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I don't know where you read that our goal is to freeze our hardware requirements, but can you give me an example of an essential feature that would boost the requirements?

There is no one essential feature. Each user has different requirements.

But all those requirements need little features served by all sorts of daemons.
And of course huge features like compositing.

The more features, the higher the requirements.

Just cause you believe it does not make it so.

Remember, Syllable is an OS implemented by guys that make it in their spare time.... so... I think these 2 years they simply were working for a living; like you or me.

If you read our front page news articles and change logs for the past two years and the articles here on OSNews, you will know.

That interview was nice to read.

Kaj and the syllable team does great work.
Your fortitude is inspirational and shows what can be done.

My 20cents here to the Syllable team.
Regarding future applications.
Please consider only getting one or two highly functional programs per application type.
More people working say on just one audio application for example can polish it more and add more depth to it.

Well, for sure there have been some trouble in the upper layers of the Syllable organization.

This is a comment (from an (ex-)insider at Syallable) on a thread at haiku-os.org: https://www.haiku-os.org/community/forum/syllable_vs_haiku#comment-1...

This explains why there has been little progress on the actual OS itself. Of course there will be two sides on the story, but where there is smoke.....

But of course I wish Syllable all the best since I am a fan of alternative operating systems.

But me, me like Haiku (Aplha3 is another great leap)

Since i know all the internals (since i spent a lot of time with syllable) I can tell you what happend with the developers.
They run away, and let kaj alone, who is not a c/c++ developer. His abilities are scripting, and that's i guess the reason why he insists on rebol/red and other scripting languages. Nearly all developers are gone, and the if there are some left (which are not officially gone), then they are inactive. On syllable project there are very rarely people doing anything related to development. You can watch their source code activity, it's nearly constantly zero, since the most developers left. Also the leader of syllable (vanders), was declared by kaj as not being the leader anymore. The potential of syllable is really zero. Even FreeDos is making a lot more progress and has more potential for the future than syllable. And the reason why most of the developers left, is not because suddenly they didnt have any free-time, no, it was exclusively because of kaj, who started to insist on his ideas (even he is not a c/c++ developer). What is the result? Kaj has still his philosophical ideas, but without having done much in the last years. He hopes, that 3'rd party stuff will work on syllable without too much work needed. Anyway in any case, the GUI bindings need to be done by syllable, and nobody is there to do that job. Even Haiku, which doenst put scripting as a priority has now scripting languages on haiku with gui bindings. Syllable does not, even the ideas of kaj to incorporate rebol in syllable are dated back to the year 2007 (or perhaps 2008). After nearly 4-5 years the results are nearly zero.

I don't recall every committing any significant patches from you, cipri.



Excuse me?

True on my end... Kaj can be a real PITA to deal with. He believes he is right all the time and I had to get away from that situation. Sorry, Vanders... that is the truth!

Hi Rick! Oh I'm not arguing that what cipri said was untrue in all cases, but I'm getting quiet bored of cipri claiming to be an authority on all things Syllable.

As a reader of OSnews and as someone who a long time ago made some minor contributions to Syllable, I'd like to second this sentiment.

Cipri, it has over the last few years become very clear you don't think much of the current state and direction of Syllable. We all got the message. But really, the relentless hate-on you seem to have for Kaj is getting increasingly childish, and tiresome to read.

You've come to the conclusion Syllable isn't for you anymore long ago, and seem to focus most of your active participation on other projects. Perhaps it's high time to also move on emotionally, and leave your feud with (some of) the Syllable people behind.

I have no idea why people take my words as words of hate?
Yes, it's already a long time ago,so there is not even a little part of hate in me. I could even go with kaj to the pub to drink a cup of .... calm water :-).
Why don't you try to take my words as "pure information"?
It can happen that I make sometimes errors when I'm tired (and I also admit them), but in "as good as all" cases i say stuff that is really true.

Now I was starting posting here, when I saw someone bringing praise to the great development done by kaj and his "team".
I really wonder how someone can praise kaj, when in fact the development of syllable is nearly constantly zero in the last years.
Why not take a look first at the source-code that changed in the last years and then say your opinion. Even if you are blind you can see that the syllable development in the last years is nearly 0, so how can you get the idea to start praising kaj?

I really wonder how kaj say "thanks" when somebody is praising him for the great development he did, when in fact kaj knows that he did as good as nothing related to real OS development.
I would really feel ashamed, how he can even say proudly "thanks", i really dont understand.

I have the impression that Kaj (and partially also Vanders) refused to see the reality.
One of that realities was that the majority of the syllable developers didnt like the syllable server (based on linux) which kaj brought inside syllable more or less through the backdoor.
There are more reason why the majority of the syllable developers left (officially and inofficially) or are now very silent. And one of the reason was also the existence of "syllable server". It's not the only reason, just one of more, but it is one too.

