I still haven't found a necessity for SMP OpenBSD yet, if I need a box to run X or anything else that would work the CPUs, i'd choose FreeBSD, just for the package system.
I've tried both Free and Open's ports and packages. To me, they seemed comparably easy and powerful. Free's seemed a bit more up-to-date, but hey, Open's taking volunteers in that department.
I think SMP is very important for OpenBSD to break out of the old-wimpy-server-repurposed-as-firewall reputation. For example, it won't be long before you wont even be able to buy a new Intel server without HyperThreading. As inconsistent as those performance gains can be, many people won't consider an OS that doesn't support it.
Of course, none of this is meant to imply that Open's leadership is doing this for anything other than their own self-interest, such as serving user's requests, gaining marketshare, or other silliness.;)
Precisely what are you referring to here? It seems to me that the GNU GPL (the license for the Linux kernal) is one of the most impressive licenses out there.
Sure it is. The problem is that every up-and-coming project seems to think that to be important they have to invent their own license.
How much energy is being wasted trying to decide if the Bleh Public License 1.1 is Open Source/Debian Free/GPL Compatible/Advert Clausing etc.?
Seriously people (you know who you are) get a clue. Your project isn't so important that anyone who produces a compilation CD should have to print some formal statement of your greatness in their literature. And none of your clever legalese is going to do anything about software patents except wind up in a courtroom where it would have been anyway. (That's my opinion anyway.)
As I understand it, OpenBSD diverged from NetBSD before SMP was available for any nonproprietary BSD. The divergence in the codebases that has taken place since then makes it impossible to simply import much of another strain's implementation.
Maybe there will be some re-use of code (and ideas), but I suspect the OpenBSD team will be building this thing from the ground up.
With a sealed box behind the speaker you could mostly cancel out longer wavelengths from all directions. Longer, that is, than the dimensions of the fan/speaker combo.
It's interesting that he said he could cancel the whine. High frequencies are going to require good alignment of the fan, microphone, speaker, and ear to cancel well. But hey, the guy's a jet engine expert, maybe he knows what he's doing.
The hope in this is that once Congress ceases to view the USPTO as a revenue source, they will be more receptive to the argument that overly-broad patents (and trademarks) hurt the economy overall.
"I can't think up an example of flywheeling off the top of my head."
Look a little higher... the Moon... look a little lower... the Earth you are standing on.
Those are certainly good examples of rotational momentum. Now, if you could just figure a way to harness some of that energy. (Tidal power is one way, for example).
We should have the space elevator send a cable to the moon. We could then have the moon turn a crank at the north or south pole to power a generator . . .
No, they're complementary functions, and there's an important reason for them to share the same button.
Yes, they are complementary. But this thread is about UI standards, and (at least under Windows) pushbuttons are not used to indicate state. They are used to invoke immediate commands.
I think you have a good argument for the need for a control to switch rapidly between play and pause, but (IMHO) a standard pushbutton isn't the appropriate thing to do it. A control to toggle state should look different than the ones that invoke actions like stop, seek, record, etc.
While we're at it, why the need for a distinction between pause and stop at all? Yes, I know that they work differently, but is it really that common that I want the semantics of stop instead of pause? Or is this just something blindly carried over from the mechanical age (where the mechanism really force the need for the distinction)?
Rotational bearings, hmm, that's a good one, Animal joints typically have joints packed in with lubricant under pressure, and the slight remaining loss due to friction can *grow* back
Are there any mechanical structures in nature that can rotate continuously? I.e., an attached, coaxial, bearing surface that can support rotations of multiples of 360 degrees?
Information storage and retrieval... no wait... electronic circuits... no wait...... viruses... no wait... worms?... no wait... trojans?... no wait... cellular automata... no wait... um... um...
Rotational bearings, reduction gearing, flywheeling. Interestingly, there's more unnatural stuff on the mechanical side than on the information side.
an airplane can fly endlessly carrying heavy loads of passengers and cargo without burning any fuel, can stop and hover in place weightless at any time, and can takeoff and land vertically
(1) an aircraft capable of aerostatic (lighter-than-air) lift to gain altitude; and,
(2) a glider aircraft capable of aerodynamic lift, having a high glide ratio to accomplish long range gliding; and,
(3) a (patented, new design of Robert D Hunt) wind turbine that is capable of harnessing the force of wind to generate power as the aircraft glides downward. This cycle can be repeated indefinitely to allow the craft to stay aloft virtually forever.
