Slashdot Mirror

KDE 4.1 has completely removed the ability to put files or icons on the desktop. That doesn't really sound like "You can do it this way, but you can also configure your own way" to me...

Amongst all the bug fixes, they added a new feature to the Address Book that lets you sync your contacts with Gmail now.

http://googlemac.blogspot.com/2008/05/mac-os-x-1053-sync-google-contacts.html

Desktop icons were deprecated in favor of a folder view applet, that you can have on your desktop, so you can still have desktop icons on your desktop via the applet.

From Aaron Seigo's blog:

"Hey!" I hear you say, "I see icons on that desktop!" That's quite right. (And, I must say, you are quite observant today. ;) So what was a mumbling about earlier then when I said the icons were gone?

Well, we now have a folder view applet courtesy of Frederik Höglund. It can view any folder you want, including the desktop folder. You can also set a filter, making it possible to, for instance, view just images or whatever. It uses KIO so you can view remote folders as well. You can drag items to and from it, delete files, scroll, etc. It lines everything up in a nice grid and uses the same drawing routines that Dolphin, Konqueror, KRunner and others use from kdelibs for the icons.

As you can see they didn't get rid of desktop icons, they made having desktop icons BETTER.

Image of icons on the desktop via the applet Original Blog Post

Thank you. I started investigating the housing issues facing us back in 2005 when my wife and I were considering moving up in home. Needless to say, we were floored by the price increases in our city since we bought our first home in 2001.

Two great places for reading up on and discussing housing, mortgage, and credit related issues are:

• The Housing Bubble Blog, and
• Calculated Risk

Is this is the release that has no more desktop icons?

Um, NAR was really proud of the fact that they got this legislation passed. It had *nothing* to do with fraud - it had everything to do with people cutting into their commissions by offering rebates.

http://rerclaw.blogspot.com/2007/06/tennessee-governor-signs-anti-rebate.html

Note that "TAR" is the TN version of NAR.

I don't think you should generalize based on ONE trial. Especially one that even the Judge has recognized was conducted in a flawed manner.

Hmmm I was thinking of a different Lala if we're talking about ball licking.

In an ironic twist, most articles on Wikipedia are also within 6 clicks of Kevin Bacon's article!

Enjoy a nice game of WikiBacon!

Link is NOT to my blog

Average unemployment during the Bush administration is lower (better) than average unemployment during the Clinton administration.

Source data: http://www.miseryindex.us/urbymonth.asp

Cesar Noragueda

We in Denmark cannot figure out why you are even bothering to hold
an election.

      On one side, you have a bitch who is a lawyer, married to a
lawyer, and a lawyer who is married to a bitch who is a lawyer.

      On the other side, you have a true war hero married to a woman
with a huge chest who owns a beer distributorship.

      Is there a contest here?

They have released a limited trial of application hosting. Only python at the moment - its called the Google App Engine and its like a free (for limited use) version of Amazon's EC2 Cloud.

• Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement - Fact Sheet
• What is the Proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)?
• "ACTA" - a New Plurilateral Policy Platform

There have been so many great UI innovations in the last decade, this seems pretty niche to me...

Better that than copying Windows 3.1. Seriously, this may have been meant as humorous but I'm starting to get frustrated. Windows 95 is one of the very few times that Microsoft got things indisputably right. Yet despite that, it seems that everyone is determined to redesign this classic formula in an attempt to making things more usable, only I haven't seen anyone actually get it right. I'm using KDE right now, since it seems they're the ones least infected with this "Let's change everything for the sake of seeming fresh and original!" virus (seems to have started with Microsoft and spread out from there), but I'm sceptical about KDE 4. I know I'll probably use it someday, but I'm scared that they're going to fuck it up and the best desktop environment will end up losing a lot of its lead.

I'm sure there's a user interface revolution on the scale of Windows 95 out there somewhere, I'm just hoping we don't have to wade through too much more crap before someone finds it.

The poster equates Web 2.0 to "java, shockwave, and ads" and gets modded as insightful? Riiiiight.

