it's really a different world than HTML authoring; it's application development. this stuff becomes very natural after a bit, and i find it much more pleasant than any other GUI creation frameworks i've used.
(disclaimer: i'm a developer for laszlo systems, but i mean what i write above.)
Your contributor faq doesn't indicate commit access, only that patches
must be submitted via email. Not quite "true open source".
Just like that big phony "the linux kernel"!
The fact is that not having direct committer access is (a) about to be
fixed, and (b) an infrastructure detail that doesn't detract from the
fact that we have healthy participation from the community -- our new
3.3 release contains many community-contributed bug fixes and new features.
Also, we in fact have direct committers on the project now, working in
svn branches. The docs on the web are out of date.
I am not trying to imply that Flex is more "open" than Laszlo,
rather that Laszlo isn't "true open source".
Why didn't you respond to my comment about ownership? In my mind,
with "true open source" I still own the code I contribute.
Well, in your mind you can define "true open source" however you want.
But in actuality, open source does not ncessarily mean the contributor
owns the code. Many, many projects require that contributors assign
copyright to the project, because otherwise the licensing issues
quickly become unmanagable. (here's a good
article.) Here's a short list of other projects that have
similar requirements: the FSF (you may have heard of them), Gentoo,
Novell (SuSE), Zimbra. There are lots more.
OpenLaszlo contributors assign copyright to the project, but in turn
they license back their code. The license is very broad and allows
the contributor to pretty much do whatever he/she wants with their
code.
This "well you're not open source enough!" is a silly red herring
anyway. My beef is not with your posting opinions about OpenLaszlo.
Everyone has an opinion and you're entitled to post yours. But
astroturfing without disclosing your motivations (in this case, who
signs your paycheck and which projects you contribute to) is
anti-community and just uncool. You've acknowledged your allegiences,
move on.
>> OpenLaszlo is true Open Source Software, and FLEX is not.
> Can I get commit access to their svn repo?
Sure. Just like any open source project, you earn your stripes and
you get commit access. And like other big open source projects,
OpenLaszlo has a review process for all commits.
Are you implying that I could get commit access to the Flex codebase? Or that Flex is open source? What are you implying?
>> What do you mean by "the programming model is better"?
> There is a lot to cover here and I'm off to see a movie in a
> few. I'll get back to you. But just to mention a few... ActionScript
> classes. Optional strong typing. Support for interfaces and extending
> classes.
>> Are there any application as complex as Laszlo Mail implemented FLEX?
> JBoss is using Flex 2 to build their web based email client. Check it out on their blog.
Dude, this is simply disingenuous. You're on the Flex team, and you
wrote the JBoss webmail client. Common courtesy dictates that
disclose that stuff before pimping.
That said, I don't think it's fair to compare the two mail clients;
they are of different scope/complexity.
(Disclaimer: I work for Laszlo Systems, and worked on the Laszlo Mail
product for the past year.)
Laszlo is a platform for creating rich internet applications. It competes directly with (and pre-dates) Macromedia Flex. We open-sourced it last fall.
OpenLaszlo targets the Flash player as its runtime; that decision was made due to Flash's ubiquity. But there's nothing to stop it from being retargeted to Java,.NET, XUL, whatever.
Good lord, I actually learned something on/. Thanks for the useful posts. I'm an audio guy currently wading into video a little (mainly because I'm interested in documenting some music projects), and goddamn there's a lot to take in. Wish I had some film friends that I could hand documentary projects to.:)
Seriously, have any other/.'ers created their own system?
I did... in about 1999 I wrote a journal-publishing system in elisp. It was pretty cool -- it had a simple language for adding entries, and it generated HTML based on templates. I used it for a long time before switching to Movable Type, and I have to say, MT is a great improvement. Hell, just having a web interface (instead of having to enter all my entries on one machine at home) is nice.
My photo pages are still generated by a similar bunch of elisp. Dunno if/when I'll replace that.
Thanks for a really good writeup. I've been wanting to move to gigabit for a while now (big audio files, impending network-based video edited, and just the desire to start leaving all.profile type stuff on a network RAID box without any slowdown). Never really thought about all the upgrades I might end up with if I really want performance. That 400mhz Linux fileserver ain't gonna cut it for long.
