Once you've built the plant, nuclear energy has basically no costs other than labor, since the fuel is so abundant.
You have to account for the costs associated with safety, security, risk, insurance, and disposal. Once you do, nuclear energy becomes astronomically expensive. The only reasons why it look attractive right now is because (1) the tax payer foots a lot of the bill, and (2) nuclear plants are just pretending the enormous costs associated with disposal don't exist.
But if you were using it to do something, then "conserving" it is a cost itself. And if the choice is between generating more electric power or, eg, replacing all the insulation in your home, the latter probably does not have a lower cost.
Retrofitting a home can be costly if the home was designed without thinking about energy use. But if you take energy use into account from the start, the home doesn't have to get any more expensive.
If it creates jobs, that implies that the costs are higher
Generating energy has high non-wage costs associated with it, while energy conservation does not. That's how energy conservation can create jobs and still save money.
So yes, new sources of energy will have to be created
I don't see why. We should instead adapt our energy usage to what we can generate sustainably and without too much risk.
simply using less energy? Becoming a lot more energy efficient results in no decrease in the quality of life (actually, it improves quality of life), can be done using proven technologies, and creates jobs.
In different words: the answer is that we should neither build more nuclear plants nor more coal power plants because neither is necessary.
You've bounced all over the place during this argument and I still don't understand exactly what your objection to Syllable is.
I don't care about Syllable either way; I am objecting to your claims about X11 performance and usability. When you attack one of the cornerstones of open source platforms as strongly as you did, people are going to ask for you to make your case and substantiate it with facts. But you have been unable to do that. And you just don't seem to give a damn what damage your statements might do to other projects or the open source community in general as long as you manage to attract more attention to your pet project. Frankly, I think that sucks.
At issue is the claims Syllable developers keep making about the usability and performance of X11-based desktops. Yet, you are unable to substantiate those claims with data, and you aren't even able to state a coherent and specific roadmap for how to do better. You just keep saying that eventually, somehow, Syllable will do better.
For now, X11 is still of crucial importance to the success of open source. What your behavior amounts to is that you are perpetuating myths about X11 in a self-serving effort to attract attention to Syllable, and, frankly, I think that just sucks.
GPL code doesn't need to be included in the same medium as the binary machine code.
Yes, and I was careful to make that distinction. Go back and read my posting. Putting source on the medium is just a "good citizen" kind of thing to do and is usually easy. It's also less hassle.
My point was that, under either license, you cannot hide the fact that you are using BSD or LGPL'ed code, as the original poster suggested.
If you would then spend some time following our discussions and digging through our previously discussed plans instead of glancing over them, you would know that some of the advanced designs you so long for are actually in planning and consideration for Syllable.
You have two roadmap summaries on your site, the latest from July 13. Neither of them indicate that you have anything planned that even reaches the level of functionality and user-friendliness that Gnome or KDE already offer.
Your arguments are typical of a lot of people who are too lazy to download Syllable and run it, but still feel like criticizing.
You already told us that the current state of Syllable doesn't reflect your vision. If I criticized it, you'd say "oh, but we'll be doing that completely differently in the final version".
In any case: I'm not criticizing your software, I'm criticizing your process and your lack of background research.
Ding ding ding, we have the looser! How do you know that Syllable "works just like another KDE theme"? Do you know what our plans our for Syllable,
Because you just told us: "Syllables goal has never to be at the cutting edge of design or technology. It just has to work and be elegant, and we're achieving that." In different words, you said you won't be breaking new ground in design or HCI or functionality, you do want it to be like KDE, just with better performance and the bugs removed. And your published Wiki, screen shots, mailing list, and design notes are consistent with that statement.
Gee, while we're at it an OS currently at version 0.5.4 doesn't run Mozilla and OpenOffice.org
Are you saying that you are going to let users run Mozilla and OpenOffice.org? But you just told us that Syllable prides itself on its "consistency" and use of a single toolkit. Well, Mozilla and OpenOffice.org both use a different toolkit, different conventions, and a different look-and-feel. And how is the user experience supposed to improve on Syllable relative to Linux, Windows, or Mac OS, if people are going to run the same applications with the same GUIs and the same bugs? Applications that have no support for Syllable-specific features (like the database file system)? The only part of Syllable that most users are going to see then regularly is the file manager, and there are a lot easier ways to put a better file manager on top of existing systems.
so it must be [...] doomed to failure; never mind that these applications are going to be ported in the future once the rest of the OS is in better shape, no, they must work now or the world is coming to an end.
Yes. First of all, even if you succeed, you undermine your own stated goals (consistency, use of a single toolkit, etc.).
