Comment Re:standard compliance? (Score 1) 161
Yes, luckily good things like Qt didn't change, but unfortunately bad things like bashing Qt without making any point, and spreading misinformation (e.g. telling MOC is a preprocessor) didn't either.
Yes, luckily good things like Qt didn't change, but unfortunately bad things like bashing Qt without making any point, and spreading misinformation (e.g. telling MOC is a preprocessor) didn't either.
So, is it fully standard C++ now or do you still have to use their hokey preprocessor?
Qt is, and always has been fully standard C++. The "moc" program is not a preprocessor, is just a tool, more precisely, just a code generator that writes for you some files that you have to either include at the end of your ".cpp" or you have to compile and link like other hand-coded files. If you use QMake, or CMake or any other buildsystem that has some Qt support (and most do), is completely effortless.
At a first glance, you see things that might look like an extension to the language, because you see stuff like "protected slots:" in addition to plain old public/private/protected C++. But here "slots" is just defined (using the standard C/C++ preprocessor) to an empty string, so the compiler sees the usual keywords only. Why is needed if is just an empty string? Well, because "moc" will use it when generating code.
Is possible to argue if all this (standard) preprocessor tricks are good or bad practice, but I have to say that it works for me. Qt has attemted to support a wide variety of environments, and the level of C++ support on those environments it's not the same. I even remember when TRUE and FALSE were provided as #defines because not all compilers had it. Right now I'm doing Qt development on an iMX23, and I'm quite constrained by the C++ compiler that Freescale provides, and I'm using Qt 4.8 just fine, the (till today) latest and greatest version.
Congratulations! You have in one short, succinct and economical sentence of only five words captured the essence - in both attitude and content - of why Linux is and always will be the perfect tool for the technically inclined tinkerer, and why it will never be adopted by the masses. Linux will go on doing what it does well, designed by the people and for the people who think the vast majority of desktop OS installations in the world are "for retards."
Congratulations! You have taken one short, succint and economical sentence of only five words, taken from Slashdot, and have concluded that all developers of Linux, and all the userspace applications think and act the same.
Oh, and at the same time you have neglected the fact that:
Oh come on. Miguel has done more for OSS than most people here.
Yes, but what? No, really: what does he have contributed that was worth it? He worked a lot of time, that's for sure, but all his projects, or his views on the projects he contributed to, don't seem of much value. At the time Evolution was the great program that GNOME users praised the most, I remember perfectly that he told us in a conference in Barcelona that it "now that we completed it, it's clear that it was a mistake writing it in C because it took too much time". I honestly don't see much value in what he contributed. Specially if we consider the negative impact that his other "endeavours" have done (Mono, OOXML, and texts like the one that started this).
His pragmatic approach and understanding that computers should be for people and not just computer geeks is refreshing and was helpful in developing Linux into a desktop OS.
You say that in a way that implies that everybody else wanted Linux to be used only with a text console. Go read Matthias Ettrich's original announcement about KDE. He repeats GUI and END USER a bazillion times. Because he wanted applications and user interfaces for the average user... like everybody else!
So, PostgreSQL is the better technical choice, therefore you should try to use it. If you decide to use MySQL when PostgreSQL would have had more or less equivalent support, you may be painting yourself in a corner needlessly. If you do nothing to avoid the problem and generally accept and cultivate your own ignorance, then you are a bad engineer.
Or... You are a good engineer because even if you consider MySQL and PHP inferior, if you have to build a blog with lots of features, you realize that WordPress plus its plugins is the better choice, even if you are tied to PHP and MySQL. Because the alternative would require you to write lots of code that will require lots of time and money.
Can you please see for one moment the whole picture? My original comment was not about MySQL vs. PostreSQL. I was just stating that sometimes, for some situations, the database tier is not somethingn that you can choose individually for its technical merits. You have to choose a whole stack, where each layer is not loosely coupled from the others. And like it or not, some of the developers of the upper layers chose MySQL, and that is what we have now.
Then why would you feel qualified to make a decision about which database to use?
You should probably read again my comment, because I didn't make any decision about the database to use. I said that when you have to evaluate the choices, choosing which programming language or database to use, is something that is out of your control if you have to choose a whole stack of RDBMS + language + application. If you have to build a blog, and the user facing features are important or critical, is very likely that you will end up using WordPress, and if the WordPress developers chose PHP and MySQL some time ago, there isn't much that you (or them) can do.
