keep in mind that Nokia does not, and probably will never, have the best interests of the Open Source society in mind.
I concur - though this (LGPL) is far from the worst thing that Nokia could have done with the Trollware.
Re:Large uptick in Qt usage?
on
Qt Becomes LGPL
·
· Score: 1
Long start-up times have been fixed ever since Qt4 was released quite a while ago.
That's a joke, right?
Not for me, I've got a big app that does lots of initialization before even trying to open a window, the splash screen is up before you hear the mouse button release click, and the main window is open and drawn less than one second later. (we need the splash to show some legal stuff, otherwise we wouldn't have one at all.)
Re:Comparison to WPF or other non stone-age tools?
on
Qt Becomes LGPL
·
· Score: 1
Depends on your target market - we have some potential OS-X customers, and we also will be porting from the desktop to an embedded device. Yes, 90% of our 1st year revenue will be from Windows, but that other 10% is worth having, and down the line having a single code base that ports onto an embedded Linux platform becomes a BIG deal.
As others have said, cross platform "just works" if you stay inside the Qt API - since about Qt 4.0, I wouldn't consider the Qt API restrictive, and since the addition of Phonon in 4.4, it's downright bitchin'
Re:Large uptick in Qt usage?
on
Qt Becomes LGPL
·
· Score: 1
Nothing human is perfect. However, having used GTK, wxWidgets, XForms, V, Motif, MFC, Borland VCL, Visual Basic, Swing, AWT, GNUStep and Qt, I have to say that Qt beats the others consistently in look & feel, ease of development, clarity of documentation, orthogonality of API and breadth of features. Not to mention cross-platformity:-) Plus, the tools, like Designer, Linguist, Creator and Assistant are top-notch.
For QtGUI, I concur, at least for the 50% of your list that I have worked in personally. As for the tools, I wouldn't call Designer or Creator top-notch, and Assistant became a royal pain in our ass when it came time to deploy on Windows (oh, you want to install your app in a directory with a space in the name? Yeah, like C:\Program Files\xxx, sorry, can't do that.)
Concur - MS actually had a programmer support line (18+ years ago), it was a total joke, but of a completely different style than the total joke of MSDN. I think I was on (800 line speakerphone) hold for 4 hours once....
Whilst being very good at code and generally geekery, Trolltech are total rubbish at the support game, leaving paying developers (i.e. me a few years ago) feeling massively shafted when being told "here's the code, fix it yourself". WTF am I paying for If I have to not only find your bugs, but fix them as well?
I've had mostly the opposite experience with Trolltech support - I don't ask them for much, but the things I do ask about have been 90% fixed within 2 releases, not necessarily for me but fixed nonetheless.
I had a funny exchange with a Troll a few months ago regarding the availability of memory mapping for files via Qt, he said it was coming "eventually" - turns out it had been available since the last release a few weeks earlier, neither of us had bothered to slog through the documentation recently.
Firstly, without competition, things tend to languish.
Competition is great, however GNU/Linux should not be competing against itself. There is too much fragmentation in Linux-land, 10 apps that all try to do the same thing, but each one does certain aspects better, yet none get it all right. Instead consolidate all that effort to 2 or 3 apps.
Nice thought, but combining the developers from 10 working groups into 2 or 3 means the working groups get 4x larger, and thus 50% less productive;-P
I think Google's decision to go with their own graphics API for Android is looking very much like "not invented here".
Qt had some pretty serious graphics performance inefficiencies, even as recently as 4.4. In 4.5 they have been "working on it" and making some impressive gains, thus proving the presence of the inefficiencies in 4.4 and earlier.
If I were Google and I saw that I could draw my screen 6x faster by rolling my own API, I'd be tempted to do that rather than trying to fix Qt's codebase that I don't really have control of.
Wow, that's crappy news. There's a whole group of people out there who couldn't afford the commercial license and were trying to make their business/development work around the GPL who now no longer have any need to make the effort, and therefore won't.
Thanks Nokia.
Whaaaaa? You can still execute your plan, this just opens an option to take your project closed source, if that's of any use to you.