But even if you attempt it and accept the consequences, you grossly underestimate the magnitude of the task; the Macintosh crowd hasn't managed to port OpenOffice to OS X (they only have a recompiled version for X11, and even that only because they are running on a BSD-like kernel).
In fact, the primary reason why people don't do what you are doing is because nobody has had a good answer to this dilemma. Of course, maybe you are just so brilliant, smart, and skilled that you can pull it off. But the fact that lots of smart people with lots of money have tried and failed, and the fact that you have voiced no plan other than "we'll see when we get there" is unconvincing.
The thing is, most of this work uses LGPL/BSD licensed libraries like iksemel so you'd never know that the underlying protocol driving that video game chat lobby is jabber unless you ran tcpdump on it.
In both cases, you are required to acknowledge inclusion of the software. Furthermore, in the case of the LGPL, you are required to offer redistribution of the library to your users (which means that they must know that you are using it).
In fact, if you want to behave decently, you should (1) acknowledge use of the library in the "About" box, in the game's credits, and in the printed documentation, (2) include the library source on the CD (no reason not to), and (3) let the developers know about your use of their code. This isn't strictly speaking legally required, but it shows that you are a good citizen, and it helps ensure that there will be improvements for you to include in the next game.
I think you're confusing developers and users, personally.
No, I'm saying that's what you are doing. Syllable is driven by a firm conviction that replacing X11 and the Linux kernel is going to make a difference, yet what Syllable ultimately delivers looks and works just like another KDE theme.
The only difference users are sure to notice is that they can't run Mozilla and OpenOffice, and that's not a point in Syllable's favor.
I'm not so sure that I care if it's done Way X instead of Way Y, and wether X or Y is better.
But you do very much care how it's done, and that's the problem. If you didn't, you would just write some I/O and graphics abstractions and put them on top of some convenient kernel (there are plenty to choose from). You'd also pick a platform that would make it easy to experiment with different ideas.
I don't see X using many of these super-advanced designs of the 70's and 80's either,
That wasn't "super advanced research" it was shipping commercial products.
And, yes, C/C++, X/Motif, UNIX, and Windows NT actually killed a lot of those products by cutting corners. But Syllable isn't putting those corners back.
so what exactly is your argument other than "I like X"?
My argument is that even if your system magically appeared 100% complete, documented, and bug-free on your CVS server tomorrow, it still would fail to be of much interest to anybody; you are just aiming too low technologically to make it worthwhile for people to switch.
just a lot of silly rhetoric and name calling.
It's not name calling when I'm telling you that you haven't done your homework. When you embark on a new project, you have to read, reflect, and debate a lot of complex issues, and that just hasn't happened for Syllable judging by the mailing list or documentation. Go read the top 10 books on HCI that have come out over the last 20 years, read about some classic operating systems and GUIs and play around with them, etc.
I fail to see how any of those things are "the UNIX mindset" They're a more "traditional" mindset; you seem to be looking for some uber Operating System built with bleeding edge langauges and technologies.
And I think that sums up your problem: you actually think that the crappy technologies and ideas you are building Syllable on are "traditional". Go back and actually study in depth the systems and ideas from 20-40 years ago. A number of them were far more advanced than anything you are even attempting.
After you have done your homework, perhaps, you'll have some basis on which to judge current systems and design something better. Right now, you are just spinning your wheels.
Yes, I am ignoring any technical merit in todays technology because it comes with an entire metric tonne of bad technology as well,
Of course, the shell, terminal subsystems, and other environments are baggage from the point of view building just a high-quality purely client OS, and, of course, users pay a price for that. Do you seriously think that's news to anybody? It's a tradeoff designers make deliberately (Apple bet billions on that tradeoff with their choice of NeXT over BeOS.)
The UNIX mindset does not work on the desktop and the sooner people realise this the sooner Open Source can actually begin to work for users on the desktop.
But Syllable is stuck in the UNIX mindset, starting with its choice of runtime, object model, and toolkit design. Syllable's implementation language even comes from Bell Labs.
I'm sorry that you can't understand the reasons or our design choices.
I went to the Syllable lists and project sites and looked around, and it seems pretty clear: you guys just haven't done your homework. Go read up on, and think about, classic systems, papers, HCI research, interactive systems design and start having some real discussions on it. Maybe after that, you can actually make an argument that's a little more convincing than "X11 sucks".
Linux fulfills the same niche on PPC it does on Windows: people are stuck with some hardware and they don't like the operating system on it. Maybe they bought an OS X machine believing that they would get a "UNIX workstation with a nicer GUI" and discovered that it didn't fit their needs after all. Maybe they discovered that their laptop is slower than they'd like it to be with OS X. Maybe they want different software that's better supported under Linux.