Unless you are considering that the loss caused by using MySQL is so great, that a new blog software has to be written from scratch, or WordPress has to be forked to support other DBMS better. Since I don't see any the latter happening, I guess that isn't really that important for a good amount of people or use cases.
I don't have the technical skills to judge the merits of MySQL vs PostgreSQL, but I can't tell you one thing: MySQL is like PHP, it might have lots of critics, but is the more widely used, supported, and developed database/programming language for web applications. All popular CMSs are written in PHP (Drupal, Joomla, MediaWiki, WordPress...), and many of them have MySQL first in the list. WordPress is almost MySQL specific. They have a PostgreSQL plugin, but works rewriting queries on the fly, and they recognize is expected to be slower, and not work for all plugins.
I've always wanted to have the excuse to try a different programming language/framework for web applications, and even a different database server, but I never had the excuse because you always feel second class if you go with them. I use my own hosting, but for cheap virtual hosts PHP and MySQL is almost a de facto standard. And if you pick some web application almost always MySQL is the best or only choice.
I know some day I'll be proved wrong, and this comment will be outdated, but I don't feel this is the time yet. And let me insist, I'm not claiming is due to technical merits (nor denying it), but I feel this is the way it is.
Do we really care?
What's this FaceBook thing anyway?
Does it compile into native code or P-code?
Fun fact: FaceBook uses HipHop, a tool they developed themselves to convert PHP code to C++, and then compile it to native code.
And the craziest thing is that they compile everything into a single 1.5 GB binary:
Because Facebook's entire code base is compiled down to a single binary executable, the company's deployment process is quite different from what you'd normally expect in a PHP environment. Rossi told me that the binary, which represents the entire Facebook application, is approximately 1.5GB in size. When Facebook updates its code and generates a new build, the new binary has to be pushed to all of the company's servers.
So, yeah, FaceBook compiles to native code!
Just make sure the tablet UI mode stays optional. We don't need another Gnome3/Unity.
KDE/Plasma doesn't have a "tablet mode". For the main interface (sometimes I've seen it mentioned as "primary user interface"), with the 4.x series a new approach was attempted. Instead of having somewhat monolithic blocks rigidly coupled (kicker, kdesktop, etc.), a general framework for creating this kind of interfaces was created: what today we know as Plasma. Plasma has shared libraries and frameworks, but the desktop experience is a program named plasma-desktop. A similar UI is plasma-netbook, and of course there are versions for tablet and even phone incarnations. Many things are shared, which is the cool thing about KDE.
This approach was probably very ambitious at the beginning, and hence the initial bad impressions, but in my experience it was worth it, since now I can have a kick-ass desktop that is configurable way beyond I could imagine in the KDE 3.x days.
KDE technically isn't C++. It's written in Qt, which is a set of bastardized extensions to C++ (see meta object compiler) that produce generated C++ code.
This is the worst description I've seen of Qt and the MOC in a long time. Qt is perfectly valid and normal C++. It just requires that you link against some generated code. Big deal. However, since the code generator (Meta Object Compiler) has the word "compiler" in it, either fools some people into thinking that requires some special tool, or is used to spread some FUD.
Breaking news: the XML files that Qt Designer creates are used to generate C++ code.
Is it actually a problem of fragmentation, or is it that some projects after a few years (and some amounts of donated money) just go into technology decline?
Apple wanted a web browser without depending on Microsoft, so they had to decide between reaching an agreement with Opera, or embrace Mozilla, or use the KHTML engine from KDE. They chose the latter, and forked it because they had to change too much (I guess). Then Google, even though is the main supporter of Mozilla, decides to create yet another browser, but not based on Gecko. Instead they pick up WebKit, but ditch JavaScriptCore and replace it with V8.
Now the even funnier thing: years after Android and Chrome are released, the default browser in Android is not Chrome. WTF? Even more amusing is the fact that WebKit is probably the only thing that is not heavily customized (like Linux) or written specifically for Android (like the rest of the userspace).