Simpler still, I think it is just more convenient to pirate today than it is to purchase. On the pirate networks, you can download and sample thousands of tracks, decide what you like, delete the rest. Who is going to pay thousands of dollars up front for that kind of selection just to throw most of it away? The sampling features available on Amazon, etc. are a joke compared to the convenience of getting a batch and listening when you feel like it. Some of the subscription services may come close to competing with this convenience, but frankly, it's probably easier to figure out LimeWire or whatever is in vogue on the pirate networks today than it is to select a decent subscription service, and I'm guessing that the subscription services smell a lot like the Columbia record club - attempting to get a regular stream of income out of you, whether you want their current product or not.
The current model, based on distributing self-destructing vinyl discs for a per-copy fee, is irretrievably broken by advances in technology. Innovate or die was on the horizon for RIAA in 2000, I think they have chosen the latter.
FUD, if they don't do it, no one will, so they press on to create fear on the part of potential file sharers and uncertainty in the general population as to what is and isn't legal.
I doubt it's working out to the ultimate benefit of the record companies, but there's probably an exec or two that feels vindicated about not being able to buy that G5 outright and having to continue to lease it because of diminishing revenue, at least he made some people miserable in return.
The prima donnas are in every field, I accidentally took a job working (indirectly) for one once - it lasted just over a year and my direct supervisor graciously found me a smooth transition elsewhere. Every single point I argued with the PD was proven out in my favor within less than a year, which I suppose is why I had to go.
I severely pissed off, inadvertently disrespected, and otherwise upset most of my programming class profs one way or another, I don't think they ever gave me less than a B, usually As. I don't think that would work in Psych 101 - but then, my Psych prof was a lot harder to piss off (not that I tried...)
Blah blah blah. There are plenty of good liberal arty classes that aren't taught by morons,
Yeah, but as a Frosh, it's hard to know what you're getting into. It's not like your advisor is going to come out and say "oh, he's sensitive about his lack of ability to think on his feet, you might want to go softball with him in any in-class discussions."
I had a prof from South America (where teachers are GOD) absolutely lose it because I exchanged a glance with the person sitting next to me, not overtly or even noticeable to other students, no big expressions on our faces, just an eye motion glance - the desks were arranged haphazardly and we were sitting at right angles to each other, 45 degrees to the front. He glared at us for 15 seconds, turned red (hard to do under his brown face, but he managed), slammed his book shut and stomped out 10 minutes before the lecture was over. I believe he stopped talking mid-sentence.
The timing of the glance communicated something minor, possibly a sexual innuendo based on something he had said (the class was Pascal, so it couldn't have been too bad...), I guess he got the joke too and didn't like for his student's minds to wander off topic, and drag him along.
Yup. No way the OP's son got removed from a class for that. I've seen plenty of *actual* misbehavior from dumbass freshmen that never led to their removal from class.
This sounds like the kind of "look what the libruls are doing *now*" sort of email that circulates among my Christian/conservative acquaintances.
All depends on the prof in question, and to a lesser degree what kind of support he has from his administration. Some places would never throw anyone out, even for the most outrageous stunts, other places are not so liberal and a prof's classroom is his kingdom.
A Bachelor's (or any) degree implies a certain set of skills, including "life" skills, have been learned. No, you don't _need_ to learn them at University, but if they are no longer implicit in the degree, it can be a big problem for employers. Most of what employers need actually are "life" skills, if you got your degree in your underwear while living in mom's basement, what are the odds you can show up to meetings on-time and get along with other people in the room?
Sad fact is, a lot of people won't learn these life skills unless they're pushed to by something like a University setting. I've met more than one product of home schooling that has some serious catching up to do in the "keeping my religious opinions to myself" department - they'd be a real problem to bring into the workplace without 4 years of social training.
I can't agree with you on your last point. If the copyright owner agreed with you, then it wouldn't be an unlicensed copy. Sometimes, you don't want or need wider exposure. It isn't your decision. It is the decision of the artist or copyright holder, and I believe that is a good thing.
I actually agree with you there, too... it would be nice to have a certain degree of "creative control" such as Bruce Springsteen's session out-takes that he didn't want released, but they ended up "out there" anyway - that's not right, and he _should_ be able to make that call.