Also, in some niches, it can be worth buying Apple hardware for specific design features. For example, even though PC panel computers have been around for many years, the new iMac is particularly cheap and widely available because it is targeted at the mass market. And Apple's iBooks are a decent compromise as entry-level laptops. And many Apple designs just look nice, and installing YDL is a lot easier than replacing the motherboard.
So, until Apple starts shipping PPC hardware without an OS or with Linux preinstalled, Linux on Apple hardware won't become a mainstream choice. But there are situations where it makes sense.
Well, except for all the other stuff applications install elsewhere, like in/Library and/usr and all those other places.
To get rid of it, you drag it from the Applications folder to the trash.
That gets rid of the application only, but it may leave gigabytes of junk behind. Worse, it may leave other stuff behind that can really screw up the system when their application has been removed.
To start it, you double-click the icon in the Applications folder. You know what's installed by looking in the Applications folder.
Or is it in a subfolder of/Applications? Or is it in/sw? Or maybe your home directory or on your desktop? Or maybe you dragged it somewhere else? If it was installed with an installer, what's it called?
This is pretty basic stuff; you must be trying really hard to remain ignorant of it.
You are trying really hard to avoid facing the ugly truth. Of course, Apple will get around to fixing this eventually, just like they have come around to a lot of other things Windows and UNIX had long before them. Of course, then people like you will go around telling everybody again that the feature didn't really exist until Apple started shipping it.
It's basically for various hacks related to looking up operations between different objects based on their types. They give examples like embedding objects in documents and making the communication work out. The patents are from the early 1990's and there is doubtlessly lots of prior art for it, but the language of the patent is so vague and confused that a good lawyer can probably argue anything based on it.
You said that the "entire industry" was moving away from GUI toolkits like Qt and MFC, but that is not true. Just because something might be replaced in the future does not mean everything right now is out of date.
It took Linux more than a decade to get to the point where it is right now, and that was building on several decades of prior work on UNIX, GNU, and X11. So, it will take Syllable many years to start making an impact, and we need to look at the long term vision for Syllable compared to the long term vision for those others.
As for X11, it has its rough spots, and it would well be worth rethinking it. Too bad that you aren't doing that.
If the executable is an X11 application, you can double-click to launch it along with the X Server if necessary.
If it only were true. Unfortunately, it isn't. For example, you can run/Applications/OpenOffice.org1.1.2/soffice from the commmand line, but the Finder doesn't even recognize it as anything it can run. It would be easy for Apple to do what you suggest, and it would be quite useful. But Apple doesn't do it, probably because they don't want X11 to become established on Macintosh.
So there: there is no real difference or incompatibility as you had dreamed up.
You're missing the context. Someone claimed that Apple was so sophisticated because it managed to open GUI apps in a GUI and command line apps in the command line. In reality, Apple just punts on the problem by keeping GUI and command line apps incompatibly different. It's a historically-grounded inconsistency, not a usability feature.
(And, yes, Apple has provided workarounds for this.)
Windows _always_ provides feedback for applications started from the shell, and stops the feedback when the application processes a GUI event.
And that's an unreliable heuristic: some applications stop feedback far too soon, and others keep the user waiting without ever starting up anything visible. The right way of dealing with this is to create a protocol that applications adhere to; even then, you'll get misbehaved implementations.
There's no way for the launcher to tell when the app has begun processing events. There is also no way to determine what process created a particular window.
You could determine this for arbitrary X11 applications using local operating system information, in analogy to what Windows does. But that's not reliable enough. The correct way is to integrate it into the toolkits and frameworks.
How? And how come neither KDE nor GNOME have taken this approach, which is clearly superior to their current implementations?
Why haven't Windows or Macintosh improved their launch feedback to be more reliable? Simple: it just isn't very high priority.
Is it? I'll admit I've only done a little X11 programming, but I thought window managers were a specific extension, the server only supports one at a time, and that their ability to change application behaviour was limited to drawing borders around top level windows and intercepting input associated with them.
Window manager support is not an "extension". In any case, there are lots of ways of hooking into raw X11, down to the level of individual widgets, subwindows, and events. Furthermore, there are additional ways for doing that at the toolkit and framework levels.
If I want to install something that hasn't been packaged by my Linux distributor,
The point is: most people don't have to because Linux distributions are so much more comprehensive than what Apple or Microsoft ship. That's what makes Linux easier than Windows or Macintosh.
Perhaps someone neglected to mention that they were interested in a Linux distro that did this effectively.
Linspire, SuSE, etc.
