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Miguel de Icaza Interview on MSDN
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"Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love." -- Albert Einstein
"Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love." -- Albert Einstein
Re:desperate times, desperate measures? (Score:4, Interesting)
You could argue that what open-source needs most is more collaboration with MS. For example, just imagine what it would do for acceptance of Linux if a company worked with MS to produce a reliable up-to-date version of Word for Linux. Of course, if you get into bed with MS, there is a fair chance you're going to get screwed - but that just means that Ximian (or anyone) has to be very careful in their negotiations.
While branding MS as the devil is easy & popular - it may be possible to work with them without selling your soul
Nice to see Brad Cox mentioned (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Miguel is the smart fellow (Score:3, Interesting)
And this is bad, because...?
Re:Miguel is the smart fellow (Score:5, Interesting)
> interesting about this interview was Miguel
> listing problems with Bonobo and CORBA that
> sounded a LOT like the reasons KDE doesn't use
> those technologies. Essentially that bindings
> such as CORBA are like swatting a fly with a
> hammer for desktop apps, thus a simpler
> approach was taken with things like DCOP.
Actually, he didn't say this. He said, "CORBA is good when you define coarse interfaces, and most Bonobo interfaces are coarse. The only problem is that Bonobo/CORBA interfaces are not good for small interfaces. For example, an XML parsing Bonobo/CORBA component would be inefficient compared to a C API."
Basically, CORBA is good enough for it's current use (GUI components and general application interfacing) but it's a bit heavy for simple things like a (high performance) XML parsing library. DCOP isn't any more efficient. It's likely less efficient since with DCOP there's a lot of serialization/deserialization to strings whereas that serialization doesn't take place if you're using Orbit (GNOME's CORBA) as an inproc procedure. Even when it happens, it's binary serialization/deserialization so it's likely more efficient.
> Again, I'm not in the trenches, but from an
> observers point of view it seems that Gnome is
> just needing that next set of bindings to be
> developed sometime later over and over again.
> Everything was going to be better with CORBA
> and Bonobo linking everything. Now that's all
> the wrong approach, and Mono is needed. I may
> be way of base here, it just seems like it's
> the "bindings to be developed" of the month club.
Again, no. Bonobo is still good and it solves problems that Mono doesn't. Bonobo interfaces are being added to Mono, just like Gtk+ bindings and gnomedb bindings.
One thing Mono has the power to do is unify GNOME and KDE. Mono is getting full GNOME bindings. From what I understand, there are KDE developers who are working on KDE bindings (including DCOP). Because of the way the C# component architecture works, you can use components with little knowledge on how they were actually built, so you can mix and match more easily. Once the work is done, you should be able to embed a KPart in a GNOME component that's embedded in a KDE component that's embedded in a WinForm component.
I don't know about you, but I think that it's cool enough to be woth pursuing.
Re:Miguel is the smart fellow (Score:3, Interesting)
The KDE folks have at least considered using Orbit. Check it out [zork.net]. In fact the only reason that KDE isn't using Corba right now is that when they started KDE2 development there weren't any useable (read fast) Free Software ORBs available. Which highlights what is perhaps the biggest difference between the KDE and Gnome camps. There wasn't a useable ORB when Gnome started either, so they wrote one themselves (just like they essentially wrote their own widget set).
The KDE folks tend to look for shortcuts. They used a (then) non-free widget set because it was easier. When they couldn't find a useful ORB they simply wrote something else. Gnome's support of Corba turned out to be a big deal. It's the primary reason why Sun, HP, and some of the other UNIX big names are pouring money into Gnome and not KDE.
Re:He's M$ Employee ??? (Score:4, Interesting)
Setting the line dash style broke in Win98 and WinME. This appears to be a direct attempt to break non-MFC programs that tried to simulate the mouse highlight. It broke Qt, the GTK port, and FLTK. It appears to be fixed again in XP and always worked in NT.
Append, join, subst, (ie every single program that could do anything similar to a symbolic link) disappeared or broke in Window 3.1. Again I think this is a direct attempt by MicroSoft to disallow Unix compatability (symbolic links would allow the MSDOS file system to match a Unix file system, and are probably easy to implement, so I cannot think of any other reason they don't do it).
Support for switchar disappeared in MSDOS 6. This broke most of my programs which exec'd other programs, and again appears to have been done purposely to break Unix compatability (they could instead have made the programs accept either - or / easily enough...).
Storage and retrival of the current directory changed in MSDOS 5 to uppercase the name and turn all forward slashes into backward slashes and truncated all the filenames at 8.3 characters. This broke an enormous amount of Unix-ported software and required it to be rewritten to store the current directory locally.
Since I have done very little Windows programming, yet have encountered these, I would say the claim that Windows remains compatable between versions is false. It also seems to me that most of the changes are on purpose to sabotage the ability to write portable programs.