(d) Wouldn't it be nice if Windows gave you a *choice* of widget sets? -----
0] Why are we suddenly ranting about how bad MS Windows is? 1] There are a few different widget-sets that function under MS Windows. They don't all come with the OS, but, ish..., I'm not going to go into that.
In my experience doing Tk/Python, the Tk API isn't too bad. 8.0 had some apparent problems, though, like not being able to deal well with very long strings.
Tk real appeal, of course, is that it's got a presence in X, MS Windows, and Mac OS--the three most popular window-systems.
Just because X doesn't do networked sound doesn't mean that it precludes you from doing so. There's nothing to stop you running an audio server on a different port which clients can connect to.
Definitely. EsounD seems to work well, for one, and I've seen some X applications that rely on talking to an EsounD server to output sounds.
I don't see the problem with not having network sound built into the X server (does X even do local sound? Does audible X software typically just write to the audio device?). The `let's build everything into the X server' mindset seems somewhat silly--it just gives support to the `it's bloated' mindset.
I wanted TrueType font-support in X, so I installed XFSTT (an external font-server), and now I seem to be able to make fairly good use of TrueType fonts, without bloating the X server more. You can do the same thing with sound, and, I'd imagine, with a good-sized portion of whatever X add-on capabilities you want.
X is modular for a reason--reuse, reuse, reuse;)
Oh, yes--anyone familiar with the ideas behind HURD?
... our privacy is slowly eroding and will soon be a thing of the past...
Privacy? The statement was that they want to monitor (contradicting the `policing' mentioned in the anonymous comment above yours) all public networks, right?
Does this effect private communications?
If they only want to look at public stuff, big deal--if you don't want someone to be see your stuff, don't show it to them; if you don't want it public, don't make it public.
As a number of posts have already mentioned (so I'm being a bit redundant--apologies), the government(s) already monitor both public and private communications, sand permission, though they don't do a hell of a lot with what they see.
How much public-network data is locatable with the zillion nifty search engines, right now?
Windows just makes everything so much easier for the cracker hacker making such programs...
MS DOS was never intended to be at all secure--it was always a purely single-user system.
Windows 3.1 was never meant to be secure--it was just a single-user, single-instance shell to the single-user, single-task DOS.
Win9x was never meant to be secure--it was just a more powerful utility with pretty much exactly the same purpose as Windows 3.1. The `hit escape to bypass login' thing isn't a mistake or a `security hole'--Win95 logins only exist to maintain multiple sets of settings.
WinNT didn't start out as a multiuser operating system with built-in paranoia, so it hasn't been, and isn't going to be, easy for Microsoft to tack that onto it.
MS Windows is `insecure', but that was initially the point to the OS.
Windows 9x, these days, is a video-game system, and it's pretty good for that, and not much more. Besides, you don't really need a video-game system to be `secure'....
Let's get things all straight, and use the right tools for the job--not all operating systems (or shells) are good for everything (which makes me think of all of the full-screen Windows games--what's the point of a window system when you want to run things full-screen? How much better would the games go if you just didn't load the Windows GUI to begin with?).
I very recently built and installed the 2.2.10 version of the Linux kernel, and can no longer get EsounD to work.
After successfully modprobing in the `sb' module ( supplying the `io', `irq', and `dma' parameters), trying to launch esd reports:
Sound: DMA (output) timed out - IRQ/DRQ config error?
esd once reported that it couldn't allocate memory to operate on/dev/dsp, too....
I can write sound data to/dev/audio or/dev/dsp and have it played, my CDs play, and I can even play XGalaga, now, where I couldn't before--except for with EsounD, the sound is working better now than it was with the 2.0.35 kernel that I got from RedHat (/dev/sequencer isn't working, but that doesn't bother EsounD).
What am I doing wrong, here?
There's an entry in the isapnptools FAQ, dealing with rather sparse output from/dev/sndstat with SB32PnP cards, which is another of my syndromes, so I'm going to see if I can get any help from that....
What exactly is the/dev/dsp problem that you're getting from esd? What kernel comes with SuSE 6.1?
You cannot represent the interior, because the surface will hide it.
This only applies to opaque objects, or objects with opaque surfaces--have you ever looked at an ice cube out of your freezer, for example, or a cloud? Clouds are some of my favourite objects, because of the..., um..., cloudiness;)--I can see the surface, but I can also see a large number of different depths in the cloud; clouds please the stereographer in me....
Again, we only see 2D, because a surface is just a twisted plane (the twisting has some informational content, but not a whole dimension's worth of it).