Unfortunately, in a world where it takes more time and effort to say the word "copy" than it does to make a copy of an image, or song, or movie, and transport that copy around the world across any and all borders, I think the only realistic form of creative control is to keep the things you don't want released worldwide 100% in your control. If you leave a copy in anyone else's control, you can assume that it will leak to the world eventually, if the world is interested.
There are too many ways to copy things today, and expecting the population at large to exercise "reasonable care" against copies being made is an unreasonable burden on people's lives.
This discussion went round and round on mp3.com years ago - yes, if it's inaudible,.mp3 should get rid of it, but... what's inaudible? etc. etc. etc.
If you're only trying to encode an e-mail address (5 bits per character, 60 characters max) that's only 300 bits to fit into 150 seconds or more of music. You can scheme forever about ways of cramming a digital bit onto 1/2 second of audible audio in a way that a listener will not notice.
Or, if you don't like finding an editor that can delete the info, just go to a record store and steal the CD.
Awesome! Would mod-up if I didn't have a bunch of comments in this thread already. There is one small distinction though, stealing from the record store causes the store to lose something. Making an unlicensed copy causes the artwork to gain wider exposure, which should be considered valuable to the artist by any rational society.
I think it's OK. Even if I really buy from iTunes to burn a cd as gift, at that point the account info will be gone, so what's the matter?
Again I'll say, don't be so sure. Just because iTunes doesn't show your account info anymore, doesn't mean it hasn't been imprinted into the audio - even if you use an analog copy, your information can be encoded in the audio.
Never again buy anything related to music and you'll be safe.
Alternatively, you can buy music in small stores, in cash. In that case, it's better to wear sunglasses and a hat. You wouldn't want anyone to discover you're one of those people who actually are paying clients of the music industry.
Seriously, in a very real way, this could potentially harm the paying customer far more than the (somewhat) anonymous file sharer. If they have any sense, they'll use this information to study file sharing and not to press litigation against their paying customers.
Slashdot Mirror
keep in mind that Nokia does not, and probably will never, have the best interests of the Open Source society in mind.
I concur - though this (LGPL) is far from the worst thing that Nokia could have done with the Trollware.
Long start-up times have been fixed ever since Qt4 was released quite a while ago.
That's a joke, right?
Not for me, I've got a big app that does lots of initialization before even trying to open a window, the splash screen is up before you hear the mouse button release click, and the main window is open and drawn less than one second later. (we need the splash to show some legal stuff, otherwise we wouldn't have one at all.)
Depends on your target market - we have some potential OS-X customers, and we also will be porting from the desktop to an embedded device. Yes, 90% of our 1st year revenue will be from Windows, but that other 10% is worth having, and down the line having a single code base that ports onto an embedded Linux platform becomes a BIG deal.
As others have said, cross platform "just works" if you stay inside the Qt API - since about Qt 4.0, I wouldn't consider the Qt API restrictive, and since the addition of Phonon in 4.4, it's downright bitchin'
Nothing human is perfect. However, having used GTK, wxWidgets, XForms, V, Motif, MFC, Borland VCL, Visual Basic, Swing, AWT, GNUStep and Qt, I have to say that Qt beats the others consistently in look & feel, ease of development, clarity of documentation, orthogonality of API and breadth of features. Not to mention cross-platformity :-) Plus, the tools, like Designer, Linguist, Creator and Assistant are top-notch.
For QtGUI, I concur, at least for the 50% of your list that I have worked in personally. As for the tools, I wouldn't call Designer or Creator top-notch, and Assistant became a royal pain in our ass when it came time to deploy on Windows (oh, you want to install your app in a directory with a space in the name? Yeah, like C:\Program Files\xxx, sorry, can't do that.)
Concur - MS actually had a programmer support line (18+ years ago), it was a total joke, but of a completely different style than the total joke of MSDN. I think I was on (800 line speakerphone) hold for 4 hours once....
Whilst being very good at code and generally geekery, Trolltech are total rubbish at the support game, leaving paying developers (i.e. me a few years ago) feeling massively shafted when being told "here's the code, fix it yourself". WTF am I paying for If I have to not only find your bugs, but fix them as well?
