So Linux development has been hijacked by people that can afford $6600 toolkits?
You keep repeating that $6600 number, but not even the most expensive option for Qt is that high. If you take a look at their pricing, you have a full desktop edition for 2630. Nor is anything being hijacked, cheaper options are available. And if you're really that anti-Qt, noone is saying you can't write a GTK application with KDE integration.
What's the point crippling KDE (and hence Linux) with Qt - IF NOBODY USES IT FOR COMMERCIAL APPS ON LINUX?
And if time to market and quality of tools are the most important aspects, why are you not using either Microsoft Visual C# or Borland Delphi / C++ Builder?
Maybe because Qt can be considered on par with these solutions? Or because being cross-platform is important?
It's mainly targetted towards document management, especially using the new OpenDocument standard, but it can store all kinds of files. It's highly plugin-based, has some nice search features and allows for flexible permission settings. You can easily write plugins which provide extra support for special file types, like adding webbased viewers and editors and indexing functions.
The only thing it doesn't offer on your list is LDAP authentication, but a plugin could be created for this as well.
Your average PC user doesn't want to have to deal with a different look-and-feel every time he boots an application, so he'll be stuck with the apps that were developed for his desktop environment.
And of course we all know how many users bail out when they see the hugely inconsistent interfaces of MS Office, Windows Media Player and MSN Messenger...
Perhaps a bit off-topic, but if software CAN'T be patented, then couldn't one LEGALLY take that unpatented open source code and make a commercial product out of it, thus negating the GPL? (IANAL, and it shows)
It shows indeed.
The GPL protects your project through copyright, not through patents. Patents are simply not required for protecting software.
If you look at the office market, this may indeed be true. If you look at StarOffice and SoftMaker Office, they both sell under $80. This was unthinkable some years ago. However, Microsofts own prices are still up in the air. So the only explanation I can think of is that because Microsoft monopolized the market, there's no way to reasonably compete with them unless you offer a *much* lower price. Now to say consumers benefit from Microsoft's precense is a bit risky as many consumers (think they) can't use these lower-cost products because of lock-in effects.
While I agree it's somewhat of a flamebait story, there's some validity to bashing ActiveX. You call ActiveX an old technology and so MS shouldn't be bashed for it, but as long as MS hasn't developed something better (which can take quite a while) it should be counted for as their currently best offering in that area, which is quite pathetic really. If you add to that the fact they dropped Netscape plugin support with IE6 so as to get everyone on ActiveX, it's really their own fault they're getting bashed about it.
I use XML quite extensively and though I love it for my purposes, I do have to admit it slows down things. Some time ago, this became very apparent when I was making a XSLT stylesheet which included about 8 other XSLT sheets which were sent to the user's browser which converted my custom XML schema to some decent XHTML and XUL code. It become _slow_, to say the least.
So, if you ask me, I'm all for a binary XML *standard* which is then supported by browsers, life, the universe and everything. One thing I do ask them is to make it possible to easily convert text XML files to binary XML files and vice versa (thus not losing the original tag names and such). As long as they obey to that, I'm all for it!
Something I personally dislike about Mozilla/Firefox is the way the page rendering and the GUI run in the same thread. For instance, this makes switching tabs sluggish when a heavy page is being rendered.
Using multiple threads, or possibly an out-of-process service like you suggest, would greatly enhance this situation. If they then also had some fallback utility which would automaticaly restart this service in case of a crash, you would have a rock solid solution. A crash in the gecko engine would just cause the service to be restarted while your GUI stays in place and just reconnects when the service is up again (thus not losing your current tabs or data you're typing in) and similarly, a crash in the GUI wouldn't effect the service.
You say that as a joke, but ever heard of this story?
Chessplayer's head explodes
From the Weekly World News, May 24, 1994
Doctors are blaming a rare electrical imbalance in the brain for the
bizarre death of a chess player whose head literally exploded in the
middle of a championship game!
No one else was hurt in the fatal explosion but four players and three
officials at the Moscow Candidate Masters' Chess Championships were
sprayed with blood and brain matter when Nikolai Titov's head suddenly
blew apart. Experts say he suffered from a condition called
Hyper-Cerebral Electrosis or HCE.