It's interesting that the reviewer describes shell scripting as "not easy to pick up"... I've always found shell scripts simple and elegant. You can describe the way they work, at a high level, in about 2 sentences. Of course some of the tools themselves are pretty arcane (like awk), which is why we reach for perl and friends to do more sophisticated things in one shell "step".
The other day I wrote a little utility to track referrers to my websites. I wrote the main chunk in perl. But the part that actually drives the whole process -- that sifts through config directories, calls child scripts, sends email... right back to bash. It's just so damn easy. Or maybe that's just my distaste for perl talking.
It didn't work out, I forget why. The artists that had paid for it got their money back.
No. CDbaby refunded their "digital distro setup fee" because they decided it was taking too long to get things set up, and that it would be really attractive for them to offer the [digital distribution hookup] service for free.
But they never had any fallout with iTunes. According to my member page, they submitted over 6000 albums to Apple in early December, and they're waiting for them to appear.
Pretty much the same goes for the other big players... Rhapsody, Emusic, etc.
It's been slow but I believe the CDbaby guys are going to pull it off. They appear to really have their shit together and their hearts in the right place. I've been very pleased working with them so far.
In all fairness, Moofie, you're obviously using iTunes for Windows on.. (wait for it).. a Windows machine. This puts you in a mindset of ignoring dialog boxes, and not bothering to read them fully, because so many Windows dialog boxes are on the level of Clippy - totally fscking useless.
This got modded "insightful"? This is a ridiculous troll.
I'm planning to change right away, because I'm tired of waiting for Verizon to support the Treo 600. Sucks, because I've been very happy with their coverage, esp in the DC and NY areas. I'll be sure to tell them exactly why I'm switching.
And word is that this is as much a business opportunity as it is a risk. Expect to see very aggressive "competitive upgrade" offers from competing providers... as long as you don't mind 2-year contracts.
...and none in sight. Which I still can't believe. Fortunately I should be able to take my number with me in about a month when I jump to Sprint. Go LNP!
Monticello (Thomas Jefferson's home) is a pretty cool tour. TJ was a true renaissance man -- he had interesting science-y hobbies and whatnot, and I 'spose he's had some influence on parts of American architecture. Of course you have to cringe your way through the "he had slaves -- but he was nice to them!" bit.
It's not in DC, it's about 2 hours south. Pretty drive tho.
Funny enough, besides that I can't think of much interesting stuff here in the nation's capital. Um... you like raunchy strip clubs?
I've never heard of CDBaby. Their website looks very shoddy, as if they used a very basic WYSIWYG editor.
CD Baby rocks. My little label has a few titles for sale there (like the new Plink record -- go buy one!), and they've been nothing but great. They provide the best information of any web store I know of; they're very quick to pay us; and they're friendly. Their site design is a little ugly but hey, it's distinctive -- and the site is fast.
While true, MP3 is not a streaming format in itself. I do not know the situation now, but in 2000, MP3 streaming was pure HTTP over TCP
That's my understanding of the present situation as well. But as a user it's never really caused a problem for me -- in fact, Real seems just as (more?) quick to burp and re-buffer. But I honestly haven't spend any time trying to track down why.
These are simple consumers, and you need something that works without them having to put in any effort. In that respect, Windows Media is a good choice. Nothing to install for the user and reasonable quality.
Agreed. Seems like mp3 is just as usable on broadband connections tho. Until DRM becomes an issue...:-\
Plain old AGC + multiband compression + limiter that has made FM radio sound the way it does for the last 30 years or so.
That's kind of what I figured based on the rest of your original post. Of course, these days original masters are limited so aggressively that FM can't do any more damage to it.:)
This was late 2000 and MP3 and Ogg were, and still are, useless for reaching the masses, for that you need Windows Media.
I guess? I don't know enough about "the masses" to say. It seems like everyone can play mp3s these days -- WMP does fine with 'em. But there's still the bandwidth thing.
Truth is, I've long since given up on understanding "the masses" vs. music. The public's attitude towards music is totally foreign to me.
We streamed 64K Real Audio and it sounded great. The secret to making it sound good is audio proecessing, just like an analog radio station does. I am not advocating New York style maximizing of loudness at all cost, but any signal needs some work.
What type of "work" are you talking about? I'm a competent audio engineer and I've spent some time trying to make RealAudio sound like anything but ass[tm], with little success.
IMO mp3 has always sounded better than.ra, and at low bandwidths ogg is really impressive.