Even if you were only focused on the technical aspects of Web 2.0, you would realize that these so-called Web 2.0 sites used AJAX and neither java nor shockwave. An even more relevant description of web 2.0 would include such terms as collective intelligence, user generated content, or the long tail.

The poster equates Web 2.0 to "java, shockwave, and ads" and gets modded as insightful? Riiiiight.

Even if you were only focused on the technical aspects of Web 2.0, you would realize that these so-called Web 2.0 sites used AJAX and neither java nor shockwave. An even more relevant description of web 2.0 would include such terms as collective intelligence, user generated content, or the long tail.

The poster equates Web 2.0 to "java, shockwave, and ads" and gets modded as insightful? Riiiiight.

Even if you were only focused on the technical aspects of Web 2.0, you would realize that these so-called Web 2.0 sites used AJAX and neither java nor shockwave. An even more relevant description of web 2.0 would include such terms as collective intelligence, user generated content, or the long tail.

Hypercard was just a bunch of cards with text, that's all! It died because it was lame! http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com/

I don't have such a problem because I refuse to judge the situation we face by just one case. When I think of all the people the RIAA harasses and gets loads of money from regarding alleged non-commercial infringement (consider the many informative stories promoted here by NewYorkCountryLawyer), I became convinced that the RIAA was a proponent and beneficiary of going too far, and I was also convinced that the NET Act is another step of metaphorically swatting flies with sledgehammers.

The length of copyright is hardly "immaterial" because that's another mechanism by which the organizations that paid for the NET Act withhold contributing to the public domain in exchange for their monopoly power; another way they ripoff the public. The DMCA end-run around expiring copyright is another tool by which they can contribute to culture only on their terms (remember that the while the work published on a home recording may be in the public domain, a copy prevention scheme which prevents full access to that work never expires). Exceptions are few in number, need to be applied for, hard to apply for, and eventually expire. That we all can leverage these powers doesn't begin to make up for the loss to cultural enrichment and observance of a bargain that copyright is supposed to represent. And as to enforcement: How many of our freedoms will we end up giving up so that they can enforce these new laws? I'm guessing the stories about this haven't reached the mainstream media enough to be pointed to by /. yet.

When I consider the severe imbalance of benefit and punishment, I find it hard to agree with your conclusions that the RIAA (and their corporate clientele) has a point here. When the corporate copyright holders violate law they face no real punishment. Wasn't Microsoft found guilty of copyright infringement (commercial, at that) in France some years back? I don't recall a big deal being made of this in the US (the same country that is currently being shamed by the fruits of EU's antitrust actions against Microsoft). Some years ago in the New York Times I recall reading a story involving the "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" movie soundtrack which had apparently been commercially produced and distributed without finding one of the people owed royalties resulting, initially, in unjust enrichment for the publishers (later the publishers chanced to find him and paid him). I have a hard time believing those publishers would get anywhere near the same punishment "Dextro" got (and you can't imprison a corporation for they have no bodies to incarcerate and no souls to save, as a wise man pointed out). UMG, an RIAA member, was recently discussed on /. when "I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property" wrote about how UMG "had no trouble with Jammie Thomas being ordered to pay $222k, some 13,214 times the actual costs, they [UMG] thought that being ordered to pay ten times the actual damages in Bridgeport v. Justin Combs was just too much". NewYorkCountryLawyer calculated "the Jammie Thomas award bore a ratio to actual damages of 26,428:1".

here http://atomic-motor.blogspot.com/

As I contemplated when AT&T started saying they want to fight piracy on the wire, the most effective way is for the ISP to cooperate with the MPAA, where the MPAA gives a graph of "These people are exchaning a large copyrighted file, block it".

If ISPs move in that direction, this defense won't help, and thats probably the bigger threat for blocking P2P piracy, as there are always countries of convienece to set up piratebay like operations.

I agree. It looks quite cool but when something tries to be all things to all men, it normally fail in some areas.