If that 'aint the definition of perpetual motion folks . . .
What they did was add the functionality so when the user hovered their mouse where the bar should be, it appears.
And they also give you a way to turn that dumb rounded window off, permanently. Which is the first thing I do whenever I have to use MMP on a new computer.
[rant on] I can't figure out why media players in general have to look like some weirdo piece of stereo equipment from outer-space. They can design any UI they want, why do they always copy a CD player? Don't they know that CD players work the way they do because pushbuttons cost 3 cents apiece times 500,000 units? There's no reason to overload one button for both play and pause, for example, they're completely opposite functions! [rant off]
And as a another professional developer using Visual Studio.Net, I'd like to say:
Amen Brother!imagine blink tag here
And I agree with you about most attempts to "innovate" are usability failures.
But attempts at anything new on computers are usually failures; many failures seems to be the price we pay to get any gradual improvement.
While standards are certainly a good thing as far as they go, I don't agree with the previous poster's assertion that not following an established standard is "pretty much the definition of a bad GUI program". The converse isn't true either, that following standards is going to (by itself) give you a good UI.
I'm reading About Face 2.0 and it is pretty hard to get into. He gets hung up on psycology and business goals pretty early on in the book and leaves the actual UI design until later. Makes reading it pretty tiresome.
I'm experiencing the same thing you are. After reading AF 1.0 and Inmates, AF 2.0 seems to be the combination of those two books, with a large amount of additional material. I feel pretty lucky to have these design methods published, even if my dabbling never approaches that level of thoroughness.
I'll take it as the field of UI design is maturing as a discipline, one that properly takes real work to pull off well.
Yes, the fact that the dialogs don't follow an established STANDARD does hurt the usability, but I don't think that they are BAD.
Yes, that is pretty much the definition of a bad GUI program.
Some of the most usable UIs don't conform to an established standard. For example, there are shopping cart apps that can be used by people who've never used a computer before, yet they don't get in the way of the expert user much either. Some custom-designed kiosk systems serve their purposes very well without following any standard other than "touch me".
Apple and Microsoft seem to throw out their own guidelines whenever they feel the need to "innovate". There's no hope of improving usability if no one's allowed to experiment.
Check out Alan Cooper's books if you want some solid reasoning behind this (better than I could give you). Edward Tufte is also a classic.
That's okay, because that official definition says "No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups", and plenty of open source software discriminates against commercial ventures, which could be considered groups.
Note that I didn't ask for licenses that happen to be suboptimal for using copyright law to protect specific business models, but those that truly discriminate about who can use or contribute.
At first glance, it would seem that a fair share of those approved licenses were in fact authored by "commercial ventures".
It's not really closed source. They let you download the source, they let you compile the source, they let you run the binaries, I think the limitation is on the redistribution of those binaries, and the source. So I would have considered it open source, but non-free.
You can consider it whatever you want. However, there is an official Open Source Definition that most people mean when using the term. Also see the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG). Sun's Java process, though fairly open for a commercial software product, doesn't comply with the letter or the spirit of either of these.
I'm getting the impression that there are a lot of really POOR programmers out who have no idea how to make a program run fast and use C or C++ as a crutch.
Or it's the "POOR programmers" that gravitate to Java . . .
The entire success of Itanium is based on whether compilers can schedule code better than a processor can. It was because some compiler people thought they could do it that the architecture even exists.
It seemed like a good idea at the time . . .
I remember Intel saying up-front that it would take cutting-edge compiler technology to get good performance out of the Itanium ISA. They were funding labs at HP and university to develop these algorithims. I wonder if the asserted intellectual property rights over this technology and tried to extract money from compiler vendors. It's just a supposition, but it could have prevented GCC (and by extension, Linux) from having good performance on Itanium.
Just because there are a lot of eyes looking at the source it does not mean that it is secure. What is more important is that every piece of software undergoes a rigourous test procedure testing all (at least most of) the possibilities.
No matter how rigorous, hands-on testing is not going to find the security holes that can only be uncovered by a source code audit. You've got to have proofreaders that are (at least instantaneously) more knowledgeable, more detail-oriented, and more alert than the original author.