He was deep in concentration with his eyes focused on the board," says
Titov's opponent, Vladimir Dobrynin. "All of a sudden his hands flew
to his temples and he screamed in pain. Everyone looked up from their
games, startled by the noise. Then, as if someone had put a bomb in
his cranium, his head popped like a firecracker."
Incredibly, Titiov's is not the first case in which a person's head
has spontaneously exploded. Five people are known to have died of HCE
in spontaneously exploded. Five people are known to have died of HCE
in the last 25 years. The most recent death occurred just three years
ago in 1991, when European psychic Barbara Nicole's skull burst. Miss
Nicole's story was reported by newspapers worldwide, including WWN.
"HCE is an extremely rare physical imbalance," said Dr. Anatoly
Martinenko, famed neurologist and expert on the human brain who did
the autopsy on the brilliant chess expert. "It is a condition in which
the circuits of the brain become overloaded by the body's own
electricity. The explosions happen during periods of intense mental
activity when lots of current is surging through the brain. Victims
are highly intelligent people with great powers of concentration. Both
Miss Nicole and Mr. Titov were intense people who tended to keep those
cerebral circuits overloaded. In a way it could be said they were
literally too smart for their own good."
Although Dr. Martinenko says there are probably many undiagnosed
cases, he hastens to add that very few people will die from HCE. "Most
people who have it will never know. At this point, medical science
still doesn't know much about HCE. And since fatalities are so rare it
will probably be years before research money becomes available."
In the meantime, the doctor urges people to take it easy and not think
too hard for long periods of time. "Take frequent relaxation breaks
when you're doing things that take lots of mental focus," he
recommends.
I'm afraid you don't really know what you're talking about here. At the start of every OpenOffice.org content.xml file there's a namespace declaration for SVG and SVG properties are used to store meta-data about images in the document. Even though you don't store the image itself using SVG, you are still using the SVG schema. There's more to SVG than just defining how a vector image looks like, you know.
Now the comparison with GIF is just making yourself look silly as GIF is not defined in XML, there's thus no XML schema for it, let alone that would HTML use it to specify metadata about images.
Nonsense! OpenOffice adds images as files to its zipped archive. They do not get embedded in the XML. Thus SVG, PNG, TIF, JPG, and all the other image formats are treated the same.
Sorry mate, your entire post is correct with the exception of the word "Nonsense!".
While it's true the images themselves are saved as seperate files inside the zip archive, their properties (like size and alternative text) are stored inside the content.xml file as SVG properties.
With your experiment, try opening content.xml and search for the svg:width and svg:height properties for instance.
Will TextMaker 2005 support setting OpenDocument to be its default/native file format and when is its release planned?
I happen to write Document Managament Software which has good support for OpenOffice.org Writer documents and which will support OpenDocument as well. However, we also face some of the problems OpenOffice.org currently has to make a full switch to it. Maybe OpenOffice.org 2.0 will solve these soon enough, but otherwise your product might be a real option to consider.
Btw, why weren't OpenOffice.org Writer filters easier to write than MS Word filters? The reason I support OpenOffice.org documents with my software is for a large part because it's so easy. Then again, I don't aim for writing a 100% compatible word processor, but rather an XHTML viewer supporting basic features and indexing the documents for my searching functionality.
I'm sorry, but here you are a bit mistaken. Most importantly there are 2 things which make XML special in this area:
Namespaces. XML allows you to use different XML schema's within one document. This makes it possible to embed for instance SVG data within an OpenOffice.org document (which it actually does if you're adding images). So, no need to reinvent the wheel here.
XSL. A technique making it possible to transform a document from one XML schema to another with very little programming effort. This makes XHTML export and import/export filters for Office 2003 XML files much less of a hassle. Again, this is actively being taken advantage of by OpenOffice.org. No need to reinvent all the parsing and generation code again.
To say the fact they're documenting the format it is more important than the fact it's in XML is true, but that doesn't make it unimportant they're using XML.