I've had mostly the opposite experience with Trolltech support - I don't ask them for much, but the things I do ask about have been 90% fixed within 2 releases, not necessarily for me but fixed nonetheless.
I had a funny exchange with a Troll a few months ago regarding the availability of memory mapping for files via Qt, he said it was coming "eventually" - turns out it had been available since the last release a few weeks earlier, neither of us had bothered to slog through the documentation recently.
Competition is great, however GNU/Linux should not be competing against itself. There is too much fragmentation in Linux-land, 10 apps that all try to do the same thing, but each one does certain aspects better, yet none get it all right. Instead consolidate all that effort to 2 or 3 apps.
Nice thought, but combining the developers from 10 working groups into 2 or 3 means the working groups get 4x larger, and thus 50% less productive ;-P
it is harder to develop multithreaded programs in GTK than in Qt.
I haven't done the GTK side, but I have used Qt and "others" to do multi-threaded apps - Qt makes threads easier than I have ever seen elsewhere.
I think Google's decision to go with their own graphics API for Android is looking very much like "not invented here".
Qt had some pretty serious graphics performance inefficiencies, even as recently as 4.4. In 4.5 they have been "working on it" and making some impressive gains, thus proving the presence of the inefficiencies in 4.4 and earlier.
If I were Google and I saw that I could draw my screen 6x faster by rolling my own API, I'd be tempted to do that rather than trying to fix Qt's codebase that I don't really have control of.
Wow, that's crappy news. There's a whole group of people out there who couldn't afford the commercial license and were trying to make their business/development work around the GPL who now no longer have any need to make the effort, and therefore won't.
Thanks Nokia.
Whaaaaa? You can still execute your plan, this just opens an option to take your project closed source, if that's of any use to you.
Simpler still, I think it is just more convenient to pirate today than it is to purchase. On the pirate networks, you can download and sample thousands of tracks, decide what you like, delete the rest. Who is going to pay thousands of dollars up front for that kind of selection just to throw most of it away? The sampling features available on Amazon, etc. are a joke compared to the convenience of getting a batch and listening when you feel like it. Some of the subscription services may come close to competing with this convenience, but frankly, it's probably easier to figure out LimeWire or whatever is in vogue on the pirate networks today than it is to select a decent subscription service, and I'm guessing that the subscription services smell a lot like the Columbia record club - attempting to get a regular stream of income out of you, whether you want their current product or not.
The current model, based on distributing self-destructing vinyl discs for a per-copy fee, is irretrievably broken by advances in technology. Innovate or die was on the horizon for RIAA in 2000, I think they have chosen the latter.
4500+ institutions of "higher learning" in the U.S. - it only makes sense that RI would get a few.
Why do they keep doing this?
FUD, if they don't do it, no one will, so they press on to create fear on the part of potential file sharers and uncertainty in the general population as to what is and isn't legal.
I doubt it's working out to the ultimate benefit of the record companies, but there's probably an exec or two that feels vindicated about not being able to buy that G5 outright and having to continue to lease it because of diminishing revenue, at least he made some people miserable in return.
The prima donnas are in every field, I accidentally took a job working (indirectly) for one once - it lasted just over a year and my direct supervisor graciously found me a smooth transition elsewhere. Every single point I argued with the PD was proven out in my favor within less than a year, which I suppose is why I had to go.
I severely pissed off, inadvertently disrespected, and otherwise upset most of my programming class profs one way or another, I don't think they ever gave me less than a B, usually As. I don't think that would work in Psych 101 - but then, my Psych prof was a lot harder to piss off (not that I tried...)
Blah blah blah. There are plenty of good liberal arty classes that aren't taught by morons,
Yeah, but as a Frosh, it's hard to know what you're getting into. It's not like your advisor is going to come out and say "oh, he's sensitive about his lack of ability to think on his feet, you might want to go softball with him in any in-class discussions."
