Re:NO CORBA !!! what where they thinking
on
KDE 2.0 in Action
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· Score: 2
-No, CORBA was designed for remote invocation of services. It has a tremendous overhead which basically is justified only if you are really working across different machine architectures and different languages.
-Statistically, most of the program interaction on the computer is between local programs (I would say 99%). So this is the case we have to optimize for.
-Unfortunately, if you are running your services in Hong Kong and accessing it from your laptop there are more things to worry about then just interoperability, and this is not a problem of CORBA or DCOP.
-During the last several years, CORBA became a horribly large standard, and ended up by claiming territory for which it was not designed for. The one-year KDE experience with CORBA as a local object model shows that it fails to provide a fast and reliable service for this case.
-On the other hand, yes, Linux users are speed freaks. Look on the comments in this thread: there are complaints that KDE is not faster then twm and it eats more memory.
Lotzi
Re:BIG FAT WARNING -- not quite so pre-alpha
on
KDE 2.0 in Action
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· Score: 2
Actually, if you have a working version right now there are no major stability or performance problems. If you refresh from CVS than it may happen that at some hour of the night some applications are out of sync.
Of course some applications are incomplete, etc. But I am using it for daily work from July and I had weeks of uptime.
The big letter warnings are more of a legalese kind of stuff, and what day really say is "please do not put it as default in the distribution (yet)".
I really like that there is such a mystical view about Konqueror like a hidded gem. It really prepares the terrain for the upcoming Krash release. In reality basically everybody who was compiling KDE 2 was sort of aware of the possibilities and problems around the system.
What is happening is that the new KDE will have probably the most flexible and fast component model available in the Unix world and Konqueror is one of the biggest beneficiaries. I don't know if it was mentioned here that it can dynamically embed postscript, dvi or for that matter, whatever viewers. It was a real mess in the last two months while this things cleared up, but it seems that it opens new possibilities.
One of these is that it allows independent programmers to contribute parts to konqueror - while still keeping their independence, responsability etc. The same thing is true for basically all the Koffice applications.
On the other hand there are still a lot of bugs to iron out both in the html renderer - and probably more of them will surface as more people will go and use it for daily browsing.
It is true that by putting 100 people to work on a relatively small piece of code like a html renderer is not going to work. But the component model allows a nicer way of contributing meaningful parts - I really see an emerging cottage industry of kparts - from mp3 players to flash plugins etc.
Interesting that Corel is sticking to their business practices which made them a second hand software company.
On the other hand, there is the RedHat way, which made for big growth, successful IPO, significant sales.
Do they think that the same marketing techniques which brought the WordPerfect market share from 80% to 10%, the Quatro and Paradox from about 30% and 40% to about 1-2%, so let's be serious, failed techniques, will work in the Linux environment?
In fact, the Linux environment is even more competitive than the Windows. There will be at least several major distributions, there are at least 3 major commercial office suite-s, it will be at least one (K) but maybe even two open source office suite-s.
I think that the idea that we reuse the Windows experience in a place where it is easier to compete it is a complete miscalculation, and this is what Corel seems to try to do.
Anyone used Sinclair Spectrum around here? I still remember awesome programs like:
16k Pascal compiler (Hi-Soft) with integrated editor 21k C compiler 6K Lisp interpreter 5K Forth interpreter
People were careful with every bit those days.
I remember there was a group at the Cluj Computing Center in Romania, who had found something like 26 hidden, not documented but working instructions in the Z80. I wonder if eZ80 still has them.
What about Corel? They are the best positioned to provide a Visio-like application for Linux.
I don't know how well structured is their code for CorelDraw is (it might be a mess, very old application, developed incrementally) BUT it is a clean object oriented code, having the graphic engines all in place, implementing something like this might be easy.
Actually a developer rush of several weeks might do it. And that would really improve their market position too, being able to offer something inexistent on a large platform. Also, the Visio format is not such a strong standard like Word, so the portability problems are easier.