To plumb a buzzword ("application services") I really don't think we're even going to recognize a "browser" in 10 years. We'll be too busy running our word processors, financial software and games straight over the internet. The "browser's" border will become transparent, and you won't need to know (or care) what you're using.
Yes, we will quite likely be using word processors over the (inter|intra)net in some years. But we won't be doing so over HTML, because it's simply not up to the task. So we need a next generation markup language for that. Currently there's only one contender, and that's Mozilla's XUL. Microsoft will try to push its own format with the introduction of Longhorn, namely XAML. If Mozilla takes off and XUL becomes a real standard before XAML even sees the daylight, Microsoft has a real problem. They will either need to adapt XUL or loose the backend market as well. That's why Microsoft should be worried for Mozilla.
It's a bug causing the main content to overlap the links on the left bar. Sometimes the content is also moved down quite a bit. Apparently it's somewhat of a timing related problem and thus happens not always and not on all systems.
Re:Security of Online Apps a Hurdle?
on
Firefox - The Platform
·
· Score: 2, Informative
OK, shameless plug ahead...
Currently I'm working on the Aukyla PHP Framework which is hosted at http://aukyla.sf.net/. Besides stuff like Login management and Configuration management, it also contains a Widget model. These widgets give output in Aukyla XML, basically a custom XML schema designed to be easily exportable to XHTML 1.1, XHTML 2.0 and XUL. While the actual XUL support will follow later it will allow you to write webapplications which can seamlessly exported from one codebase to different formats. While I don't really focus on MySQL myself, I know of others who are already using this framework in combination with MySQL, so there you have your XUL/PHP/MySQL combination;)
I hope to do a beta2/rc1 release (depending on the stability I can get this week) the first of November, this release will show the first progress towards multiple output support.
But then again, currently Linux is slowly eating into Windows' market share. Right now for about every lost Windows user they also loose an Office (which earns them more than Windows) user. Currently, Office is a very strong instrument in keeping the Windows monopoly intact, but if Windows looses out too much it will also undercut Office. So porting Office to Linux could at least keep their Office monopoly intact a bit longer. So it may not be a matter of attracting potential customers that much as it will be about keeping their existing customers.
Wow, that's a lot of fud for one person. I'm not here to bash anyone but let's face some facts.
1. GNOME is the main distribution for corporate desktops.
Please define corporate desktop. SUSE Linux Desktop and Xandros for instance are both KDE-based corporate desktops, I thought.
KDE is simply nowhere -- Novell are basically just gladhanding KDE zealots to prevent them from going off on one of their infamous jihads against SuSE.
Says who? Any references? SUSE has only intensified its KDE development lately (KDE/OpenOffice.org integration, KDE/Novell GroupWise integration, Qt/Mozilla integration was started after SUSE request).
IBM's forthcoming desktop is GNOME-based.
Again, says who? Any references? Last thing I heard (on aKademy, that was) was that someone for IBM is writing a redbook to determine IBM's position towards both desktops. Turns out this person fell in love with KDE during his research and this redbook will be strongly favored towards KDE. (Though again, what I heard is just a rumor as well.)
Sun is GNOME-based. KDE is... what?
So what? And what will they do with GNOME once Project Looking Glass takes off?
2. No-one, and I mean *NO-ONE* who matters gives a flying fuck what Slackware does. Slackware might have had a user base 5 years ago, but these days... nothing. Slackware is in a similar position as the other minor and virtually irrelevant Linux distributions -- the difference is that at least some of those distros are minor because they try something radical. Slackware is just old and busted.
3. This is yet another slashdot GNOME-bashing story. It's tiresome. Go and bore someone else, zealots.
So you think bashing Slackware in any way helps you get sympathy for GNOME?
It suggests HyperThreading doesn't do a whole lot on a single process not designed for multi-threading. That's quite a big difference. HyperThreading will give you some nice speed-ups when running multiple processes together.
Furthermore, Linux actually works better with HyperThreading when you run a single multi-threaded program, the program will actually be scheduled to run on both cores. On Windows, you will only see an advantage when running multiple processes.