Sean J Connolly
Visit My Blog
Find me on FaceBook

Actually, he started with no lawyer, then Public Citizen gave him some help. I found this information in a copyright blog by one of Google's lawyers mentioned further down in the responses to this article.

I posted a blog entry with some pictures: http://camaelon.blogspot.com/2008/05/iliad-irex-pictures.html and a previous post about the iliad and other stuff: http://camaelon.blogspot.com/2008/04/iliad-irex-note-taking-and-hand-writing.html The Mobile Read forums are also pretty informative. On the capacity to annotate pdf, I think that's one of the great use case of the iliad -- you can easily read & annotate on the iliad, then transfert back the PDF+annotations, and merge them in a new PDF -- or even only create a PDF with annotated pages.

I posted a blog entry with some pictures: http://camaelon.blogspot.com/2008/05/iliad-irex-pictures.html and a previous post about the iliad and other stuff: http://camaelon.blogspot.com/2008/04/iliad-irex-note-taking-and-hand-writing.html The Mobile Read forums are also pretty informative. On the capacity to annotate pdf, I think that's one of the great use case of the iliad -- you can easily read & annotate on the iliad, then transfert back the PDF+annotations, and merge them in a new PDF -- or even only create a PDF with annotated pages.

Whitelisting is a good idea, as Stewart suggests, but honestly I don't agree with him. You need antivirus software. And on that, free antiviruses aren't as good as paid ones. I actually tried out almost all the major brands -- free and paid -- and that's the verdict I arrived at. (Here's my reviews: http://avscan.blogspot.com/ )

Fraud watches aren't 100% security from credit fraud also. A fraud watch is actually voluntary. It means that the credit issuer should be careful and double-check whether a certain application is really from the person it claims to be from. However, some issuers ignore the fraud watches and will issue the credit anyway.

The best protection is freezing your credit. That way, no one can check your credit or add new lines of credit. If you want to do anything involving your credit (open a new credit card, get a loan, get a background check), you would then need to unfreeze your credit and refreeze it when the activity was completed. Unfortunately, this costs $5 per action per agency per person. So if a husband and wife want to freeze their credit, it is $5 * 3 (credit agencies) * 2 (people), or $30. If they then want to unfreeze their credit, get a car load, and then refreeze their credit, it would cost $60.

There was a bill awhile back that would have made this free, but the credit industry lobbyists got it killed. After all, if you freeze your credit then you can't sign up for a new credit card at the checkout line of a store to get 10% off your purchase. And that means that you are less likely to have lots of credit card debt interest to pay off. And that means less profits for them.

As far as ID theft is concerned, they honestly don't care. If your identity gets stolen, it's your problem. You need to spend the time and money to prove to them that something went wrong. Any losses due to cards issued during ID theft are written off (or sent to a collection agency to hassle the ID theft victim and further negatively impact their credit rating).

Todd Davis is just lucky that he wasn't a victim of Criminal Identity Theft.

This blog entry by William Patry adds quite a bit of background.

Patry is Senior Copyright Counsel for Google.

Richard Stallman

Calculated Risk believes this is a case where S&P decided not to believe their own models and tweaked them to match the results derived by Moody's, which spit out the wrong results in the first place. Call it bug-compatibility, but it's also clear that there were plenty of financial incentives at the time for the rating agencies to deliver results in step with their peers lest they lose out on lucrative "second opinion" business.

This is how the author makes his living - everyone has to support themselves somehow, you know. If he gave his insights away for free, he wouldn't have nearly as much time to devote to his specialty as he does.

I wrote a diary on k5 a few years back which referenced Shadow Stats, which linked to an interview that links to a fuller interview of John Williams, the guy behind the Shadow Stats site.

My impression is that while Mr. Williams is quite right about the government mangling the statistics, he's wrong about the long-term implications (inflation forevermore). I like Mish of the Global Economic Analysis blog's take: he's been saying for some time that the end-game of current economic developments is massive deflation, as all the loans in the economy go bad one at a time, in a sort of cascading system failure. We're now seeing the deflation prediction come to pass - while Gas & food are skyrocketing, other assets (housing, etc) and prices are dropping fast, as homeowners and businesses struggle to find buyers at any price. This is what you'd expect if the amount of money available in the economy (read: available for the everyday working Joe to spend - the trust fund manager who made $1billion last year doesn't count) was decreasing.