Slashdot Mirror
yeah, it's frustrating when software makes massive progress in full public view, eh? wtf.
the DHTML target has been going since about the start of the year. how soon would you like it to be done?
you don't get any layout by default; though you could declare a simplelayout to get what you want:
it's really a different world than HTML authoring; it's application development. this stuff becomes very natural after a bit, and i find it much more pleasant than any other GUI creation frameworks i've used.
(disclaimer: i'm a developer for laszlo systems, but i mean what i write above.)
Your contributor faq doesn't indicate commit access, only that patches must be submitted via email. Not quite "true open source".
Just like that big phony "the linux kernel"!
The fact is that not having direct committer access is (a) about to be fixed, and (b) an infrastructure detail that doesn't detract from the fact that we have healthy participation from the community -- our new 3.3 release contains many community-contributed bug fixes and new features.
Also, we in fact have direct committers on the project now, working in svn branches. The docs on the web are out of date.
I am not trying to imply that Flex is more "open" than Laszlo, rather that Laszlo isn't "true open source".
*boggle*
OpenLaszlo is released under an OSI-approved license (CPL). "OSI approved" means "meets the OSI's definition of open source".
Why didn't you respond to my comment about ownership? In my mind, with "true open source" I still own the code I contribute.
Well, in your mind you can define "true open source" however you want. But in actuality, open source does not ncessarily mean the contributor owns the code. Many, many projects require that contributors assign copyright to the project, because otherwise the licensing issues quickly become unmanagable. (here's a good article.) Here's a short list of other projects that have similar requirements: the FSF (you may have heard of them), Gentoo, Novell (SuSE), Zimbra. There are lots more.
OpenLaszlo contributors assign copyright to the project, but in turn they license back their code. The license is very broad and allows the contributor to pretty much do whatever he/she wants with their code.
This "well you're not open source enough!" is a silly red herring anyway. My beef is not with your posting opinions about OpenLaszlo. Everyone has an opinion and you're entitled to post yours. But astroturfing without disclosing your motivations (in this case, who signs your paycheck and which projects you contribute to) is anti-community and just uncool. You've acknowledged your allegiences, move on.
>> OpenLaszlo is true Open Source Software, and FLEX is not.
> Can I get commit access to their svn repo?
Sure. Just like any open source project, you earn your stripes and you get commit access. And like other big open source projects, OpenLaszlo has a review process for all commits.
Are you implying that I could get commit access to the Flex codebase? Or that Flex is open source? What are you implying?
>> What do you mean by "the programming model is better"?
> There is a lot to cover here and I'm off to see a movie in a
> few. I'll get back to you. But just to mention a few... ActionScript
> classes. Optional strong typing. Support for interfaces and extending
> classes.
>> Are there any application as complex as Laszlo Mail implemented FLEX?
> JBoss is using Flex 2 to build their web based email client. Check it out on their blog.
Dude, this is simply disingenuous. You're on the Flex team, and you wrote the JBoss webmail client. Common courtesy dictates that disclose that stuff before pimping.
That said, I don't think it's fair to compare the two mail clients; they are of different scope/complexity.
(Disclaimer: I work for Laszlo Systems, and worked on the Laszlo Mail product for the past year.)
Yeah, OpenLaszlo's been "asynchronous javascript and XML" since its inception, even before the XmlHttpRequest support.
And we're demoing a pre-alpha DHTML runtime now:
labs.openlaszlo.org
(I work for Laszlo Systems.)
Doh. Sorry about that.
.NET, XUL, whatever.
Laszlo is a platform for creating rich internet applications. It competes directly with (and pre-dates) Macromedia Flex. We open-sourced it last fall.
OpenLaszlo targets the Flash player as its runtime; that decision was made due to Flash's ubiquity. But there's nothing to stop it from being retargeted to Java,
More info here: http://www.openlaszlo.com/faq/
(note: I'm a Laszlo employee but these are my personal opinions)
Good lord, I actually learned something on /. Thanks for the useful posts. I'm an audio guy currently wading into video a little (mainly because I'm interested in documenting some music projects), and goddamn there's a lot to take in. Wish I had some film friends that I could hand documentary projects to. :)
I just posted a blog entry about this show.
