as first-class types.
I think he meant, he doesn't think it's easy to create bindings for emitting Boost signals from javascript or Python, like you can do from javascript engine running in Qt app, or from PySide/PyQt application.
While this doesn't make sense for Boost alone, without context, it becomes relevant and even critical, if you have a library/framework using Boost as core signal/slot mechanism. If you do that, how easy is it to emit such signals from an interpreted language? Or, to put it other way, are Boost signals a realistic option at all, if you want to leave open the option to interface with a scripting language?
dlsym(h, "my_method") There is no need to store it, it's already in the symbol table.
If you do want to store it, there is no need to use an external preprocessor anyway.
Sorry, wrong answer. C++ method name symbols are mangled to include class name and parameters. Worse, this mangling is not standardized, it is compiler specific. In other words, that is not a method name, that is a C function name in the example you gave.
But it's even worse than just generating the symbol name. With virtual methods, you have to determine at runtime, what is the real class of the object pointer, because you need to call differently named method based on that. So, could be done with RTTI and compiler specific helper function to generate the mangled symbol name, but I don't remember anybody ever doing it...
Let me add that In this particular instance, many is 15 years.
How do you call a C++ method by it's name from QML or javascript or C++ plugin without some kind of pre-prosessing step which actually stores the method names and argument types somehow to make invocation possible?
So, is it fully standard C++ now or do you still have to use their hokey preprocessor?
Well, for many things Qt requires reflection features not provided with C++. When/if C++ starts to provide them as part of the language, I'm sure moc will become thing of the past, and be replaced with just translation data extractor, which you can leave out if you do not care about internationalization. But for what it's worth, with the new signal-slot connect syntax it's probably possible to have meaningful programs without running moc, if that makes someone happy.
Oh, I'm not slagging the science done in space (and not just by NASA) at all. Instrument improvements have been amazing for the science. I'm also not so much after putting man on the moon, but being able to, because that means ability to do a whole lot of other things, too.
I mean, just looking at progress from 1950-1980, and then from 1980-2010... I wouldn't be so negative if I believed the "basic" space tech has reached a plateau, but especially in the electric propulsion and miniature nuclear power (not just RTG) areas, I believe there's so much room for improvement, that last 30 years seem like just wasting time.
JWST is something to be exited about, definitely... Once it's actually up!
And now that I think of it, Hubble isn't that old tech either, especially considering the repair missions. It's a bit sad we (the humanity, I'm not an American) have currently lost the capability to do the kind of "rescue" repair. Well, probably lost, who knows what the X-37 is actually capable of... (And no, this is not longing to get the space shuttle back).
Slashdot Mirror
I'm fairly confident MS will bring out a Win 8 for Desktop edition. When apps needed are desktop apps, going through Metro with every Win-key press is just untolerable for productivity in many ways, and needing to use external tool to get "normal" desktop usability back is a barrier to upgrade in many ways, especially for businesses.
All it would take is, allow metro to be windowed to desktop, and bring back some kind of start menu.
I also want Aero glass back, but maybe that's just me.
That's the problem with not-for-profit software. Few developers are willing to go to the extra effort to test it under different environments. And I guess that's just fine too with OSS, let the community test and report (which you seem to be doing, great!) , and preferably fix, if there is a community that cares. And if there is not, why should the developer care about it more than new features or bugs that actually bother him/her?
.
Python accepts either spaces or tabs, specifically because you can't get agreement on one or the other. The same argument applies here, too.
Indeed, but doing something which is basically "worst of both worlds" is neither simple nor all that sensible, no matter the reason. Fortunately practical impact is quite minor, at worst it costs a bit more work from people who have plenty of free time for such fun things anyway, when submitting or merging patches with different indentation conventions, and when tweaking editor settings back and forth.
That's not simple, and I'd argue it's not sensible either. Sensible thing is to specify that there is just one indentation character, and for practical reasons it has to be space (tabs can always be converted to space only by any programming editor, but spaces can't be converted to tab-only by common editors). Problem solved.
It would be neat if all indentation was tabs, and tab width would be purely visual thing, up to each individual looking at the code, much like font is. Then meaning of tab in source code would be "exactly one indentation level", and programming world would be a better place. But alas, real world conflicts with that ideal.
Once a human, always a human.
Also, once an animal, always an animal, once a vertebrate, always a vertebrate, once a tetrapod, always a tetrapod (also snakes and whales), etc
This happens pretty much every update cycle. The new OS is still terrible and unfamiliar and incompatible, and the old OS still has good availability. The only difference this time is that somebody wrote an article about.
For the record: I'm an OSX, Android and 360 user. I don't particularly LIKE MS, but this is not the world-shaking revelation that the article and the rest of the comments are going to make it out to be.