I guess Kaj will now feel offended, but I really recommand him to contact all syllable developers and all ex-syllable-delevopers and ask them about their honest feelings/sentiments/opinion related to the syllable server, and ask them, how much they love it.
Of course he will not do that, perhaps he is afraid of the truth, and prefers to lie himself.

So, that was just a side-note, that is off-topic.
Now let us do something on-topic, and praise Kaj for bringing Syllable to new heights :-))

Thank you Kaj, for bringing Syllable under your leadership to new heights, that haven't been reached before.

Now that I think that syllable is the successor of atheos, and that can be interpreted as kaj being the successor of Kurt Skauen.

What an evolution at the scale of the leadership of the OS.
Who's next? Mikey Mouse?
( sorry for that joke, but I really like to make jokes :-) )

Syllable is not a hate-based project - at least, not any more. We have no place for people who hate Linux, not for people who hate REBOL, not even for people who hate Haiku. And for better or for worse, we have no place for people who hate me.

Well, when I see your name above a comment I immediately associate it with long, rant-ish and repetitive posts, where you often concentrate on one person's failings. I realise that's a generalisation, but it *is* the first thing that comes up. And to be frank, most names here come up completely blank for me.

Let's take a step back, and look at the comments from your profile. Most of them are for Syllable-related articles, and fairly negative. Also the negativeness revolves around marginalising new developments of Syllable (even if they are small), belittling Kaj's abilities, or even cornering Vanders here on the forum and demand explanations.

That really sounds to me like someone who still has a bone to pick.


To be honest, you haven't convinced me. But I hope I am wrong. And anyway, my personal opinion in that doesn't matter much anyway.


Reading back those previous comments of yours in Syllable-related threads, I sense a lot of bitterness and resentment in them. I'm not saying there are no true facts or valid opinions at all in your comments, but your comments are certainly heavily coloured by your negative experience with the community. So I don't feel I can take your comments on this subject as "pure information".


That's only human, but then my suggestion is to reconsider the possibility that Syllable still makes you more on edge than you'd like, and to reflect a little longer on your Syllable-related posts. I regularly leave forum posts alone for an hour after writing them, only submitting (or scrapping!) them after another re-read.

There are plenty of reasons why it can be difficult to interpret the nuances and true intentions of posts on the Internet, that also goes for yours *and* mine. I hope I haven't offended you with this one; my main motive here was to give you some insight into why *I* "take [your] words as words of hate".

Without getting into the rest of your comment, the answer is yes. Yes they are. XML is a terrible, complicated mess. It was in the right place at the right time (thank you, SOAP...) but that doesn't make it the best solution for everything.

Yeah, but its a popular solution for many things. Having the ability to interact with popular interchange languages like XML is a necessary evil. Like speaking in English.

+1 - absolutely spot on.

XML isn't a terribly complicated mess at all. XML is actually a really simple mark up definition language. What is terribly complicated is the way in which some developers believe it is the answer for all problems. Having worked on a product that uses it for some horribly bastardised scripting language (nothing but XML, no other script) - THAT is a horribly overly complicated mess. XML in general is actually simple.

Modding yourself up, eh?

JSON and YAML are both much more simple than XML for simple data exchange, and yes, XML alone may be simple enough (although still more complex than JSON) but once you start bolting on all the related standards and schemas you're into a sticky quagmire.



Quite. There are very few cases where the features of XML are really required. Simple data exchange is not one of them.

Uhm, if you want to standardize fully on "Industry standard", use Windows and .NET..
Those who works on alternate OS are not satisfied with current "industry standards" so this is a poor argument.

Well no - the CIL and CLR are an industry standard - that is not what Microsoft supplies per se. You can use the CLR without the full Microsoft platform. But that is another discussion.



Ah, cool. So they don't need to write any C or C++ in their OS then - because they are industry Standards... and so is Assembler... hmmm..

Boolean algebra would beg to differ.

Anyway, you're welcome to port .Net to Syllable. In fact, I ported part of GNU Portable .Net in the very early years of Syllable. But we found something better.

Well, there are some OSs which are written in languages other than C or C++, don't you know?

Don't blame REBOL as a language for eventually wrong decision of Syllable team members!

well no, you blame the developers for using something unsuitable, obviously. The IT industry is littered with cool ideas that didn't cut the mustard....

Who should port it? On syllable there are no active developers. Perhaps you can find one or two that consider themself developers after they managed to compile a comand line application by running the "make" command.
There are even not developers that solve the most simple bugs, that would need just a few lines of code.
Syllable 0.6.6 is already more than 2 years old, and their last development build is also about 2 years old. Compare it with Haiku that has every day a few development builds.

Those people, whom you are referring, have never been involved in your story with Syllable, Kaj or anything else, keep them apart your bitterness. Thank you in advance.