Even closed-source software such as Microsoft's typically has hundreds of people with permissions to view the code. Recent events have shown that not all of them are going to be trustworthy.
Most of the linux distributions are overloaded with stuff that an average user would hardly use.
And when any of that stuff runs with different credintials than the user, or accepts foreign data locally or from a network, you have a potential problem.
Just because you have more people looking at the code does not guarantee a level of quality, because those people might not be the most-qualified people to do code review. I'm not [making] a disparaging comment on the open-source community. I'm just simply saying that more in number does not mean it's more in quality. Let's just say that. That said, it's something that we continue to look at to see at what level and how do we open it up and share. And at the end of the day, there are only about 14 to 25 guys that actually check code into the Linux kernel. Just because you have a bunch folks out in the community that have the access to look at open-source product means that, by default, it will be more secure or higher quality.
While amusing, it's pretty clear that he was misquoted.
Well 50% slower isn't really a problem -- you could just wait a year or two and run it on newer hardware at the same speed as the C++ program would have run.
Or just write it in C++ in the first place and:
have the results of your computation a year or two sooner
have a product that's not half as fast as your competitors'
have a product that runs faster on newer hardware instead of one that performs like it's on yesterday's hardware
save your customers' money on hardware and claim some of that back on your sale
have a product that has a chance at portability
have a product that is suitable for people who have computers today, instead of the (much smaller) market segment of people with computers from the future
Slashdot Mirror
I've tried both Free and Open's ports and packages. To me, they seemed comparably easy and powerful. Free's seemed a bit more up-to-date, but hey, Open's taking volunteers in that department.
I think SMP is very important for OpenBSD to break out of the old-wimpy-server-repurposed-as-firewall reputation. For example, it won't be long before you wont even be able to buy a new Intel server without HyperThreading. As inconsistent as those performance gains can be, many people won't consider an OS that doesn't support it.
Of course, none of this is meant to imply that Open's leadership is doing this for anything other than their own self-interest, such as serving user's requests, gaining marketshare, or other silliness. ;)
Sure it is. The problem is that every up-and-coming project seems to think that to be important they have to invent their own license.
How much energy is being wasted trying to decide if the Bleh Public License 1.1 is Open Source/Debian Free/GPL Compatible/Advert Clausing etc.?
Seriously people (you know who you are) get a clue. Your project isn't so important that anyone who produces a compilation CD should have to print some formal statement of your greatness in their literature. And none of your clever legalese is going to do anything about software patents except wind up in a courtroom where it would have been anyway. (That's my opinion anyway.)
As I understand it, OpenBSD diverged from NetBSD before SMP was available for any nonproprietary BSD. The divergence in the codebases that has taken place since then makes it impossible to simply import much of another strain's implementation.
Maybe there will be some re-use of code (and ideas), but I suspect the OpenBSD team will be building this thing from the ground up.
Just curious, how did they do this?
http://www.dropline.net/gtk/
Acutally, they also run on Win32 even without cygwin. So I don't know what you'd call them except freakin' portable.
With a sealed box behind the speaker you could mostly cancel out longer wavelengths from all directions. Longer, that is, than the dimensions of the fan/speaker combo.
It's interesting that he said he could cancel the whine. High frequencies are going to require good alignment of the fan, microphone, speaker, and ear to cancel well. But hey, the guy's a jet engine expert, maybe he knows what he's doing.
The hope in this is that once Congress ceases to view the USPTO as a revenue source, they will be more receptive to the argument that overly-broad patents (and trademarks) hurt the economy overall.
Those are certainly good examples of rotational momentum. Now, if you could just figure a way to harness some of that energy. (Tidal power is one way, for example).
We should have the space elevator send a cable to the moon. We could then have the moon turn a crank at the north or south pole to power a generator . . .
Yes, they are complementary. But this thread is about UI standards, and (at least under Windows) pushbuttons are not used to indicate state. They are used to invoke immediate commands.
I think you have a good argument for the need for a control to switch rapidly between play and pause, but (IMHO) a standard pushbutton isn't the appropriate thing to do it. A control to toggle state should look different than the ones that invoke actions like stop, seek, record, etc.