Visio is the only reason why we are keeping some NT machines around in the lab. I was hoping for a port from them soon. Eh. It seems that we will have KVisio or nothing. Lotzi
Slashdot Mirror
-No, CORBA was designed for remote invocation of services. It has a tremendous overhead which basically is justified only if you are really working across different machine architectures and different languages.
-Statistically, most of the program interaction on the computer is between local programs (I would say 99%). So this is the case we have to optimize for.
-Unfortunately, if you are running your services in Hong Kong and accessing it from your laptop there are more things to worry about then just interoperability, and this is not a problem of CORBA or DCOP.
-During the last several years, CORBA became a horribly large standard, and ended up by claiming territory for which it was not designed for. The one-year KDE experience with CORBA as a local object model shows that it fails to provide a fast and reliable service for this case.
-On the other hand, yes, Linux users are speed freaks. Look on the comments in this thread: there are complaints that KDE is not faster then twm and it eats more memory.
Lotzi
Actually, if you have a working version right now there are no major stability or performance problems. If you refresh from CVS than it may happen that at some hour of the night some applications are out of sync.
Of course some applications are incomplete, etc. But I am using it for daily work from July and I had weeks of uptime.
The big letter warnings are more of a legalese kind of stuff, and what day really say is "please do not put it as default in the distribution (yet)".
L.
I really like that there is such a mystical view about Konqueror like a hidded gem. It really prepares the terrain for the upcoming Krash release. In reality basically everybody who was compiling KDE 2 was sort of aware of the possibilities and problems around the system.
What is happening is that the new KDE will have probably the most flexible and fast component model available in the Unix world and Konqueror is one of the biggest beneficiaries. I don't know if it was mentioned here that it can dynamically embed postscript, dvi or for that matter, whatever viewers. It was a real mess in the last two months while this things cleared up, but it seems that it opens new possibilities.
One of these is that it allows independent programmers to contribute parts to konqueror - while still keeping their independence, responsability etc. The same thing is true for basically all the Koffice applications.
On the other hand there are still a lot of bugs to iron out both in the html renderer - and probably more of them will surface as more people will go and use it for daily browsing.
It is true that by putting 100 people to work on a relatively small piece of code like a html renderer is not going to work. But the component model allows a nicer way of contributing meaningful parts - I really see an emerging cottage industry of kparts - from mp3 players to flash plugins etc.
Lotzi Boloni
Interesting that Corel is sticking to their business practices which made them a second hand software company.
On the other hand, there is the RedHat way, which made for big growth, successful IPO, significant sales.
Do they think that the same marketing techniques which brought the WordPerfect market share from 80% to 10%, the Quatro and Paradox from about 30% and 40% to about 1-2%, so let's be serious, failed techniques, will work in the Linux environment?
In fact, the Linux environment is even more competitive than the Windows. There will be at least several major distributions, there are at least 3 major commercial office suite-s, it will be at least one (K) but maybe even two open source office suite-s.
I think that the idea that we reuse the Windows experience in a place where it is easier to compete it is a complete miscalculation, and this is what Corel seems to try to do.
Lotzi
Anyone used Sinclair Spectrum around here? I still remember awesome programs like:
16k Pascal compiler (Hi-Soft) with integrated editor
21k C compiler
6K Lisp interpreter
5K Forth interpreter
People were careful with every bit those days.
I remember there was a group at the Cluj Computing Center in Romania, who had found something like 26 hidden, not documented but working instructions in the Z80. I wonder if eZ80 still has them.
Lotzi Boloni
What about Corel? They are the best positioned to provide a Visio-like application for Linux.
I don't know how well structured is their code for CorelDraw is (it might be a mess, very old application, developed incrementally) BUT it is a clean object oriented code, having the graphic engines all in place, implementing something like this might be easy.
Actually a developer rush of several weeks might do it. And that would really improve their market position too, being able to offer something inexistent on a large platform. Also, the Visio format is not such a strong standard like Word, so the portability problems are easier.
Any comments on this?
Lotzi
Visio is the only reason why we are keeping some NT machines around in the lab. I was hoping for a port from them soon. Eh. It seems that we will have KVisio or nothing. Lotzi