Webster (the Syllable web browser) is built around Webkit, but the port is incomplete in several places and it's out of date now in any case.

these forums is ruthless

70,80 kg for a child? That's not something to be proud of. 10 kg is a bit on the emancipated anorexic side as well. Something more like 22 kg sounds better to me for a generic child of generic child age.

you didnt get the idea. Light doesnt mean automatically it's great. Vandam is heavy, but instead full of muscles, which you can use to do work. The child has 10 kg, but mostly fat.

Syllable misses really a lot of things. It's light, but it also doesnt offer much. It has a "leight" api, but which instead is very very uncomplete and very buggy.
Even if you do something simple you come across it's liminations and bugs, and if you try to do something more complex the bugs become more and more obvious.

The syllable community has come to the conglusion that it even has no sense to report bugs, because even the most trivial ones are not solved, even they have been repetedly reported over the years.
It's really in such a funny situation, that you could think that it's bug-free if you look how often bug reports are done. It seems like nobody has anything to complain about. But in fact most people dont care anymore, and so bugs are not reported. Or just very rarely by newbies which are new and dont know yet, that the project is know alredy for some years mroe or less in a pause-periode. Most of the devs / ex-devs are expecting it to die, a new version 0.6.7 is not expected by them to come out anytime soon.

No, you didn't get what I was saying. 10 kg on a child is not enough weight. No one would brag that their 8 year old was 10 kg.He would be considered malnourished, or anorexic. You chose bad numbers for your analogy. Its like my physics books that had problems where the solution was that a swimmer had an average speed of 60 kph in a swimming pool. That could never happen and gets in the way of the lesson that is trying to be taught.

Maybe Syllable has a very skinny API?

Ok, this is becoming a lot more pedantic than I thought. I understand Syllable is lightweight. Syllable developers and users think this is a good thing. If you were trying to help people understand that something that some people think is a good thing may not be a good thing, you would have to compare it to a more easily understood scenario where something may look good if only viewed with a narrow perspective, but actually looks bad upon further inspection. My complaint about the numbers used, is that in the analogy syllable's counterpart never looks good when viewed from any single aspect. A 10 kg child is not something anyone would brag about. Just change Syllable's kid's mass to 22 kg and the other os kids mass to 44 kg and the analogy works a lot better.

Small pet peeve of mine: when people do analogies backwards such that it works better in reverse. as in
The colors black is actually a darker color to most people than white in much the same was as Helium becomes a Bose-Einstein condensate under lower pressure for most temperatures than Hydrogen.

10 kg for a 2 year old is OK.

Guess it depends on your definition of child. A two year old is a toddler 'round here parts. If that was the target age, then the 70,80 kg child is even more off the mark.

I think you've been misunderstanding the original post. It talked about a comparison people would make between Kaj's 2 year old child and a grown-up.

(I thought he was referring to Jean-Claude Van Damme, even though he weighs way more than 80kg..!)

Oh... I see. My brain obviously wasn't reading that right. He also says two year old. Missed that too. Jean Claude VanDamn would make more sense.

Still a bad analogy. Jean Claude is quite possible the worst actor in history, he should never be referred to as a positive in a an analogy. He makes Keanu look like Brando.

Hang in there. It won't always be like this.

I agree with Dee... Cipri, you are a great guy but it is time to move on. The rest of us have. The past is the past. Good luck to Syllable in its endeavors. I hope Kaj finds people that will listen to his "wisdom and expertise" and all is well. Time heals all wounds Cipri

The interview is about that. Anything specific you want to know?

How about this. If you could look ahead to 1.0 release notes for Syllable, what might they look like?

That's pretty much exactly what the interviewer asked, so I'll refer you there.

Thom:


We had a project consisting of about 3 developers and now there is one. All this happened a long time ago.

Some things are worth fighting for, even if you can't win. If I fight for Syllable I'm being blamed, and if I don't fight for Syllable I'm being blamed, so I might as well do what I feel like doing myself.

The interview explains why this is not the highest priority for the project.

Yes, that strategy of kaj, to make publicity and hope developers will come who he can command and tell them what to do.
Just look how many "conferences" kaj made/gave in the last years. Every year he makes summer/winter/whatever conferences.
For that things he has time (and money), but for learning c++ and doing some real developement for syllable he doesnt have time.

Yes, there are also other companies that have that strategy to make a lot of publicity to their bad products and hoping people will buy it.
It seems Kaj tries something similar.
You still didnt notice that doesnt work? In general real developers are not stupid, and you can not fool them with empty (philosophical) words/ideeas.

Syllable is in such a situation that even FreeDos has a more bright future. (Freedos is doing active development, and they have more developers)

So, if you want to have succes , you will need to concentrate on real and "own" (and not 3'rd party) development.
The past (few years) have shown that it's a dead end if you concentrate on publicity instead, and hoping that a very skilled developer (and naive enough, not to see the low potential syllable has) will appear and you will be able to command him, and to implement kaj ideeas.

Edited 2011-09-05 12:09 UTC