Yes and no-- The surface is a twisted plane in the sense that it is only a surface, but it's not a plane in the sense that it doesn't lay only in two dimensions of the coordinate-system in which you're measuring it.
Also, considering that we typically have multiple eyes, we can actually observe in three+ dimensions--our sight's recognition of positions can be broken down into:
a horizontal coordinate (ie: at position 1, 2, 3...)
a vertical coordinate (ie: at position 1, 2, 3...)
an `eye' coordinate (ie: at position 1, 2..., >2 if we have >2 eyes).
Of course, this isn't quite the same three dimensions that we usually mean when we say `3-D', but it is a set of three dimensions.
There are a few other dimensions, in which the an object isn't observed directly, as well: the angle formed by the normal vectors of our eyes, the tightness of the iris, et al. The latter aids somewhat in determining depth, and the former aids both in depth-perception and size-perception. Colour is another dimension which is measured along to help determine the depth of something--some colours actually tend to look `further away' than other colours.
I recently read a newspaper article about this, which stated that E Ink can currently do two-colour combinations.
The mechanism was explained via analogy: Think of a clear beach ball filled with coloured liquid and ping-pong balls of some other colour. View this beach ball from above. When the ping pong balls are floating oat the top, the beach ball appears to be the colour of said ping pong balls. Toggle the density of the ping pong balls, making them sink to the bottom, and the colour of the beach ball appears to change.
The creators of E Ink expect it to drastically reduce to use of paper.... Somehow, I think that they're missing part of the point to hardcopy....
Well, expressing data in more dimensions can be good, and helpful, but only so long as you're not exceeding the dimensions that the viewer can actually experience (in number or in type).
Three-dimensional workspaces would probably work better than two-deimensional ones, but only if the user has the capability of truely experiencing the 3-D reality.
If you have three rectangular items, it might be best to join them all together like the corner of a box, rather than laying them out side-by-side-by-side, or whatever. If all that you can experience is two dimensions (for example, you 're viewing the universe through a CRT), then you can't really see depth--you can just get an impression of it.
If we take a plane (or the [inner] side of a cube) and rotate it, so that the surface becomes more parralel with our line of view, in two dimensions, everything on that plane appears to shrink along one axis, and either shrink or elongate along another axis, which can be... unpleasant; in three dimensions, we see that things are moving away, or toward us, and the mind adjusts the perceived sizes of everything, so we don't get that strange, irritating, stretchy-shrinky effect.
The `non-flat planar' layout of workspaces is the only advantage that I see, in a 3-D workspace, with regard to presentation of data that doesn't naturally occupy at least three dimensions--being able to place more items side-by-side, but have them occupy the same amount of (or less) space, is great, but being able to push and pull 2-D windows to give a better `document P is make occult by document Q' feel is rather worthless as far as anything besides aesthetics goes, and may actually act as a hinderance to `productivity', by adding complexity and time-consumption to the navigation of the workspace. This is big problem that I've always had with mice and other scrolly-pointy-clicky things--in order to perform an action, you need to move to a specific location, and, to move to another location, you need to traverse all of the space between it and your current location. Three-dimensional touch-sensitive displays would probably speed things up;), but I think that I'll be sticking with my keyboard until I have wormholes in my workspace, or the workspace responds to thought....
... Workstation OS source! It just isn't that important, and so NON mission critical...
More often than not I find,, having reliable workstations is `mission critical'--if my workstation is down, I can't do anything with it. Of course, I might be able to use a server to get my work done, but only if the server is also functioning as a workstation.
The last thing people need is alternate window managers that no one knows how to install, etc, etc...
Yes, but, note that, if you don't know how to install it, then you don't have it, and it won't affect you. This only untrue if something becomes `the standard', in which case it's not `alternate';)
Slashdot Mirror
(d) Wouldn't it be nice if Windows gave you a *choice* of widget sets?
-----
0] Why are we suddenly ranting about how bad MS Windows is?
1] There are a few different widget-sets that function under MS Windows. They don't all come with the OS, but, ish..., I'm not going to go into that.
In my experience doing Tk/Python, the Tk API isn't too bad. 8.0 had some apparent problems, though, like not being able to deal well with very long strings.
Tk real appeal, of course, is that it's got a presence in X, MS Windows, and Mac OS--the three most popular window-systems.
The same sort of thing often happens when people try to pluralise "torus"--they end up talking about Japanese architecture.
`vy-ree-ee'....