Slashdot Mirror
So Linux development has been hijacked by people that can afford $6600 toolkits?
You keep repeating that $6600 number, but not even the most expensive option for Qt is that high. If you take a look at their pricing, you have a full desktop edition for 2630. Nor is anything being hijacked, cheaper options are available. And if you're really that anti-Qt, noone is saying you can't write a GTK application with KDE integration.
What's the point crippling KDE (and hence Linux) with Qt - IF NOBODY USES IT FOR COMMERCIAL APPS ON LINUX?
That point can easily be proven wrong. HP uses Qt for their printer utilities on Linux. Google Earth is being ported to Linux, and yes, it uses Qt. Another example is Skype, which works on Linux as well as it does on Windows, thanks to Qt.
And if time to market and quality of tools are the most important aspects, why are you not using either Microsoft Visual C# or Borland Delphi / C++ Builder?
Maybe because Qt can be considered on par with these solutions? Or because being cross-platform is important?
You might want to take a look at ADMS
It's mainly targetted towards document management, especially using the new OpenDocument standard, but it can store all kinds of files. It's highly plugin-based, has some nice search features and allows for flexible permission settings. You can easily write plugins which provide extra support for special file types, like adding webbased viewers and editors and indexing functions.
The only thing it doesn't offer on your list is LDAP authentication, but a plugin could be created for this as well.
You mean like this?
how you know?
so, obviously he was not talking about you. why act offenced anyway?
Your average PC user doesn't want to have to deal with a different look-and-feel every time he boots an application, so he'll be stuck with the apps that were developed for his desktop environment. And of course we all know how many users bail out when they see the hugely inconsistent interfaces of MS Office, Windows Media Player and MSN Messenger...
It shows indeed.
The GPL protects your project through copyright, not through patents. Patents are simply not required for protecting software.
If you look at the office market, this may indeed be true. If you look at StarOffice and SoftMaker Office, they both sell under $80. This was unthinkable some years ago. However, Microsofts own prices are still up in the air. So the only explanation I can think of is that because Microsoft monopolized the market, there's no way to reasonably compete with them unless you offer a *much* lower price. Now to say consumers benefit from Microsoft's precense is a bit risky as many consumers (think they) can't use these lower-cost products because of lock-in effects.
While I agree it's somewhat of a flamebait story, there's some validity to bashing ActiveX. You call ActiveX an old technology and so MS shouldn't be bashed for it, but as long as MS hasn't developed something better (which can take quite a while) it should be counted for as their currently best offering in that area, which is quite pathetic really. If you add to that the fact they dropped Netscape plugin support with IE6 so as to get everyone on ActiveX, it's really their own fault they're getting bashed about it.
I use XML quite extensively and though I love it for my purposes, I do have to admit it slows down things. Some time ago, this became very apparent when I was making a XSLT stylesheet which included about 8 other XSLT sheets which were sent to the user's browser which converted my custom XML schema to some decent XHTML and XUL code. It become _slow_, to say the least.
So, if you ask me, I'm all for a binary XML *standard* which is then supported by browsers, life, the universe and everything. One thing I do ask them is to make it possible to easily convert text XML files to binary XML files and vice versa (thus not losing the original tag names and such). As long as they obey to that, I'm all for it!
Something I personally dislike about Mozilla/Firefox is the way the page rendering and the GUI run in the same thread. For instance, this makes switching tabs sluggish when a heavy page is being rendered. Using multiple threads, or possibly an out-of-process service like you suggest, would greatly enhance this situation. If they then also had some fallback utility which would automaticaly restart this service in case of a crash, you would have a rock solid solution. A crash in the gecko engine would just cause the service to be restarted while your GUI stays in place and just reconnects when the service is up again (thus not losing your current tabs or data you're typing in) and similarly, a crash in the GUI wouldn't effect the service.
You say that as a joke, but ever heard of this story?
Chessplayer's head explodes
From the Weekly World News, May 24, 1994
Doctors are blaming a rare electrical imbalance in the brain for the bizarre death of a chess player whose head literally exploded in the middle of a championship game!