This is not just getting used to it. Win8 mixes two totally different GUIs, the UI-previously-known-as-Metro, and the stripped down Vista/Win7 UI. And boy, do they integrate badly. To be able to use it, printed out cheat sheet of keyboard shortcuts is a must, the GUI is not going to help you get things done. And better learn to give keyboard commands "blind", because transition animations will make the display lag behind.
Win8 would be brilliant with two small improvements: ability to run Metro in a window with other desktop apps, and a sensible start menu implementation for desktop mode. Even alone either of these would make a world of difference, together they'd make Win8 a must have OS even as upgrade.
I would argue that once a distribution has gone "dark" in the manner that Ubuntu and its parent company Canonical have, measures like these are a moot point... Yes, you can block their servers. Now. If they decide to write a daemon that watches the host file for alterations and automatically restores it to a protected backup, what then?
I'd be willing to grant they are only shady, not really dark, until they actually do put in measures (beyonf having opt-out instead of opt-in) which make it hard to disable this. That is an important distinction. Now by default they make people do it "their way", but that's always how it is, there's always default for everything except dialogs which force making a choice before "Next->" button becomes enabled. Doing it this way with spy feature is bad, but it's still a far cry from stopping people from changigng it.
I steer clear of Unity anyway, it didn't really do it for me when I gave it a try, so this is not really any kind of issue for me in practice, it only makes sure I'm not going to give it another try in future.
My point is, this isn't "going dark", it's just bad service to (mostly non-paying) customers.
I don't quite grasp the concept of switching distro based on default DE, when alternative is just one apt-get away (at least kubuntu, xubuntu and lubuntu variants). Though I sure am glad I ditched Unity as soon as it had finished installation, due to the issue of TFA, so I guess I share your sentiment a bit anyway. As it is, I'll keep using Ubuntu (without Unity) as long as it is the most convenient and widely supported distro for getting software packages outside official repositories.
It's been implied that Ron Paul has knowingly benefitted from operation of this domain. I don't know if it means anything legally, but it does mean Ron Paul has morally validated the situation, and indicated he has no problem with it. So, what he does now is both hypocritical, unethical, and demonstration of why libertarianism will never work: even its most ardent supporters are willing to use non-libertarian methods to get their way, when there's a way and a reason. And there always is a way, even in pure anarchy, and reasons always appear too. Always.
The thing is, Internet changes, world moves, and things (such as libraries) are interdependent. If you want both ultra-stable OS and recent software, you need two OSes. Which of course is just fine, just run Fedora or whatever in a VM, and reap benefits of up-to-date software where it matters, while having stable host OS for the "real work" (or whatever). No OS install needed even, just download pre-made VM image and you're set.
If it is at least a semi-normal PC workstation, one where user might want to use Chrome, then fact of life is, Internet moves, standards change, compilers and associated core libraries change, utility and framework libraries target the new core etc etc.
All in all, even that Ubuntu LTS 2 year upgrade cycle is pushing it and often requires either compromising or tinkering to get some software to work. Going longer than that with same OS core just isn't compatible with the real world. If both are needed, then two OSes are needed, one for "real work", other for interacting with rest of the world. Fortunately, virtual machines and obscene power of modern PCs make it easy to have that with one physical PC without noticeable performance penalty. Easy enough to dedicate an entire OS for running just Chrome.
Above you talked about 6-12 months, now it suddenly changed to 7 years... Do you seriously use that old disk images carried over to new HW, or do you perhaps re-install the OS from scratch to new HW a bit more often than that, after all?
I'm fairly happy with Ubuntu LTS (with a sane DE of your choice), and doing OS upgrade every two years (and I mean upgrade, not re-install), about half a year after each LTS has come out and most bugs have been weeded out.
If the meat did not come from an animal, which rolled in shit when it was growing up, and which then was panicking when it was lead for slaughter, then briefly (or not so briefly) screamed in pain when it was killed, it's not real meat. It's just some... substitute, though probably with less hormones, antibiotics and pesticide remnants, more tender yet less fatty, and with very few bacterial contaminants. But still, substitute!
Now excuse me while I go to the outhouse, the crops need fertilizer next year too.
I agree with you, but I don't know about the other guy.
Impostor! I'm the WP user you claim to be! But I don't know what the third thinks about this, either...
We're running out of idiots? Surprise surprise surprise.
Yes. Even though idiots are a naturally renewing resource, one scammer can easily harvest money from hundreds of idiots. We may very well run out of idiots before we run out of scammers...
Not to mention we are at the dawn of the age of 3D printer. If you want to make money you should "short" the bricks. Maybe you can hedge that with an option.