While we're at it, why the need for a distinction between pause and stop at all? Yes, I know that they work differently, but is it really that common that I want the semantics of stop instead of pause? Or is this just something blindly carried over from the mechanical age (where the mechanism really force the need for the distinction)?
Are there any mechanical structures in nature that can rotate continuously? I.e., an attached, coaxial, bearing surface that can support rotations of multiples of 360 degrees?
Information storage and retrieval ... no wait ... electronic circuits ... no wait ... ... viruses ... no wait ... worms? ... no wait ... trojans? ... no wait ... cellular automata ... no wait ... um ... um ...
Rotational bearings, reduction gearing, flywheeling. Interestingly, there's more unnatural stuff on the mechanical side than on the information side.
If that 'aint the definition of perpetual motion folks . . .
And they also give you a way to turn that dumb rounded window off, permanently. Which is the first thing I do whenever I have to use MMP on a new computer.
[rant on] I can't figure out why media players in general have to look like some weirdo piece of stereo equipment from outer-space. They can design any UI they want, why do they always copy a CD player? Don't they know that CD players work the way they do because pushbuttons cost 3 cents apiece times 500,000 units? There's no reason to overload one button for both play and pause, for example, they're completely opposite functions! [rant off]
And as a another professional developer using Visual Studio .Net, I'd like to say:
And I agree with you about most attempts to "innovate" are usability failures.
But attempts at anything new on computers are usually failures; many failures seems to be the price we pay to get any gradual improvement.
While standards are certainly a good thing as far as they go, I don't agree with the previous poster's assertion that not following an established standard is "pretty much the definition of a bad GUI program". The converse isn't true either, that following standards is going to (by itself) give you a good UI.
I'm experiencing the same thing you are. After reading AF 1.0 and Inmates, AF 2.0 seems to be the combination of those two books, with a large amount of additional material. I feel pretty lucky to have these design methods published, even if my dabbling never approaches that level of thoroughness.
I'll take it as the field of UI design is maturing as a discipline, one that properly takes real work to pull off well.
Some of the most usable UIs don't conform to an established standard. For example, there are shopping cart apps that can be used by people who've never used a computer before, yet they don't get in the way of the expert user much either. Some custom-designed kiosk systems serve their purposes very well without following any standard other than "touch me".
Apple and Microsoft seem to throw out their own guidelines whenever they feel the need to "innovate". There's no hope of improving usability if no one's allowed to experiment.
Check out Alan Cooper's books if you want some solid reasoning behind this (better than I could give you). Edward Tufte is also a classic.
Please point out to me one of the Approved Open Source Licenses that "discriminates against commercial ventures".
Note that I didn't ask for licenses that happen to be suboptimal for using copyright law to protect specific business models, but those that truly discriminate about who can use or contribute.
At first glance, it would seem that a fair share of those approved licenses were in fact authored by "commercial ventures".
You can consider it whatever you want. However, there is an official Open Source Definition that most people mean when using the term. Also see the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG). Sun's Java process, though fairly open for a commercial software product, doesn't comply with the letter or the spirit of either of these.
Or it's the "POOR programmers" that gravitate to Java . . .
;-)
It seemed like a good idea at the time . . .
I remember Intel saying up-front that it would take cutting-edge compiler technology to get good performance out of the Itanium ISA. They were funding labs at HP and university to develop these algorithims. I wonder if the asserted intellectual property rights over this technology and tried to extract money from compiler vendors. It's just a supposition, but it could have prevented GCC (and by extension, Linux) from having good performance on Itanium.
Does anybody have any info on this?
No matter how rigorous, hands-on testing is not going to find the security holes that can only be uncovered by a source code audit. You've got to have proofreaders that are (at least instantaneously) more knowledgeable, more detail-oriented, and more alert than the original author.
Even closed-source software such as Microsoft's typically has hundreds of people with permissions to view the code. Recent events have shown that not all of them are going to be trustworthy.
And when any of that stuff runs with different credintials than the user, or accepts foreign data locally or from a network, you have a potential problem.
The whole paragraph:
While amusing, it's pretty clear that he was misquoted.
Or just write it in C++ in the first place and:
That's an easy one. The computer is 10 times better at recognizing what it has decided is spam. We humans are lucky to even be in the same league.
Now that you understand that, you're one step close to being "computer literate".