No one else was hurt in the fatal explosion but four players and three officials at the Moscow Candidate Masters' Chess Championships were sprayed with blood and brain matter when Nikolai Titov's head suddenly blew apart. Experts say he suffered from a condition called Hyper-Cerebral Electrosis or HCE.
He was deep in concentration with his eyes focused on the board," says Titov's opponent, Vladimir Dobrynin. "All of a sudden his hands flew to his temples and he screamed in pain. Everyone looked up from their games, startled by the noise. Then, as if someone had put a bomb in his cranium, his head popped like a firecracker."
Incredibly, Titiov's is not the first case in which a person's head has spontaneously exploded. Five people are known to have died of HCE in spontaneously exploded. Five people are known to have died of HCE in the last 25 years. The most recent death occurred just three years ago in 1991, when European psychic Barbara Nicole's skull burst. Miss Nicole's story was reported by newspapers worldwide, including WWN. "HCE is an extremely rare physical imbalance," said Dr. Anatoly Martinenko, famed neurologist and expert on the human brain who did the autopsy on the brilliant chess expert. "It is a condition in which the circuits of the brain become overloaded by the body's own electricity. The explosions happen during periods of intense mental activity when lots of current is surging through the brain. Victims are highly intelligent people with great powers of concentration. Both Miss Nicole and Mr. Titov were intense people who tended to keep those cerebral circuits overloaded. In a way it could be said they were literally too smart for their own good."
Although Dr. Martinenko says there are probably many undiagnosed cases, he hastens to add that very few people will die from HCE. "Most people who have it will never know. At this point, medical science still doesn't know much about HCE. And since fatalities are so rare it will probably be years before research money becomes available."
In the meantime, the doctor urges people to take it easy and not think too hard for long periods of time. "Take frequent relaxation breaks when you're doing things that take lots of mental focus," he recommends.
I'm afraid you don't really know what you're talking about here. At the start of every OpenOffice.org content.xml file there's a namespace declaration for SVG and SVG properties are used to store meta-data about images in the document. Even though you don't store the image itself using SVG, you are still using the SVG schema. There's more to SVG than just defining how a vector image looks like, you know.
Now the comparison with GIF is just making yourself look silly as GIF is not defined in XML, there's thus no XML schema for it, let alone that would HTML use it to specify metadata about images.
If you're not convinced, go read the OpenDocument specification and do a search for SVG.
Nonsense! OpenOffice adds images as files to its zipped archive. They do not get embedded in the XML. Thus SVG, PNG, TIF, JPG, and all the other image formats are treated the same.
Sorry mate, your entire post is correct with the exception of the word "Nonsense!".
While it's true the images themselves are saved as seperate files inside the zip archive, their properties (like size and alternative text) are stored inside the content.xml file as SVG properties.
With your experiment, try opening content.xml and search for the svg:width and svg:height properties for instance.
Hi Martin!
Will TextMaker 2005 support setting OpenDocument to be its default/native file format and when is its release planned?
I happen to write Document Managament Software which has good support for OpenOffice.org Writer documents and which will support OpenDocument as well. However, we also face some of the problems OpenOffice.org currently has to make a full switch to it. Maybe OpenOffice.org 2.0 will solve these soon enough, but otherwise your product might be a real option to consider.
Btw, why weren't OpenOffice.org Writer filters easier to write than MS Word filters? The reason I support OpenOffice.org documents with my software is for a large part because it's so easy. Then again, I don't aim for writing a 100% compatible word processor, but rather an XHTML viewer supporting basic features and indexing the documents for my searching functionality.
Greets,
Arend jr.
I'm sorry, but here you are a bit mistaken. Most importantly there are 2 things which make XML special in this area:
To say the fact they're documenting the format it is more important than the fact it's in XML is true, but that doesn't make it unimportant they're using XML.
To plumb a buzzword ("application services") I really don't think we're even going to recognize a "browser" in 10 years. We'll be too busy running our word processors, financial software and games straight over the internet. The "browser's" border will become transparent, and you won't need to know (or care) what you're using.