Considering current speed of 3D printers, combined with the tolerances of Lego, we're quite a long way (I say a decade minimum) from having reasonably priced 3D printers which can produce real Lego-quality bricks, let alone counterfeits which could pass as the real thing (colors etc), never mind the unit cost of single brick.
And even if 3D printing drives Lego to bankruptcy, what do you think will happen to the prices of real Lego packets? Or even to prices of real used Lego bricks in a big bin? Are they going to go down?
Has anybody had success migrating their project from QWidgets to Qt Quick? Unless I see a strong compelling reason, I am sticking with QWidgets. It works really well for me.
For an existing project, I think the only compelling reason would be, if you want a bling-bling GUI for touch interaction. Think of flick scrolling, multi-finger zoom&pan, animated transitions. And then it would need to be a complete UI redesign.
But, in 1-2 years, I think almost all new displays even on desktop, and certainly on laptops, will be touch screens. I think this is a good time to start thinking about a full UI re-design for any application, where displaying information is important.
I doubt it. Qt is nice but depending on what's being developed, HTML5/JavaScript can be the superior solution.
I think there are very few different cases where HTML5+JavaScript is superior. Online cloud-backed apps running in browsers are obviously one case, removing the need for separate download, and on native side there's the case where HTML+JS is the only alternative supported by all platforms where the application needs to run...
But HTML (any XML) is klunky compared to QML if you want to go the declarative route, and for "real applications" like the much-mentioned Autodesk Maya, they're not even competing because one of them is not an option at all, and will not be for a decade at least.
HTML5+JavaScript will probably get there, once processing power and memory of (mobile) devices goes up a bit more, and once the standard stabilizes (assuming it stabilizes instead of fragmenting...), and mobile networks become faster, and once the JavaScript libraries develop to be more sophisticated, and support for non-networked data storage gets better. A decade, maybe, considering the inertia.
I don't think Boost has support for JS and Python.
Well, Boost is a C++ library. That said, you don't really need any special support for signals in JS or Python, because they already have functions as first-class types.
I think he meant, he doesn't think it's easy to create bindings for emitting Boost signals from javascript or Python, like you can do from javascript engine running in Qt app, or from PySide/PyQt application.
While this doesn't make sense for Boost alone, without context, it becomes relevant and even critical, if you have a library/framework using Boost as core signal/slot mechanism. If you do that, how easy is it to emit such signals from an interpreted language? Or, to put it other way, are Boost signals a realistic option at all, if you want to leave open the option to interface with a scripting language?
I don't know.
Sure, but what about your own types? Implementing COW is much harder than implementing a move constructor.
In case you are genuinely interested, it's not hard, because there's a helper class for that: QSharedDataPointer
dlsym(h, "my_method")
There is no need to store it, it's already in the symbol table.
If you do want to store it, there is no need to use an external preprocessor anyway.
Sorry, wrong answer. C++ method name symbols are mangled to include class name and parameters. Worse, this mangling is not standardized, it is compiler specific. In other words, that is not a method name, that is a C function name in the example you gave.
But it's even worse than just generating the symbol name. With virtual methods, you have to determine at runtime, what is the real class of the object pointer, because you need to call differently named method based on that. So, could be done with RTTI and compiler specific helper function to generate the mangled symbol name, but I don't remember anybody ever doing it...
Let me add that In this particular instance, many is 15 years.
How do you call a C++ method by it's name from QML or javascript or C++ plugin without some kind of pre-prosessing step which actually stores the method names and argument types somehow to make invocation possible?
So, is it fully standard C++ now or do you still have to use their hokey preprocessor?
Well, for many things Qt requires reflection features not provided with C++. When/if C++ starts to provide them as part of the language, I'm sure moc will become thing of the past, and be replaced with just translation data extractor, which you can leave out if you do not care about internationalization. But for what it's worth, with the new signal-slot connect syntax it's probably possible to have meaningful programs without running moc, if that makes someone happy.
Oh, I'm not slagging the science done in space (and not just by NASA) at all. Instrument improvements have been amazing for the science. I'm also not so much after putting man on the moon, but being able to, because that means ability to do a whole lot of other things, too.
I mean, just looking at progress from 1950-1980, and then from 1980-2010... I wouldn't be so negative if I believed the "basic" space tech has reached a plateau, but especially in the electric propulsion and miniature nuclear power (not just RTG) areas, I believe there's so much room for improvement, that last 30 years seem like just wasting time.
JWST is something to be exited about, definitely... Once it's actually up!
And now that I think of it, Hubble isn't that old tech either, especially considering the repair missions. It's a bit sad we (the humanity, I'm not an American) have currently lost the capability to do the kind of "rescue" repair. Well, probably lost, who knows what the X-37 is actually capable of... (And no, this is not longing to get the space shuttle back).