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One poster mentioned software for star gazing. Go with kstars by Jason Harris et al. Cool graphics, neat features, and the next version will control your telescope for you (if your telescope supports this, of course, unless your computer has SkyNet support). Part of the KDE desktop.

What fooling around with telescopes has taught me is how unbelievably limited our general education is. Consider yourself well educated? Well then. Go out and look up at the Moon tonight -- you've seen it hundreds, thousands of times, right? Now name the features. Which is the Sea of Tranquility? Where is Tycho (now that is really easy)? Even worse are the stars: Yes, you can find the Polar Star (Australians and Neu Zealanders are excused), but then? Name ten stars, any ten stars.

If you are anything like me, you know the different classes of Quake II monsters better than the Moon. Somewhere, somehow, that bothers me; but then maybe I've just been staying up too late at night...

Native KDE Info

On Linux I've had a ton of success using Valgrind to find memory errors. It can identify bad memory reads, writes, uninitialized values, etc. during runtime. Figuring out what is causing those errors is up to you, however. It doesn't substitute for intelligence but it helps narrow the search incredibly.

Afaik kopete will support MSNP9 protocol ( its in the works ) . So Kopete users will be able to use Msn after the ban too.

what on earth are you talking about??? how in any way shape or form is shlashdot the biggest advocate of linux? how is linux window's main competition? for one thing, linux still has a smaller desktop usage percentage than apple. secondly, in the server market -- doesn't BSD have the upperhand? and third of all, slashdot has microsoft advertisements in their pages. this is not he future of my desktop. this is nopt he future of ANY desktop. thsi is the furture of crappy proprietary software that it mostly used for controlling the user's experience. if i want a different/better desktop i already got mine

Canopy Group *does not* own TrolTech.

Read...

Me

They have but 5.7% stake in the company. Canopy does technically control SCO, on the other hand. So, who's the real enemy here? Canopy, or SCO?

The gnome virus must be destroyed. PLease install linux anti virus today!

Let's start with the windowing environment, since that is the first thing users will notice. While both KDE and GNOME are mature, stable, and accepted as IEEE standards, Apple has elected to use neither. In fact, they don't even use X at all! Their display system is a proprietary, closed-source system called Quartz Extreme. In addition to the moral issues involved with closed software, this precludes the user from running X apps. There is an untested and alpha-quality X11 emulation layer available for download, but it is emulation, so programs will be slow. Does this sound like a standards-based system to you?

Looking under the hood, it gets worse. While all other *nixes use standard ELF binaries, Darwin (Apple's name for their proprietary "Unix" kernel) does not. It uses Mach-O, an unproven format that is proprietary to Apple. The moribund FreeBSD, off which OS X is based, uses ELF, so clearly Apple went to the extra effort of "switching" (heh) simply to break compatibility. With ELF, users would be able to run most of their Lunix apps; with Mach-O this is impossible. Additionally, Apple has moved most configuration info fromhuman readable text files into a proprietary database called "NetInfo", which is much like the Windows registry we all loathe. Why? These are only a few of the ways that Apple has deliberately broken compatibility with other systems, presumably in order to lock users in to expensive Mac hardware.

When we factor in the threat to users' civil liberties that is posed by the DRM included to support the iTunes Music Store (do you really think it will end there?) it is obvious that real *nix gurus should give OS X a wide berth. Caveat emptor.

Let's start with the windowing environment, since that is the first thing users will notice. While both KDE and GNOME are mature, stable, and accepted as IEEE standards, Apple has elected to use neither. In fact, they don't even use X at all! Their display system is a proprietary, closed-source system called Quartz Extreme. In addition to the moral issues involved with closed software, this precludes the user from running X apps. There is an untested and alpha-quality X11 emulation layer available for download, but it is emulation, so programs will be slow. Does this sound like a standards-based system to you?

Looking under the hood, it gets worse. While all other *nixes use standard ELF binaries, Darwin (Apple's name for their proprietary "Unix" kernel) does not. It uses Mach-O, an unproven format that is proprietary to Apple. The moribund FreeBSD, off which OS X is based, uses ELF, so clearly Apple went to the extra effort of "switching" (heh) simply to break compatibility. With ELF, users would be able to run most of their Lunix apps; with Mach-O this is impossible. Additionally, Apple has moved most configuration info fromhuman readable text files into a proprietary database called "NetInfo", which is much like the Windows registry we all loathe. Why? These are only a few of the ways that Apple has deliberately broken compatibility with other systems, presumably in order to lock users in to expensive Mac hardware.