Windows has 3-6 different ways of doing just aout anything, and installing software is no exception.
You may start Windows software installs in a few different ways, but for conforming software (and most software is), the end result is the same: the software ends up with an entry in the Start menu and the Add/Remove Programs dialog. Macintosh doesn't have that consistency.
OS X has only three methods that I've encountered: drag and drop the.app "file" (actually a folder that looks like a file) from the CD or.DMG to the Applications folder on your hard drive; and double-click on the.PKG file and click some buttons; and if it's an upgrade of free(beer) Apple-ware, you can get it through Software Update.
And then? Where does the software go? How do you get rid of it? How do you start it? How do you know what's installed?
Your talk of dependencies makes me suspect you're talking about X11 apps written for Darwin; it makes no sense whatsoever in reference to OS X.
Sure it does. IE, Photoshop, Quicktime, Eclipse, Mozilla, Office, and all those programs have plug-ins, sometimes from many different commercial vendors. Macintosh provides no consistent way of keeping those applications and their plug-ins in sync.
Another problem is that conflicting packages or installations aren't detected consistently. I have three copies of TeX installed on my OS X machine, with no idea of whether they conflict, how to get rid of any of them, of whether that causes problems. Eventually, I'll just have to reinstall to clean things up.
Both Windows and Macintosh provide working mouse-cursor feedback for starting of new applications. This is, I have been led to believe, impossible with X11, due to the nature of application startup with it.
Neither Windows nor Macintosh provide reliable feedback either: some applications start up without feedback, and others provide feedback but don't pop up a window.
If you impose the same restrictions on X11 applications as on Windows and Macintosh, you can provide the same feedback: the launcher can watch the process itself.
Windows (I'm not sure about Macs) automatically determines whether an application is a GUI one or a text one, and opens a terminal window for those that need them.
Those are limitations of those environments: for various historical reasons, they have trouble supporting applications that are both GUI apps and use console interaction. X11 apps frequently combine console interaction with GUI displays, and the fact that neither Macintosh nor Windows can support that easily is a big nuisance.
But if that's the behavior you want, it could be easily supported under X11. For example, Macintosh gets its behavior by simply declaring GUI and command line apps to be different and incompatible: you can't double-click on most executables, and you can't (easily) run most GUI apps from a shell. Likewise, it's trivial to emulate Windows behavior.
Windows allows one application to modify the behaviour of another application's windows (by subclassing in a hook function). This is impossible under X11. (Again, I don't have a clue about Macs)
The entire window and event structure of every application is exposed on X11, in a network-transparent and safe way. You can hook in and override in many ways. That's how window managers work, for example.
I also fail to follow your argument that the "entire industy" is moving away from languages such as C++. I still see Qt and MFC in heavy use, and I don't see much evidence of this changing in the next few years.
Yes, and Qt and MFC have that market more than covered (and so to Gtkmm and wxWindows and FLTK and other libraries). The question is: what's going to succeed them and why? Syllable's vision seems to be that the current approach to GUIs is just fine, we only need better engineered implementations of them. I don't believe that.
Huge? Libsyllable is about 1.3Mb and talks to an Appserver about 400k in size. Less than 2Mb for an entire display system is hardly huge
There are plenty of examples of APIs that are designed like yours, in which widgets and properties etc. are all exposed through type-safe C++ APIs. By the time the Syllable APIs reach the maturity and completeness of other C++ GUI libraries, we have to expect them to be just as big and complex as those other APIs (and I'm not talking about code size, although that will probably grow alongside).
As I've pointed out, Syllable is a client-server architecture.
Not as far as the API samples are concerned. What you do under the covers doesn't matter.
All things X has only just begun to take advantage of with things like Render and Xft2. Syllable is hardly behind the times here.
When a system that is as widely used as X11 "just begins" to do something, it instantly surpasses something like Syllable in the absolute number of applications taking advantage of a feature.
It would be a good idea to become slightly familiar with your subject before you dismiss it.
No, it wouldn't. It is you who is dismissing established, functional, flexible technology and trying to replace it with an unproven, new system. I looked at your project in a lot more detail than other people are going to. If you can't present a convincing "elevator story" for why people should pay more attention to your project, people conclude that you don't have a compelling case to make and dismiss the project.
Slashdot Mirror
Those kinds of applications run just fine in standard web browsers. If your particular vendor doesn't support that, maybe you need a better vendor.
Once you've built the plant, nuclear energy has basically no costs other than labor, since the fuel is so abundant.