We need to replace X with a... gui that runs on the framebuffer device.
-----
:blinks.
Who says that an X-implementation can't run on a framebuffer device?
Graphics-toolkits should only need to support one medium, too: graphics.
They mentioned Linux, will these things run some sort of linux...
----
I noticed an interesting entry in the the POV-Ray benchmarks, recently:
http://www.haveland.com/cgi-b in/getpovb.pl?search=psx
Furthermore, real-life polygons aren't only 3 pixels, and they're not solid colour. They're larger, and they're textured.
-----
Real life tends to use splines and fractals--the advantage of which is infinite resolution with high (effectively infinite, eh?) compression;)
I really don't see the taxation of in-house activities as feasible.
I would start ranting about the immorality or whatnot of the idea, too, but that doesn't really matter, anymore....
See the free-software-song page at gnu.org;)
http://www.gnu.org/music/free-soft ware-song.html
And how accurate were those cubit-based measurements?
Just because X doesn't do networked sound doesn't mean that it precludes you from doing so.
There's nothing to stop you running an audio server on a different port which clients can connect to.
Definitely. EsounD seems to work well, for one, and I've seen some X applications that rely on talking to an EsounD server to output sounds.
I don't see the problem with not having network sound built into the X server (does X even do local sound? Does audible X software typically just write to the audio device?). The `let's build everything into the X server' mindset seems somewhat silly--it just gives support to the `it's bloated' mindset.
I wanted TrueType font-support in X, so I installed XFSTT (an external font-server), and now I seem to be able to make fairly good use of TrueType fonts, without bloating the X server more. You can do the same thing with sound, and, I'd imagine, with a good-sized portion of whatever X add-on capabilities you want.
X is modular for a reason--reuse, reuse, reuse;)
Oh, yes--anyone familiar with the ideas behind HURD?
... our privacy is slowly eroding and will soon be a thing of the past...
Privacy? The statement was that they want to monitor (contradicting the `policing' mentioned in the anonymous comment above yours) all public networks, right?
Does this effect private communications?
If they only want to look at public stuff, big deal--if you don't want someone to be see your stuff, don't show it to them; if you don't want it public, don't make it public.
As a number of posts have already mentioned (so I'm being a bit redundant--apologies), the government(s) already monitor both public and private communications, sand permission, though they don't do a hell of a lot with what they see.
How much public-network data is locatable with the zillion nifty search engines, right now?
If you don't trust an administrator, why is he an administrator?
Windows just makes everything so much easier for the cracker hacker making such programs...
MS DOS was never intended to be at all secure--it was always a purely single-user system.
Windows 3.1 was never meant to be secure--it was just a single-user, single-instance shell to the single-user, single-task DOS.
Win9x was never meant to be secure--it was just a more powerful utility with pretty much exactly the same purpose as Windows 3.1. The `hit escape to bypass login' thing isn't a mistake or a `security hole'--Win95 logins only exist to maintain multiple sets of settings.
WinNT didn't start out as a multiuser operating system with built-in paranoia, so it hasn't been, and isn't going to be, easy for Microsoft to tack that onto it.
MS Windows is `insecure', but that was initially the point to the OS.
Windows 9x, these days, is a video-game system, and it's pretty good for that, and not much more. Besides, you don't really need a video-game system to be `secure'....
Let's get things all straight, and use the right tools for the job--not all operating systems (or shells) are good for everything (which makes me think of all of the full-screen Windows games--what's the point of a window system when you want to run things full-screen? How much better would the games go if you just didn't load the Windows GUI to begin with?).
Doesn't the insertion of a kernel module require root access?
I nice web based linux control panel would be fun though.
Doesn't Linuxconf do that?
I very recently built and installed the 2.2.10 version of the Linux kernel, and can no longer get EsounD to work.
/dev/dsp, too....
/dev/audio or /dev/dsp and have it played, my CDs play, and I can even play XGalaga, now, where I couldn't before--except for with EsounD, the sound is working better now than it was with the 2.0.35 kernel that I got from RedHat (/dev/sequencer isn't working, but that doesn't bother EsounD).
/dev/sndstat with SB32PnP cards, which is another of my syndromes, so I'm going to see if I can get any help from that....
/dev/dsp problem that you're getting from esd?
After successfully modprobing in the `sb' module ( supplying the `io', `irq', and `dma' parameters), trying to launch esd reports:
Sound: DMA (output) timed out - IRQ/DRQ config error?
esd once reported that it couldn't allocate memory to operate on
I can write sound data to
What am I doing wrong, here?