For the record, I don't subscribe to Mr. Williams' newsletter - much too poor for that right now.

This entry at Calculated Risk openly wonders if Moody's jiggered its model expressly so that it would line up with whatever the Standard&Poors ratings were.

Personally, I'm concerned this revelation will result in a concerted effort to blame the whole mess on a computer error, rather than the profoundly bad judgment exhibited by fund managers and investment banks. Expect some hapless programmer to be located and pilloried.

Schwab

i need to be able to carry things like groceries.

Gee. It's too bad there aren't working solutions to this problem.

Maybe patients can bolster privacy by inserting legal terms of access (like an end-user license agreement) into the content of their electronic medical records. The idea is not legal advice, just something to think about. --Ben -- Sample terms for public discussion: http://hack-igations.blogspot.com/2008/02/some-fear-law-will-not-accord-adequate.html

Maybe patients can bolster privacy by inserting legal terms of access (like an end-user license agreement) into the content of their electronic medical records. The idea is not legal advice, just something to think about. --Ben -- Sample terms for public discussion: http://hack-igations.blogspot.com/2008/02/some-fear-law-will-not-accord-adequate.html

I believe this would be relevant http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2008/05/google-health-privacy-and-hipaa.html

I found this http://grandstreamdreams.blogspot.com/2008/04/taming-avg-free-version-8.html useful to get AVG8 Free to not always signal a red exclamation mark when noting was wrong.

UAC is a mistake. Some how crap like this still gets installed in Vista under a limited user, with no UAC or popups asking admin rights to install. These nasties fill up in the registry and in the windows system32 directory.

As a UK "citizen" I totally agree with you. England has sleepwalked into something akin to post war East Germany.

"Oh but stop moaning, there are twelve kinds of butter in the supermarket".

Pah, Viz comics bottom inspectors are looking more like prophecy every day !

For more about my relatively uneventful earthquake experience in this city which saw almost no damage in or around the CBD, you can check out the blog I keep for my family members, though it's unaccessible from China:

Seriously, The Path Intelligence guys use, or at least got started using, the GNU Radio platform(which, incidentally, is really really cool and you ought to check out). http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/06/70933?currentPage=2 http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6124/1637/1600/path_intelligence.jpg http://handcircus.blogspot.com/2006/06/my-brother-in-wired.html

We will come to encounter robots that interact with us in more ways than we can imagine. That interaction will be subject to the rule of law. One method for ruling robots will be legal contracts. --Ben

I think I just saw this in a webcomic.

As the article mentions Google ended up funding a number of Gaming projects. There are a total of 7 game projects and 5 game related projects for a total of over 40 slots.

The following game projects have been accepted,

• Battle for Wesnoth (projects), a very cool turn based strategy game in the theme of Heroes of Might and Magic.
• BZFlag (projects), the classic tank first person shooter game. One of the oldest open source games around!
• Linden Lab (projects), the makers of Second Life the largest "almost game like" online universe.
• ScummVM (projects), an engine which lets you play all the classic Lucas Arts games and many more!
• Thousand Parsec (projects), a framework for building 4x empire building games. Been around since 2001 and growing quickly.
• Tux4Kids (projects), a group of multi-platform open source educational games for children.
• WorldForge (projects), one of the original open source MMORPG which has even been mentioned on Slashdot multiple times (original called Altima).

My own project Thousand Parsec got 8 slots for a number of critical features. One of the coolest is a 3d client, which should make the games much more interesting to look at.

We will also finally have a few more interesting games to actually play, including a clone of Risk in Space and a very interesting game called DroneSec. Finally, we should have some opponents for you to play against as 2 AI clients being developed for our premier RFTS ruleset.