You have to account for the costs associated with safety, security, risk, insurance, and disposal. Once you do, nuclear energy becomes astronomically expensive. The only reasons why it look attractive right now is because (1) the tax payer foots a lot of the bill, and (2) nuclear plants are just pretending the enormous costs associated with disposal don't exist.
But if you were using it to do something, then "conserving" it is a cost itself. And if the choice is between generating more electric power or, eg, replacing all the insulation in your home, the latter probably does not have a lower cost.
Retrofitting a home can be costly if the home was designed without thinking about energy use. But if you take energy use into account from the start, the home doesn't have to get any more expensive.
The point is, that we do need energy, and it has to come from somwhere
Yes: in the long term, we should move to a mixture of biologically grown fuel, wind, and solar energy (transported in the form of hydrogen).
Coal, oil, and nuclear simply are not sustainable.
Basically, these are two different problems,
The two problems are quite related: there is a limit to how much energy we can generate sustainably using current technologies.
If it creates jobs, that implies that the costs are higher
Generating energy has high non-wage costs associated with it, while energy conservation does not. That's how energy conservation can create jobs and still save money.
So yes, new sources of energy will have to be created
I don't see why. We should instead adapt our energy usage to what we can generate sustainably and without too much risk.
simply using less energy? Becoming a lot more energy efficient results in no decrease in the quality of life (actually, it improves quality of life), can be done using proven technologies, and creates jobs.
In different words: the answer is that we should neither build more nuclear plants nor more coal power plants because neither is necessary.
You've bounced all over the place during this argument and I still don't understand exactly what your objection to Syllable is.
I don't care about Syllable either way; I am objecting to your claims about X11 performance and usability. When you attack one of the cornerstones of open source platforms as strongly as you did, people are going to ask for you to make your case and substantiate it with facts. But you have been unable to do that. And you just don't seem to give a damn what damage your statements might do to other projects or the open source community in general as long as you manage to attract more attention to your pet project. Frankly, I think that sucks.
At issue is the claims Syllable developers keep making about the usability and performance of X11-based desktops. Yet, you are unable to substantiate those claims with data, and you aren't even able to state a coherent and specific roadmap for how to do better. You just keep saying that eventually, somehow, Syllable will do better.
For now, X11 is still of crucial importance to the success of open source. What your behavior amounts to is that you are perpetuating myths about X11 in a self-serving effort to attract attention to Syllable, and, frankly, I think that just sucks.
GPL code doesn't need to be included in the same medium as the binary machine code.
Yes, and I was careful to make that distinction. Go back and read my posting. Putting source on the medium is just a "good citizen" kind of thing to do and is usually easy. It's also less hassle.
My point was that, under either license, you cannot hide the fact that you are using BSD or LGPL'ed code, as the original poster suggested.
If you would then spend some time following our discussions and digging through our previously discussed plans instead of glancing over them, you would know that some of the advanced designs you so long for are actually in planning and consideration for Syllable.
You have two roadmap summaries on your site, the latest from July 13. Neither of them indicate that you have anything planned that even reaches the level of functionality and user-friendliness that Gnome or KDE already offer.
Your arguments are typical of a lot of people who are too lazy to download Syllable and run it, but still feel like criticizing.
You already told us that the current state of Syllable doesn't reflect your vision. If I criticized it, you'd say "oh, but we'll be doing that completely differently in the final version".
In any case: I'm not criticizing your software, I'm criticizing your process and your lack of background research.
Ding ding ding, we have the looser! How do you know that Syllable "works just like another KDE theme"? Do you know what our plans our for Syllable,
Because you just told us: "Syllables goal has never to be at the cutting edge of design or technology. It just has to work and be elegant, and we're achieving that." In different words, you said you won't be breaking new ground in design or HCI or functionality, you do want it to be like KDE, just with better performance and the bugs removed. And your published Wiki, screen shots, mailing list, and design notes are consistent with that statement.
Gee, while we're at it an OS currently at version 0.5.4 doesn't run Mozilla and OpenOffice.org
Are you saying that you are going to let users run Mozilla and OpenOffice.org? But you just told us that Syllable prides itself on its "consistency" and use of a single toolkit. Well, Mozilla and OpenOffice.org both use a different toolkit, different conventions, and a different look-and-feel. And how is the user experience supposed to improve on Syllable relative to Linux, Windows, or Mac OS, if people are going to run the same applications with the same GUIs and the same bugs? Applications that have no support for Syllable-specific features (like the database file system)? The only part of Syllable that most users are going to see then regularly is the file manager, and there are a lot easier ways to put a better file manager on top of existing systems.
so it must be [...] doomed to failure;
never mind that these applications are going to be ported in the future once the rest of the OS is in better shape, no, they must work now or the world is coming to an end.