There's an entry in the isapnptools FAQ, dealing with rather sparse output from
What exactly is the
What kernel comes with SuSE 6.1?
Does outlook have a search-and-replace function?
Perhaps for the same reason that MS Excel 97 `cannot open two documents with the same name, even if the documents are in different folders', eh?
There's an entry in the FOLDOC for "slashdot effect"--see http://foldoc.doc.ic.ac.uk.
Hrm....
Try xfstt.
This only applies to opaque objects, or objects with opaque surfaces--have you ever looked at an ice cube out of your freezer, for example, or a cloud? Clouds are some of my favourite objects, because of the..., um..., cloudiness;)--I can see the surface, but I can also see a large number of different depths in the cloud; clouds please the stereographer in me....
Again, we only see 2D, because a surface is just a twisted plane (the twisting has some informational content, but not a whole dimension's worth of it).
Yes and no--
The surface is a twisted plane in the sense that it is only a surface, but it's not a plane in the sense that it doesn't lay only in two dimensions of the coordinate-system in which you're measuring it.
Also, considering that we typically have multiple eyes, we can actually observe in three+ dimensions--our sight's recognition of positions can be broken down into:
Of course, this isn't quite the same three dimensions that we usually mean when we say `3-D', but it is a set of three dimensions.
There are a few other dimensions, in which the an object isn't observed directly, as well: the angle formed by the normal vectors of our eyes, the tightness of the iris, et al. The latter aids somewhat in determining depth, and the former aids both in depth-perception and size-perception. Colour is another dimension which is measured along to help determine the depth of something--some colours actually tend to look `further away' than other colours.
:)
I recently read a newspaper article about this, which stated that E Ink can currently do two-colour combinations.
The mechanism was explained via analogy:
Think of a clear beach ball filled with coloured liquid and ping-pong balls of some other colour.
View this beach ball from above.
When the ping pong balls are floating oat the top, the beach ball appears to be the colour of said ping pong balls.
Toggle the density of the ping pong balls, making them sink to the bottom, and the colour of the beach ball appears to change.
The creators of E Ink expect it to drastically reduce to use of paper....
Somehow, I think that they're missing part of the point to hardcopy....
Well, expressing data in more dimensions can be good, and helpful, but only so long as you're not exceeding the dimensions that the viewer can actually experience (in number or in type).
Three-dimensional workspaces would probably work better than two-deimensional ones, but only if the user has the capability of truely experiencing the 3-D reality.
If you have three rectangular items, it might be best to join them all together like the corner of a box, rather than laying them out side-by-side-by-side, or whatever. If all that you can experience is two dimensions (for example, you 're viewing the universe through a CRT), then you can't really see depth--you can just get an impression of it.
If we take a plane (or the [inner] side of a cube) and rotate it, so that the surface becomes more parralel with our line of view, in two dimensions, everything on that plane appears to shrink along one axis, and either shrink or elongate along another axis, which can be... unpleasant; in three dimensions, we see that things are moving away, or toward us, and the mind adjusts the perceived sizes of everything, so we don't get that strange, irritating, stretchy-shrinky effect.
The `non-flat planar' layout of workspaces is the only advantage that I see, in a 3-D workspace, with regard to presentation of data that doesn't naturally occupy at least three dimensions--being able to place more items side-by-side, but have them occupy the same amount of (or less) space, is great, but being able to push and pull 2-D windows to give a better `document P is make occult by document Q' feel is rather worthless as far as anything besides aesthetics goes, and may actually act as a hinderance to `productivity', by adding complexity and time-consumption to the navigation of the workspace. This is big problem that I've always had with mice and other scrolly-pointy-clicky things--in order to perform an action, you need to move to a specific location, and, to move to another location, you need to traverse all of the space between it and your current location. Three-dimensional touch-sensitive displays would probably speed things up;), but I think that I'll be sticking with my keyboard until I have wormholes in my workspace, or the workspace responds to thought....
... Workstation OS source! It just isn't that important, and so NON mission critical...
More often than not I find,, having reliable workstations is `mission critical'--if my workstation is down, I can't do anything with it. Of course, I might be able to use a server to get my work done, but only if the server is also functioning as a workstation.
The last thing people need is alternate window managers that no one knows how to install, etc, etc...
Yes, but, note that, if you don't know how to install it, then you don't have it, and it won't affect you. This only untrue if something becomes `the standard', in which case it's not `alternate';)