LWN: Comments on "Plasma Active Three released"

Plasma Active Three released

raven667 — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 16:27:28 +0000

Thanks for the clear response, I hadn't thought about that. I'd forgotten about the differences between 32bit and 64bit mode on modern CPUs, and that dosemu and dosbox aren't the same thing.

Plasma Active Three released

nix — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 15:49:14 +0000

The two are quite different. Win3.1/NT/95 were all 32-bit systems, so they had the benefit of being able to use VM86 to do 90% of the work for them. In long mode (64-bit mode), vm86 no longer exists, so this approach cannot be used.

Plasma Active Three released

raven667 — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 17:12:48 +0000

Win3.1 with virtual memory enabled and WinNT, Win95 had the same problem so how they solved it should be sufficient. DOSBox does better but that may because it creates virtual video, sound and network devices in its VM. I don't think it does any more instruction emulation/trapping than a WinNT DOS window.

Plasma Active Three released

nix — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 15:21:26 +0000

I know it does. But if insn-level emulation was required, it couldn't possibly have (i.e. if it had done what dosbox et al do now).

Plasma Active Three released

raven667 — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 05:17:21 +0000

In my speculative revised history I would think that the Xenix transition would happen in the early 90's, maybe with Win3.x and instead of developing new kernels for WinNT and Win9x. The result would probably have looked a lot like NeXT.

Plasma Active Three released

raven667 — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 05:13:56 +0000

The 386 does run 8086 software just fine. Sure some runs too fast or whatever but the CPU has the appropriate guts to run 8086 software in a VM and that feature was in use at the time. For example Concurrent DOS 386.

Of course the rest of this is high speculation as it wasn't what happened.

Plasma Active Three released

efraim — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 23:06:55 +0000

My original point is: the "original reimplementation" thing just means that the creators of those system found the feature useful enough to implement it.

If those systems were UNIX-derived, it would not say much - after all they'd inherit the implementation together with source code or at least API design.
That's why it's important to mention those system whose codebase was very different. Like DOS (BTW, as already mentioned, DOS DID have minimal support for FS usage from TSR - the very hairy idea of InDOS flag)

Plasma Active Three released

viro — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 19:07:30 +0000

Remind me, when had 386 boxen become widespread enough? IIRC, in the very late 80s... And overhead of vm86, while nowhere near that of hacks possible on 286, could still be heavy, depending on what the turd running in it had been doing. IRH the things had eventually gone that way, but it took a lot of time. IBM had invested too much into 286 boxen; OS/2 was only the software half of disaster...

AFAICS, there were two critical points in the making of that mess; one in mid-70s, when CP/M had been designed and spread, with resulting traditions of software that assumed it had essentially solitary control of bare hardware and another in the end of 70s, when internal politics in Intel has lead to 80286 design picked. Hell knows what happened in there - at the same time they had an even worse disaster going on (iAPX432) and chances of iAPX286 design to get accepted had to depend on how much could it be internally sold as aligned with iAPX432 one, but details are probably impossible to reconstruct by now.

Plasma Active Three released

nix — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 18:43:40 +0000

The VM route is viable *with modern hardware*, because its CPUs are much much faster and memory much more capacious than the systems being emulated. On late-1980s and early-1990s CPUs like the 80386 (which was introduced in 1985 and was becoming common in the early 1990s), it is wholly impractical to expect to be able to do instruction-level, let alone cycle-accurate, emulation of even an 8086, let alone a 286.

Plasma Active Three released

raven667 — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 15:47:08 +0000

Aside from os/2 I don't think the 286 was relevant except as a a faster 8086 and the 386 was the transition point. Dosbox shows that the vm route is viable.

Plasma Active Three released

callegar — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 11:13:35 +0000

1) You seem to be confirming my statement. There is no standard and every kind of file needs its own type of tagging. By the way, the idea that the tags should go inside the file (a la id3) is interesting, but the file paradigm seems to be completely inadequate for it. When you change a tag, the sha of the whole file changes (which is not nice at all). Furthermore, if you have your files remotely, to read the tags you need to transfer the whole file. Which means CO2 and drying up your internet forfait. Furthermore, nepomuk seems not to follow the paradigm of tagging the stuff by adding a nfo file to every dir, but to put everything in its own inexplorable database of ontologies.