Yes. First of all, even if you succeed, you undermine your own stated goals (consistency, use of a single toolkit, etc.).
But even if you attempt it and accept the consequences, you grossly underestimate the magnitude of the task; the Macintosh crowd hasn't managed to port OpenOffice to OS X (they only have a recompiled version for X11, and even that only because they are running on a BSD-like kernel).
In fact, the primary reason why people don't do what you are doing is because nobody has had a good answer to this dilemma. Of course, maybe you are just so brilliant, smart, and skilled that you can pull it off. But the fact that lots of smart people with lots of money have tried and failed, and the fact that you have voiced no plan other than "we'll see when we get there" is unconvincing.
The thing is, most of this work uses LGPL/BSD licensed libraries like iksemel so you'd never know that the underlying protocol driving that video game chat lobby is jabber unless you ran tcpdump on it.
In both cases, you are required to acknowledge inclusion of the software. Furthermore, in the case of the LGPL, you are required to offer redistribution of the library to your users (which means that they must know that you are using it).
In fact, if you want to behave decently, you should (1) acknowledge use of the library in the "About" box, in the game's credits, and in the printed documentation, (2) include the library source on the CD (no reason not to), and (3) let the developers know about your use of their code. This isn't strictly speaking legally required, but it shows that you are a good citizen, and it helps ensure that there will be improvements for you to include in the next game.
I think you're confusing developers and users, personally.
No, I'm saying that's what you are doing. Syllable is driven by a firm conviction that replacing X11 and the Linux kernel is going to make a difference, yet what Syllable ultimately delivers looks and works just like another KDE theme.
The only difference users are sure to notice is that they can't run Mozilla and OpenOffice, and that's not a point in Syllable's favor.
I'm not so sure that I care if it's done Way X instead of Way Y, and wether X or Y is better.
But you do very much care how it's done, and that's the problem. If you didn't, you would just write some I/O and graphics abstractions and put them on top of some convenient kernel (there are plenty to choose from). You'd also pick a platform that would make it easy to experiment with different ideas.
While they have over 100 years of plot fleshed out for the gameworld
Halo was a decent FPS, but it had a plot? I mean other than "shoot anything that moves"?
I don't see X using many of these super-advanced designs of the 70's and 80's either,
That wasn't "super advanced research" it was shipping commercial products.
And, yes, C/C++, X/Motif, UNIX, and Windows NT actually killed a lot of those products by cutting corners. But Syllable isn't putting those corners back.
so what exactly is your argument other than "I like X"?
My argument is that even if your system magically appeared 100% complete, documented, and bug-free on your CVS server tomorrow, it still would fail to be of much interest to anybody; you are just aiming too low technologically to make it worthwhile for people to switch.
just a lot of silly rhetoric and name calling.
It's not name calling when I'm telling you that you haven't done your homework. When you embark on a new project, you have to read, reflect, and debate a lot of complex issues, and that just hasn't happened for Syllable judging by the mailing list or documentation. Go read the top 10 books on HCI that have come out over the last 20 years, read about some classic operating systems and GUIs and play around with them, etc.
I fail to see how any of those things are "the UNIX mindset" They're a more "traditional" mindset; you seem to be looking for some uber Operating System built with bleeding edge langauges and technologies.
And I think that sums up your problem: you actually think that the crappy technologies and ideas you are building Syllable on are "traditional". Go back and actually study in depth the systems and ideas from 20-40 years ago. A number of them were far more advanced than anything you are even attempting.
After you have done your homework, perhaps, you'll have some basis on which to judge current systems and design something better. Right now, you are just spinning your wheels.
Yes, I am ignoring any technical merit in todays technology because it comes with an entire metric tonne of bad technology as well,
Of course, the shell, terminal subsystems, and other environments are baggage from the point of view building just a high-quality purely client OS, and, of course, users pay a price for that. Do you seriously think that's news to anybody? It's a tradeoff designers make deliberately (Apple bet billions on that tradeoff with their choice of NeXT over BeOS.)
The UNIX mindset does not work on the desktop and the sooner people realise this the sooner Open Source can actually begin to work for users on the desktop.
But Syllable is stuck in the UNIX mindset, starting with its choice of runtime, object model, and toolkit design. Syllable's implementation language even comes from Bell Labs.
I'm sorry that you can't understand the reasons or our design choices.
I went to the Syllable lists and project sites and looked around, and it seems pretty clear: you guys just haven't done your homework. Go read up on, and think about, classic systems, papers, HCI research, interactive systems design and start having some real discussions on it. Maybe after that, you can actually make an argument that's a little more convincing than "X11 sucks".