I did... in about 1999 I wrote a journal-publishing system in elisp. It was pretty cool -- it had a simple language for adding entries, and it generated HTML based on templates. I used it for a long time before switching to Movable Type, and I have to say, MT is a great improvement. Hell, just having a web interface (instead of having to enter all my entries on one machine at home) is nice.
My photo pages are still generated by a similar bunch of elisp. Dunno if/when I'll replace that.
Thanks for a really good writeup. I've been wanting to move to gigabit for a while now (big audio files, impending network-based video edited, and just the desire to start leaving all .profile type stuff on a network RAID box without any slowdown). Never really thought about all the upgrades I might end up with if I really want performance. That 400mhz Linux fileserver ain't gonna cut it for long.
Try this Google Groups thread for details.
The other day I wrote a little utility to track referrers to my websites. I wrote the main chunk in perl. But the part that actually drives the whole process -- that sifts through config directories, calls child scripts, sends email... right back to bash. It's just so damn easy. Or maybe that's just my distaste for perl talking.
No. CDbaby refunded their "digital distro setup fee" because they decided it was taking too long to get things set up, and that it would be really attractive for them to offer the [digital distribution hookup] service for free.
But they never had any fallout with iTunes. According to my member page, they submitted over 6000 albums to Apple in early December, and they're waiting for them to appear.
Pretty much the same goes for the other big players... Rhapsody, Emusic, etc.
It's been slow but I believe the CDbaby guys are going to pull it off. They appear to really have their shit together and their hearts in the right place. I've been very pleased working with them so far.
I've heard that kind of talk about foobar2000 for a while now, but when I tried it, I said "that's it?".
What is it that separates foobar from Winamp? I don't see the need for tabbed playlists ... what else is there?
In all fairness, Moofie, you're obviously using iTunes for Windows on .. (wait for it).. a Windows machine. This puts you in a mindset of ignoring dialog boxes, and not bothering to read them fully, because so many Windows dialog boxes are on the level of Clippy - totally fscking useless.
This got modded "insightful"? This is a ridiculous troll.
I'm planning to change right away, because I'm tired of waiting for Verizon to support the Treo 600. Sucks, because I've been very happy with their coverage, esp in the DC and NY areas. I'll be sure to tell them exactly why I'm switching. And word is that this is as much a business opportunity as it is a risk. Expect to see very aggressive "competitive upgrade" offers from competing providers... as long as you don't mind 2-year contracts.
...and none in sight. Which I still can't believe. Fortunately I should be able to take my number with me in about a month when I jump to Sprint. Go LNP!
And hey, catch a show at the 930 Club (big bands) or The Black Cat (lotsa indie rock) while you're at it.
Forgot the link... www.monticello.org
It's not in DC, it's about 2 hours south. Pretty drive tho.
Funny enough, besides that I can't think of much interesting stuff here in the nation's capital. Um... you like raunchy strip clubs?
CD Baby rocks. My little label has a few titles for sale there (like the new Plink record -- go buy one!), and they've been nothing but great. They provide the best information of any web store I know of; they're very quick to pay us; and they're friendly. Their site design is a little ugly but hey, it's distinctive -- and the site is fast.
Ugh. Wish they'd stop coming at this backwards.
That's my understanding of the present situation as well. But as a user it's never really caused a problem for me -- in fact, Real seems just as (more?) quick to burp and re-buffer. But I honestly haven't spend any time trying to track down why.
These are simple consumers, and you need something that works without them having to put in any effort. In that respect, Windows Media is a good choice. Nothing to install for the user and reasonable quality.
Agreed. Seems like mp3 is just as usable on broadband connections tho. Until DRM becomes an issue... :-\
That's kind of what I figured based on the rest of your original post. Of course, these days original masters are limited so aggressively that FM can't do any more damage to it. :)
This was late 2000 and MP3 and Ogg were, and still are, useless for reaching the masses, for that you need Windows Media.
I guess? I don't know enough about "the masses" to say. It seems like everyone can play mp3s these days -- WMP does fine with 'em. But there's still the bandwidth thing.
Truth is, I've long since given up on understanding "the masses" vs. music. The public's attitude towards music is totally foreign to me.
What type of "work" are you talking about? I'm a competent audio engineer and I've spent some time trying to make RealAudio sound like anything but ass[tm], with little success.
IMO mp3 has always sounded better than .ra, and at low bandwidths ogg is really impressive.