2) Maybe just for photos and music if you do not use nepomuk approach to tagging which puts stuff in its own db.

3) Apart from the fact that using nepomuk your 1b does not appear all that natural, my point is this. Say that you use nepomuk and automatic indexing and that you index all your home. Say that (by mistake, during a file transfer, whatever) for 5 minutes a text file full of very secrete passwords enters your home dir. Can you guarantee me that after you erase that file, your secret passwords are not captured for an arbitrarily long time in some index file?

4) When I was administering machines, this was a nightmare. Having users ending up their quotas all the time.

5) Ok, now try to rescale all those images to 800x600. Or say that you messed a few years, so that for every year you want to do year=year+1. The fact is that if you go tags currently you loose scripting and automation. Furthermore, if the tags are in the files (like for photos, music), rewriting tags currently means rewriting an arbitrary large number of huge files to update the tags.

So, I am not saying that tags are necessarily bad. I am saying that they are extremely immature and that trying to /force/ people to use something that is immature (or even giving it as a default) often backfires. Like the gmail labels that no-one I know uses (google is anyway quite good at searching inside messages) or the crazy management of photos on android phones, where everything is shown together even if it comes from 4 different cameras and is copied in 4 different dirs.

Plasma Active Three released

viro — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 21:54:08 +0000

There had been lots and lots of software that would be hell to port to anything OS-like. Unix, VMS, whatever. Nothing short of fully virtualized system would help and that would be prohibitively costly on 286 (not to mention 8086). It didn't have to be written that way; it just had been the common culture on CP/M boxen and it had been transported over to DOS. And no, MacOS of the period hadn't been any better in that respect. And 386 had been too late to really affect that - by the time it had been widely deployed, there had been a huge market and it had been way too late. I suspect that this is what had really doomed any plans of transition to Xenix.

As for 286, I really wonder what would an OS Intel had in mind for that beast look like. Some kind of Ada environment, perhaps? Definitely not something resembling Unix...

Plasma Active Three released

raven667 — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 19:43:35 +0000

> You are overestimating the effects. Or just forgetting what the situation really had been

That may be, this is speculative history fiction after all.

The seeds for MacOS were planted when NeXT was founded and successfully created its successor. Apple might have turned out very differently in the late 80's and 90's has NeXT been done in-house. Lets just change one thing for speculation purposes though.

I can see how 286 protected-mode could have thrown a monkey wrench into the design but Xenix was ported to the 386 and available at the time a switch over could have been made from DOS. Compatibility could have been maintained with Merge for example or some other DOSBox-like technology created. Windows could have been designed for Xenix instead of DOS.

The rest of the systems turned out to be small fry or have fundamental flaws either technically or in the management of the companies supporting them. I don't think the winners and losers of the 80s-90s would have turned out differently but there was an opportunity that was missed.

Plasma Active Three released

viro — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 16:26:34 +0000

You are overestimating the effects. Or just forgetting what the situation really had been.

* MacOS had not been thrown out and replaced by a Unix derivative until very late in the game.
* there had been AmigaOS, which was also not a Unix by any stretch of imagination. Might or might not have died off; hell knows.
* IBM mistake of using Intel's design failure (286 protected mode architecture) would still have happened. Results wouldn't have been any prettier than in real history. By the time Intel has fixed the worst of that it was too late - OS/2 interfaces had been deeply affected by that horror and it was too late to fix them.
* Gary Kildall and his pile of garbage. That's the guy you have to thank for the mess, far more than Gates&co. A lot of bitty-box software had been out there and it had been cheerfully ignoring the nearly inexistent kernel. Porting _that_ to anything resembling an operating system would have been slow and painful.