I had a prof from South America (where teachers are GOD) absolutely lose it because I exchanged a glance with the person sitting next to me, not overtly or even noticeable to other students, no big expressions on our faces, just an eye motion glance - the desks were arranged haphazardly and we were sitting at right angles to each other, 45 degrees to the front. He glared at us for 15 seconds, turned red (hard to do under his brown face, but he managed), slammed his book shut and stomped out 10 minutes before the lecture was over. I believe he stopped talking mid-sentence.
The timing of the glance communicated something minor, possibly a sexual innuendo based on something he had said (the class was Pascal, so it couldn't have been too bad...), I guess he got the joke too and didn't like for his student's minds to wander off topic, and drag him along.
Yup. No way the OP's son got removed from a class for that. I've seen plenty of *actual* misbehavior from dumbass freshmen that never led to their removal from class.
This sounds like the kind of "look what the libruls are doing *now*" sort of email that circulates among my Christian/conservative acquaintances.
All depends on the prof in question, and to a lesser degree what kind of support he has from his administration. Some places would never throw anyone out, even for the most outrageous stunts, other places are not so liberal and a prof's classroom is his kingdom.
A Bachelor's (or any) degree implies a certain set of skills, including "life" skills, have been learned. No, you don't _need_ to learn them at University, but if they are no longer implicit in the degree, it can be a big problem for employers. Most of what employers need actually are "life" skills, if you got your degree in your underwear while living in mom's basement, what are the odds you can show up to meetings on-time and get along with other people in the room?
Sad fact is, a lot of people won't learn these life skills unless they're pushed to by something like a University setting. I've met more than one product of home schooling that has some serious catching up to do in the "keeping my religious opinions to myself" department - they'd be a real problem to bring into the workplace without 4 years of social training.
I can't agree with you on your last point. If the copyright owner agreed with you, then it wouldn't be an unlicensed copy. Sometimes, you don't want or need wider exposure. It isn't your decision. It is the decision of the artist or copyright holder, and I believe that is a good thing.
I actually agree with you there, too... it would be nice to have a certain degree of "creative control" such as Bruce Springsteen's session out-takes that he didn't want released, but they ended up "out there" anyway - that's not right, and he _should_ be able to make that call.
Unfortunately, in a world where it takes more time and effort to say the word "copy" than it does to make a copy of an image, or song, or movie, and transport that copy around the world across any and all borders, I think the only realistic form of creative control is to keep the things you don't want released worldwide 100% in your control. If you leave a copy in anyone else's control, you can assume that it will leak to the world eventually, if the world is interested.
There are too many ways to copy things today, and expecting the population at large to exercise "reasonable care" against copies being made is an unreasonable burden on people's lives.
This discussion went round and round on mp3.com years ago - yes, if it's inaudible, .mp3 should get rid of it, but... what's inaudible? etc. etc. etc.
If you're only trying to encode an e-mail address (5 bits per character, 60 characters max) that's only 300 bits to fit into 150 seconds or more of music. You can scheme forever about ways of cramming a digital bit onto 1/2 second of audible audio in a way that a listener will not notice.
Or, if you don't like finding an editor that can delete the info, just go to a record store and steal the CD.
Awesome! Would mod-up if I didn't have a bunch of comments in this thread already. There is one small distinction though, stealing from the record store causes the store to lose something. Making an unlicensed copy causes the artwork to gain wider exposure, which should be considered valuable to the artist by any rational society.
It will be playable, but there's no guarantee that the e-mail information is not encoded in other ways.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/30/2014222
I think it's OK. Even if I really buy from iTunes to burn a cd as gift, at that point the account info will be gone, so what's the matter?
Again I'll say, don't be so sure. Just because iTunes doesn't show your account info anymore, doesn't mean it hasn't been imprinted into the audio - even if you use an analog copy, your information can be encoded in the audio.
Never again buy anything related to music and you'll be safe.
Alternatively, you can buy music in small stores, in cash. In that case, it's better to wear sunglasses and a hat. You wouldn't want anyone to discover you're one of those people who actually are paying clients of the music industry.
Seriously, in a very real way, this could potentially harm the paying customer far more than the (somewhat) anonymous file sharer. If they have any sense, they'll use this information to study file sharing and not to press litigation against their paying customers.