Are companies like Google or Apple in a technological decline? Hell, no. Is just that software is freaking complex, and to do it right you just need to focus on some things, and reach compromises. That leaves some people behind, and creates niches for different products. As simple as that. This "fragmentation" or "duplication" is simply a consequence of the freedom of people and companies to do whatever they see fit. And it doesn't matter if it's a FOSS project or a big evil corporation. It happens from time to time, and yes, sometimes it could be improved, but it isn't such a big thing IMHO.
First, note that my reply was to a post that claimed that "[t]he FLOSS community hates to pay money". I wasn't writing about how much, but I gave some evidence (not definitive, but some) that this wasn't true.
Second, the link that you posted seems to be about the much larger super set that includes the KDE-related Nepomuk. I don't understand the full stack, not even the subset or implementation that includes the KDE-related technologies. But if you check out the page about the pieces released as open source, you will see that they claim that not the whole project is open source, and Nepomuk-KDE (the project that was asking for funding) is only one part. I haven't found many references, but an article on KDE news gives some pointers and explanation. So I think that your comparison is not accurate. The larger project includes many implementations and lots of research. Now we are talking about a single implementation that is more or less done, but needs features and bug fixing.
Third, I wasn't the one setting the milestone. Sebastian Trüg, the lead Nepomuk developer did, and he claimed it was a reasonable amount to "secure long-term funding for Nepomuk". I guess that if he started the fundraiser on September of 2011, and he finally joined a regular company on February 2012, it was enough to live with some dignity during some months (he was working for Mandriva previously, and it seems the financial troubles of the company forced him and other employees to work without a salary). I don't know about the living expenses in every corner of the world, but I can tell you that in Spain, I would be terribly happy if I could dedicate myself to work full time on my favorite project for 3000€ before taxes per month. If I'm not mistaken, many programmers are working here for about 1200€ per month after taxes, maybe even less. With a 23% of people unemployed, I don't expect salaries to be much higher in some time.
Seriously, just stop. The FLOSS community hates to pay money and thinks no one should make any money from software. All one has to do is look at comments on Slashdot to see that.
Well, I'm going to lose the moderation point that I just used, but I have to reply to this.
Dude, you can't judge the way the FLOSS community thinks because of the comments on Slashdot. First, because you will have to prove first that Slashdot is a non-biased sample of the community. Second, because normally the comments on one news entry are the reaction to that event, not a proper statement from such community.
And if you want more, here is one small piece of evidence: 9000€ collected in 3 months to fund Nepomuk. Nepomuk is one of the most hated and/or more controversial pieces of KDE 4.x. From what I read on the KDE related sites, lists, etc., many people are quite vocal in stating that they don't want Nepomuk and want to disable it, or get rid of it as a forced dependency. And still got some love in the form of money.
Oh, and remember the figures from the Humble Indie Bundle: Linux users of the bundle paid (a lot) more on average that Mac or Windows users.
I still use a 6MP camera and it's more than sufficient for daily use.
Then you are going to love this phone's camera, since the default setting is 5MP, and unless you set explicitly the "tricks" mode, 8MP is the largest setting in normal mode.
I think the big issue is that the camera manufacturers pushed higher MP but never got around to telling Joe Public what exactly MP means to them.
I think all agree on this. Even Nokia. In the paper they published they say:
People will inevitably home in on the number of pixels the Nokia 808 PureView packs, but they’re missing the point. [...]
It all stems from the very early days of digital cameras, when image quality was affected by the limited number of pixels available. As the pixel numbers increased, image quality dramatically improved. However, once the resolution reached around 5Mpix-6Mpix, the real-world benefits became debatable.
But by then, the market had made a direct correlation between number of pixels and quality of image. The more pixels the better, was the received wisdom. And this thinking has stuck. Though today manufacturers would happily reduce the number of pixels in their cameras, and instead concentrate on their lenses and sensors, they’re not so sure the market would accept this.
Is nice that the company selling the device is stating this from day 1.
Or perhaps the phone has been in development for some time, maybe it takes longer than Marketing announcement cycles to design and deliver new technology.
I can't find now the link (maybe it was on a video), but they say they have been developing this technology for four years.
And BTW, the summary is somewhat unfair. On the announcement they have posted (besides some impressive photo samples) a whitepaper were they clearly say that is not about quantity of megapixels, is about the quality you get when you average the results given by each one. I've also seen some of the videos were you get a very smooth digital zoom without loss of quality, and is quite remarkable.
Always draw your curves, then plot your reading.