Plasma Active Three released

raven667 — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 14:35:36 +0000

How different he world would be if that had happened. Everything would be a unix-derivitave or unix-alike maybe aside from some very niche mainframe or embedded systems. The ecosystems between MS, Apple and Linux would be more directly cross-pollinated, if Linux was even started at all.

I don't know if that would have been a better world but I'd like to think so. At least it would have saved the world years of aggravation dealing with win/dos instability.

Plasma Active Three released

nix — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 08:46:00 +0000

Oh, yes, it was never well-implemented and never worked properly. But that they tried at all pretty much proves Al's point that the whole DOS 2.0 directory thing was intended to emulate Unix (at that point the intention was to eventually ditch DOS and migrate everyone to Xenix, IIRC).

Plasma Active Three released

dirtyepic — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 04:52:12 +0000

It also has built-in Musicbrainz and CDDB support, can automatically rename files based on format strings (including directory structure), create playlists, etc. etc. It does have a bit of a learning curve and the UI isn't exactly what you'd call intuitive but you can configure just about anything you can think of.

An example workflow: I like to clear any existing tags and fill in the fields by hand (you can use musicbrainz here but I'm anal about how my tracks get named). Then I just save and hit Rename and all my files are renamed based on the tags and my format string and sorted directly into my collection. If it could fetch album cover art from Amazon and lyrics from LyricWiki it'd be perfect.

Activities?

pynm0001 — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 23:05:49 +0000

You're right that the Android SDK was available early, just keep in mind Plasma was actively in development before the KDE 4.0 release as well. ;)

I'm too lazy to dig up links (and besides, doesn't really matter). Feels like the OpenHandsetAlliance was so long ago though, amazing how much has changed just in 4 years...

Activities?

man_ls — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 07:42:36 +0000

I am no expert, but the Wikipedia says that Google published their Android platform on November 2007. The SDK was available then even if the first phones would not come out for almost a year. (Remember the "OpenHandsetAlliance" that appeared as a response to Apple's iPhone?)

So I understand that activities in KDE are an element of the UI, thanks. Intriguing. dtlin's post below and the link posted are a very good source.

Plasma Active Three released

steveriley — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 07:23:58 +0000

"desktop use scenarios are different from mobile"

An stupendously obvious position that so many other UI designers appear to be completely, astonishingly ignorant of. Aaron, thank you. I look forward to installing Plasma Active Three on my Samsung 700t (yeah, the one that came with Windows 8 from //build/) this weekend.

Activities?

dtlin — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 03:09:39 +0000

They're not alike at all.

Plasma activities are like super-virtual desktops: they are a collection of desktop state, configuration, and windows.

Android is easier to explain by analogy. The whole system is a web browser and an activity is a specific web page. One program may have many activities, just as one host may have many web pages, but while you can navigate between them freely, you can only see one at once.

Activities?

pynm0001 — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 00:18:01 +0000

Well that's just it. They're not "new", Activities have been a KDE feature since before the 4.0 release in Jan. 2008 (some months before the first Android phone was released in Oct. 2008).

Either way, my very limited understanding of the Android SDK when I reviewed it some months ago was that an activity was an implementation detail for a software developer, not a user-visible term in the Android UI.

Plasma Active Three released

BenHutchings — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 22:56:28 +0000

DOS system calls accept either path separator (and so does Win32). But since a leading '/' (and even an embedded '/' in some cases) is treated as introducing an option, it cannot really be used as a path separator.

MS-DOS 2.0 and some later releases supported changing the option character, typically to '-', resulting in a more Unix-like behaviour. However, command line parsing was left to each program and there was no widely used getopt() function, so this was never universally supported. There was also no convention of a special argument like '--' that would disable option parsing in subsequent arguments

Plasma Active Three released

Tara_Li — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 16:24:36 +0000

Well, it's not just the tagging that I'm concerned with.

There's this database - and it holds information on 20,000 pictures. Pretty fair chance, in fact, that even holds the pictures themselves, the way things are going. This whole huge database gets searched for just a few pictures, that I tend to keep together anyway. I don't need half of my RAM holding indexes for all of this metadata crap.