Linux fulfills the same niche on PPC it does on Windows: people are stuck with some hardware and they don't like the operating system on it. Maybe they bought an OS X machine believing that they would get a "UNIX workstation with a nicer GUI" and discovered that it didn't fit their needs after all. Maybe they discovered that their laptop is slower than they'd like it to be with OS X. Maybe they want different software that's better supported under Linux.
Also, in some niches, it can be worth buying Apple hardware for specific design features. For example, even though PC panel computers have been around for many years, the new iMac is particularly cheap and widely available because it is targeted at the mass market. And Apple's iBooks are a decent compromise as entry-level laptops. And many Apple designs just look nice, and installing YDL is a lot easier than replacing the motherboard.
So, until Apple starts shipping PPC hardware without an OS or with Linux preinstalled, Linux on Apple hardware won't become a mainstream choice. But there are situations where it makes sense.
Have you actually used OS X?
/Library and /usr and all those other places.
/Applications? Or is it in /sw? Or maybe your home directory or on your desktop? Or maybe you dragged it somewhere else? If it was installed with an installer, what's it called?
Typing at it right now.
[Software] goes in the Applications folder.
Well, except for all the other stuff applications install elsewhere, like in
To get rid of it, you drag it from the Applications folder to the trash.
That gets rid of the application only, but it may leave gigabytes of junk behind. Worse, it may leave other stuff behind that can really screw up the system when their application has been removed.
To start it, you double-click the icon in the Applications folder. You know what's installed by looking in the Applications folder.
Or is it in a subfolder of
This is pretty basic stuff; you must be trying really hard to remain ignorant of it.
You are trying really hard to avoid facing the ugly truth. Of course, Apple will get around to fixing this eventually, just like they have come around to a lot of other things Windows and UNIX had long before them. Of course, then people like you will go around telling everybody again that the feature didn't really exist until Apple started shipping it.
You can find the patents here here and here
It's basically for various hacks related to looking up operations between different objects based on their types. They give examples like embedding objects in documents and making the communication work out. The patents are from the early 1990's and there is doubtlessly lots of prior art for it, but the language of the patent is so vague and confused that a good lawyer can probably argue anything based on it.
You said that the "entire industry" was moving away from GUI toolkits like Qt and MFC, but that is not true. Just because something might be replaced in the future does not mean everything right now is out of date.
It took Linux more than a decade to get to the point where it is right now, and that was building on several decades of prior work on UNIX, GNU, and X11. So, it will take Syllable many years to start making an impact, and we need to look at the long term vision for Syllable compared to the long term vision for those others.
As for X11, it has its rough spots, and it would well be worth rethinking it. Too bad that you aren't doing that.
If the executable is an X11 application, you can double-click to launch it along with the X Server if necessary.
/Applications/OpenOffice.org1.1.2/soffice from the commmand line, but the Finder doesn't even recognize it as anything it can run. It would be easy for Apple to do what you suggest, and it would be quite useful. But Apple doesn't do it, probably because they don't want X11 to become established on Macintosh.
If it only were true. Unfortunately, it isn't. For example, you can run
So there: there is no real difference or incompatibility as you had dreamed up.
You're missing the context. Someone claimed that Apple was so sophisticated because it managed to open GUI apps in a GUI and command line apps in the command line. In reality, Apple just punts on the problem by keeping GUI and command line apps incompatibly different. It's a historically-grounded inconsistency, not a usability feature.
(And, yes, Apple has provided workarounds for this.)
Windows _always_ provides feedback for applications started from the shell, and stops the feedback when the application processes a GUI event.
And that's an unreliable heuristic: some applications stop feedback far too soon, and others keep the user waiting without ever starting up anything visible. The right way of dealing with this is to create a protocol that applications adhere to; even then, you'll get misbehaved implementations.
There's no way for the launcher to tell when the app has begun processing events. There is also no way to determine what process created a particular window.
You could determine this for arbitrary X11 applications using local operating system information, in analogy to what Windows does. But that's not reliable enough. The correct way is to integrate it into the toolkits and frameworks.
How? And how come neither KDE nor GNOME have taken this approach, which is clearly superior to their current implementations?
Why haven't Windows or Macintosh improved their launch feedback to be more reliable? Simple: it just isn't very high priority.
Is it? I'll admit I've only done a little X11 programming, but I thought window managers were a specific extension, the server only supports one at a time, and that their ability to change application behaviour was limited to drawing borders around top level windows and intercepting input associated with them.
Window manager support is not an "extension". In any case, there are lots of ways of hooking into raw X11, down to the level of individual widgets, subwindows, and events. Furthermore, there are additional ways for doing that at the toolkit and framework levels.