Yes, we will quite likely be using word processors over the (inter|intra)net in some years. But we won't be doing so over HTML, because it's simply not up to the task. So we need a next generation markup language for that. Currently there's only one contender, and that's Mozilla's XUL. Microsoft will try to push its own format with the introduction of Longhorn, namely XAML. If Mozilla takes off and XUL becomes a real standard before XAML even sees the daylight, Microsoft has a real problem. They will either need to adapt XUL or loose the backend market as well. That's why Microsoft should be worried for Mozilla.
It's a bug causing the main content to overlap the links on the left bar. Sometimes the content is also moved down quite a bit. Apparently it's somewhat of a timing related problem and thus happens not always and not on all systems.
Just installed in an hour ago. While everything looks nice and polished, unfortunately the Slashdot rendering bug is still present :(
They did backport some support for IE-only JavaScript features from the 1.8 branch though (but that was also in the RC's, I think).
W3Schools, for instance (Linux: 3.1%, Mac: 2.6%):
a sp
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.
OK, shameless plug ahead...
;)
Currently I'm working on the Aukyla PHP Framework which is hosted at http://aukyla.sf.net/. Besides stuff like Login management and Configuration management, it also contains a Widget model. These widgets give output in Aukyla XML, basically a custom XML schema designed to be easily exportable to XHTML 1.1, XHTML 2.0 and XUL. While the actual XUL support will follow later it will allow you to write webapplications which can seamlessly exported from one codebase to different formats. While I don't really focus on MySQL myself, I know of others who are already using this framework in combination with MySQL, so there you have your XUL/PHP/MySQL combination
I hope to do a beta2/rc1 release (depending on the stability I can get this week) the first of November, this release will show the first progress towards multiple output support.
But then again, currently Linux is slowly eating into Windows' market share. Right now for about every lost Windows user they also loose an Office (which earns them more than Windows) user. Currently, Office is a very strong instrument in keeping the Windows monopoly intact, but if Windows looses out too much it will also undercut Office. So porting Office to Linux could at least keep their Office monopoly intact a bit longer. So it may not be a matter of attracting potential customers that much as it will be about keeping their existing customers.
Wow, that's a lot of fud for one person. I'm not here to bash anyone but let's face some facts. 1. GNOME is the main distribution for corporate desktops. Please define corporate desktop. SUSE Linux Desktop and Xandros for instance are both KDE-based corporate desktops, I thought. KDE is simply nowhere -- Novell are basically just gladhanding KDE zealots to prevent them from going off on one of their infamous jihads against SuSE. Says who? Any references? SUSE has only intensified its KDE development lately (KDE/OpenOffice.org integration, KDE/Novell GroupWise integration, Qt/Mozilla integration was started after SUSE request). IBM's forthcoming desktop is GNOME-based. Again, says who? Any references? Last thing I heard (on aKademy, that was) was that someone for IBM is writing a redbook to determine IBM's position towards both desktops. Turns out this person fell in love with KDE during his research and this redbook will be strongly favored towards KDE. (Though again, what I heard is just a rumor as well.) Sun is GNOME-based. KDE is... what? So what? And what will they do with GNOME once Project Looking Glass takes off? 2. No-one, and I mean *NO-ONE* who matters gives a flying fuck what Slackware does. Slackware might have had a user base 5 years ago, but these days... nothing. Slackware is in a similar position as the other minor and virtually irrelevant Linux distributions -- the difference is that at least some of those distros are minor because they try something radical. Slackware is just old and busted.
3. This is yet another slashdot GNOME-bashing story. It's tiresome. Go and bore someone else, zealots. So you think bashing Slackware in any way helps you get sympathy for GNOME?
It suggests HyperThreading doesn't do a whole lot on a single process not designed for multi-threading. That's quite a big difference. HyperThreading will give you some nice speed-ups when running multiple processes together.
Furthermore, Linux actually works better with HyperThreading when you run a single multi-threaded program, the program will actually be scheduled to run on both cores. On Windows, you will only see an advantage when running multiple processes.
You *knew* about file systems. Doh!