Plasma Active Three released

hummassa — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 15:27:14 +0000

Ah, and...

5/Gmail comment) Select all mail in a label, re-label them, remove the old label; trivial.

Plasma Active Three released

hummassa — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 15:25:56 +0000

1a) Tag the files, not the directory entries. Works well for photos and music.
1b) OR put the tags in a plaintext file along the file (the .nfo approach). Works well for videos.

2) problem solved with [1a/1b] above.

3) I use nepomuk; excluding some file or directory from the index excludes its tags from the index... I couldn't see the problem.

4) Never looked at it; will study this better.

5) Works OK for me in Digikam, doing [1a] above...

Plasma Active Three released

callegar — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 10:22:42 +0000

OK, seriously now.

The reason why I am suspicious of the tag approach and the reason why I have so far systematically disabled nepomuk on all my systems (in spite of being a long time kde user), it that I really feel that this approach is 'imprisoning' some of my data, taking control of it away from me.

1) This tag approach appears to be completely unstandardized and unportable between desktop environments. If I spend time tagging my stuff and one day later I decide that I like gnome/ubuntu/xfce better than kde, all this effort is lost.

2) Looks like there is no possibility to sanely export or share this metadata. If I have a bunch of photos and I organize it by means of sensible path names (e.g. Photos/2011/Summer), and I decide to share them with a friend, simply zipping the folder and sharing the zip file will give to the receiver not just the content, but also the organization. If I put all my photos in Photos and I rely on tags for the organization, there is not tool capable of making a container file (zip like) with both the content and the organization.

3) Looks like there is no possibility to rapidly control what gets tagged and how, particularly if one relies on automatic tools to generate the tags, like indexers. For instance, if some password file of mine gets indexed by nepomuk, I would like to assure that such data is immediately removed from the indexes, but there is no way to do it.

4) There is almost no control on the amount of resources that is used for the tagging, particularly when the tags rely on automatic tools like indexing for their generation. With nepomuk, if I disable automatic indexing for a directory, I do not see the space taken by the database immediately decrease. The database seems to only augment in space over time, which is even more worrying for tablet like devices.

5) There is no way to automate operations on tags. Say that I have a bunch of photos, and that I have organized them by paths. Say "Photos/2011/Summer". Then I realize that this is wrong, and that they should have been "Photos/2010/Summer". Fixing this is as simple as a directory rename. How do I tell a tag based system something like "Please select all Photos that have the "Summer" tag as well as the "2011" tag and change the "2011" tag into "2010"? I have the same problem with gmail labels. Not that the thing cannot be done, but is extremely more demanding in terms of time than a directory rename.

Plasma Active Three released

rsidd — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 08:38:57 +0000

This is exactly why I use folder players (and refuse to buy any Apple product). I still have a problem choosing sane folder names for classical music, that aren't hundreds of characters long. But it's better than tagging.

What I've ended up doing is a composer directory; inside that, a performance/piece directory; inside that, track files whose filenames describe only the piece and movement, not composer/performer. It mostly works, but some multi-composer discs require other treatment.

Plasma Active Three released

rsidd — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 08:33:48 +0000

The OP (GP) was talking about ipod / itunes specifically.

Plasma Active Three released

smcv — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 08:14:13 +0000

Relying on semantic tagging can work, but only if the software interpreting the semantic tags has the same interpretation you do.

One of my pet hates in MeeGo/Maemo Harmattan is that the media player copes poorly with "Various Artists" compilations. I can either navigate by album (which sorts alphabetically by album, so e.g. the Nine Inch Nails albums aren't grouped together) or by artist, which really means artist/album (treating a 10-track compilation as if it was 10 1-track albums by different artists).

What makes that particularly annoying is that the directory hierarchy on the actual filesystem follows the Musicbrainz Picard defaults - "AlbumArtist/Album/01. Artist - Track.ogg" - so if I was able to navigate according to the filesystem, all the compilations would be under "Various Artists" where I expect to find them.

I'm not sure whether the bug here is "media player doesn't let me navigate the filesystem" or "media player doesn't understand ALBUMARTIST tags" or both...