If I want to install something that hasn't been packaged by my Linux distributor,
.app "file" (actually a folder that looks like a file) from the CD or .DMG to the Applications folder on your hard drive; and double-click on the .PKG file and click some buttons; and if it's an upgrade of free(beer) Apple-ware, you can get it through Software Update.
The point is: most people don't have to because Linux distributions are so much more comprehensive than what Apple or Microsoft ship. That's what makes Linux easier than Windows or Macintosh.
Perhaps someone neglected to mention that they were interested in a Linux distro that did this effectively.
Linspire, SuSE, etc.
Windows has 3-6 different ways of doing just aout anything, and installing software is no exception.
You may start Windows software installs in a few different ways, but for conforming software (and most software is), the end result is the same: the software ends up with an entry in the Start menu and the Add/Remove Programs dialog. Macintosh doesn't have that consistency.
OS X has only three methods that I've encountered: drag and drop the
And then? Where does the software go? How do you get rid of it? How do you start it? How do you know what's installed?
Your talk of dependencies makes me suspect you're talking about X11 apps written for Darwin; it makes no sense whatsoever in reference to OS X.
Sure it does. IE, Photoshop, Quicktime, Eclipse, Mozilla, Office, and all those programs have plug-ins, sometimes from many different commercial vendors. Macintosh provides no consistent way of keeping those applications and their plug-ins in sync.
Another problem is that conflicting packages or installations aren't detected consistently. I have three copies of TeX installed on my OS X machine, with no idea of whether they conflict, how to get rid of any of them, of whether that causes problems. Eventually, I'll just have to reinstall to clean things up.
Both Windows and Macintosh provide working mouse-cursor feedback for starting of new applications. This is, I have been led to believe, impossible with X11, due to the nature of application startup with it.
Neither Windows nor Macintosh provide reliable feedback either: some applications start up without feedback, and others provide feedback but don't pop up a window.
If you impose the same restrictions on X11 applications as on Windows and Macintosh, you can provide the same feedback: the launcher can watch the process itself.
Windows (I'm not sure about Macs) automatically determines whether an application is a GUI one or a text one, and opens a terminal window for those that need them.
Those are limitations of those environments: for various historical reasons, they have trouble supporting applications that are both GUI apps and use console interaction. X11 apps frequently combine console interaction with GUI displays, and the fact that neither Macintosh nor Windows can support that easily is a big nuisance.
But if that's the behavior you want, it could be easily supported under X11. For example, Macintosh gets its behavior by simply declaring GUI and command line apps to be different and incompatible: you can't double-click on most executables, and you can't (easily) run most GUI apps from a shell. Likewise, it's trivial to emulate Windows behavior.
Windows allows one application to modify the behaviour of another application's windows (by subclassing in a hook function). This is impossible under X11. (Again, I don't have a clue about Macs)
The entire window and event structure of every application is exposed on X11, in a network-transparent and safe way. You can hook in and override in many ways. That's how window managers work, for example.
I also fail to follow your argument that the "entire industy" is moving away from languages such as C++. I still see Qt and MFC in heavy use, and I don't see much evidence of this changing in the next few years.
Yes, and Qt and MFC have that market more than covered (and so to Gtkmm and wxWindows and FLTK and other libraries). The question is: what's going to succeed them and why? Syllable's vision seems to be that the current approach to GUIs is just fine, we only need better engineered implementations of them. I don't believe that.
Huge? Libsyllable is about 1.3Mb and talks to an Appserver about 400k in size. Less than 2Mb for an entire display system is hardly huge
There are plenty of examples of APIs that are designed like yours, in which widgets and properties etc. are all exposed through type-safe C++ APIs. By the time the Syllable APIs reach the maturity and completeness of other C++ GUI libraries, we have to expect them to be just as big and complex as those other APIs (and I'm not talking about code size, although that will probably grow alongside).
As I've pointed out, Syllable is a client-server architecture.
Not as far as the API samples are concerned. What you do under the covers doesn't matter.
All things X has only just begun to take advantage of with things like Render and Xft2. Syllable is hardly behind the times here.
When a system that is as widely used as X11 "just begins" to do something, it instantly surpasses something like Syllable in the absolute number of applications taking advantage of a feature.
It would be a good idea to become slightly familiar with your subject before you dismiss it.
No, it wouldn't. It is you who is dismissing established, functional, flexible technology and trying to replace it with an unproven, new system. I looked at your project in a lot more detail than other people are going to. If you can't present a convincing "elevator story" for why people should pay more attention to your project, people conclude that you don't have a compelling case to make and dismiss the project.