Plasma Active Three released

spaetz — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 07:16:52 +0000

There is one argument in the filepath/tag debate I have hardly seen:

Yes, tags might be better and fulfil all needs that filepaths can do, but most tagging systems I know work only within the application you use.

Switch from f-spot to shotwell (or digikam), boom all information is lost. While if it's in the folder 2012/07/Boston/ I have at least some information to reconstruct where the picture was taken. This is why I don't want to give up file hierarchy based locations even if I like tagging.

Plasma Active Three released

ncm — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 06:28:36 +0000

Rockbox doesn't only work on old players. It runs on current Sandisk devices.

Plasma Active Three released

rsidd — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 03:51:03 +0000

I have tried itunes, thank you -- my wife's Mac has it. Fine for rock/pop music (though I still prefer pretty much linux-based program I've seen). Awful for anything else. She doesn't use it often either. But this is a general feature of Apple -- it's great if you want to do exactly what they want you to do. If you want to do something else, you're out of luck.

Plus, itunes doesn't do ogg vorbis files.

Plasma Active Three released

nix — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 22:56:15 +0000

And if it comes from the Far East: who translates the manual? How much is she paid? Is it more than the people who clean the floors? (Probably not.)

Plasma Active Three released

nix — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 22:51:00 +0000

DOS 2.0's implementation of a hierarchical filesystem was so unrelated to Unix that there was an undocumented switch you could flip which switched the path separator from \ (a choice forced on them by the CPM-inspired choice of / as the option character) to /. Just like, um, Unix.

Heck, some of the code even emulated Xenix interfaces to some degree. It was explicitly Unix-inspired.

Plasma Active Three released

hummassa — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 22:40:20 +0000

> Trick question. There is no second verse.

Translation: I will ignore all you wrote because confirmation bias, that's why.

Plasma Active Three released

nix — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 22:35:54 +0000

The remaining columns form the tag hierarchy. The first is Genres, the next Artists, and then there is a list of songs grouped by Album, then sorted by number within the album.

As an aside, it is hard to imagine just how worthless this is for classical music. With the exception of iPods old enough to run Rockbox on, the whole line of players is simply useless for classical music. Let's see, I have three recordings of the Goldberg Variations, the two by Gould and one other -- and what does the iPod's cruddy built-in non-free software do? It lumps them all into one, if I'm very lucky, or gives them all the same name and does not differentiate between recordings, otherwise: last I saw it didn't even provide a way to distinguish between composer and performer, let alone multiple performances of the same work. If I'm *very* lucky it keeps the variations within each performance in the right order, otherwise they get jumbled up as well. How helpful. (And as for including things like the opus number(s) of the works, just forget it.)

Plasma Active Three released

sorpigal — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 21:52:27 +0000

A virtual +1, Insightful to you, sir.

Why do FHS reformers never get anywhere? It's because they only worry about the problems they want to fix, not solutions they're throwing out. Why are UI redesigners met with fear? It's because they're only worried about making the new UI do X, not explaining how it meets or fails to meet existing needs.

This is also why backwards compatibility is so important: It means that the things you don't do right can at least still be done. On that note, why throw away file paths and not just tag each file with its "real" path and in the UI make it appear as if folders and a strict hierarchy still exist? It doesn't make things less semantic and it doesn't break anyone's head.

Computing fails

dgm — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 21:15:39 +0000

> Do you think the robot will adapt to driving in e.g. snowy roads unless the algorithms have been programmed to deal with it?

Yes.

Google's self driving cars are programmed with a mix of clever algorithms, classical AI algorithms and new machine learning techniques. All put together leads to some surprising results on the tests.

I had the opportunity to take Thrun and Norvig's course on AI (www.ai-class.com), and I can say that the field has advanced more in the latest 5 years alone than in the previous 30. It's well worth the effort:

Computing fails

dlang — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 21:03:12 +0000

oops published too quickly.

I meant to say that most of the things you are talking about are acutlaly fairly common, you just don't know what's happening under the covers.