When we factor in the threat to users' civil liberties that is posed by the DRM included to support the iTunes Music Store (do you really think it will end there?) it is obvious that real *nix gurus should give OS X a wide berth. Caveat emptor.

Let's start with the windowing environment, since that is the first thing users will notice. While both KDE and GNOME are mature, stable, and accepted as IEEE standards, Apple has elected to use neither. In fact, they don't even use X at all! Their display system is a proprietary, closed-source system called Quartz Extreme. In addition to the moral issues involved with closed software, this precludes the user from running X apps. There is an untested and alpha-quality X11 emulation layer available for download, but it is emulation, so programs will be slow. Does this sound like a standards-based system to you?

Looking under the hood, it gets worse. While all other *nixes use standard ELF binaries, Darwin (Apple's name for their proprietary "Unix" kernel) does not. It uses Mach-O, an unproven format that is proprietary to Apple. The moribund FreeBSD, off which OS X is based, uses ELF, so clearly Apple went to the extra effort of "switching" (heh) simply to break compatibility. With ELF, users would be able to run most of their Lunix apps; with Mach-O this is impossible. Additionally, Apple has moved most configuration info fromhuman readable text files into a proprietary database called "NetInfo", which is much like the Windows registry we all loathe. Why? These are only a few of the ways that Apple has deliberately broken compatibility with other systems, presumably in order to lock users in to expensive Mac hardware.

When we factor in the threat to users' civil liberties that is posed by the DRM included to support the iTunes Music Store (do you really think it will end there?) it is obvious that real *nix gurus should give OS X a wide berth. Caveat emptor.

Every single app that I would want to run is already available and runs under Linux natively. For example:

mozilla, neverwinter nights(w/ expansion pack), gcc, gdb, make, gnuplot, bc, gimp, icebreaker, valgrind, electric fence, Crossfire, LyX, angband, Nethack (falcon's eye), vim, XFree86, pekwm and netpbm.

There are few apps that I run that are not on that list. Really, if you think about it. On any computer system the top 90% of the apps you run could probably be counted on one hand.

But I'm one of those unusual people who has his laser printer working in Linux and only has a windows box to test the software I write. I compile the windows version on Linux of course. (using these scripts to build the cross compiler).

Granted but if you're throwing user into a GUI like KDE you can spawn KDE in lockdown mode and maintain the same level of restriction. However, this still won't prevent non-KDE compliant apps from launching programs. If one of your "approved" apps in a restricted session can be used to fork a program and your user has execute privs on a writable directory, then by definition, it's gonna be possible to run the file. Likewise, if I rename msblast32.exe to runitbaby.exe, it's gonna be possible to run it on Win as well. Neither the original AD solution or the *NIX example are 100% idiot proof but both will prevent the "auto" running of the worm.

http://docs.kde.org/en/3.1/kdebase/konqueror/enhan ced-browsing.html

As a true hacker, RMS despised passwords, and was proud of the fact that the computers he was paid to maintain did not use them.

In this interview on KDE's site, RMS admits that he was forced to use passwords on his systems after a few bad experiences.

HY: In a lecture, you mentioned that you didn't use passwords, and had no security for your computer.

RMS: Uh-huh. Security might make sense with banks and military facilities, but in a computer lab, that is a sign of a social breakdown.

HY: (!!!) Social Breakdown?!?!!

RMS: Yes. It's like curing the symptom and worsening the disease. The disease here are the young people who are cut off from warmth and anything really worthwhile, who have nothing on their hands that to rebel and get attention by sneaking into other peoples system. But then the attention that they get from this is one of total hate and hostility. Security sends out that message of hostility, and I don't want to be on either side of it.

HY: So, you still don't have security?

RMS: I regret to say that we had to. There was this one person who repeatedly erased our files and there was no choice. So we made a gateway, a login server. But since I thought that this was such a sad thing, I thought I should suffer more from it so I can't log in on that server.

This post has been automagically generated by the FirstPostCore Robot.

FirstPostCore Robot uses technology from Apple, primarily WebCore. WebCore is an open source product, which is, in turn, based off the KHTML library from the fine people working on the KDE project.

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• GNOME Human Interface Guidelines
• KDE User Interface Guidelines
• From Apple, the Aqua Human Interface Guidelines and the pre-Aqua HIG

Let's start with the windowing environment, since that is the first thing users will notice. While both KDE and GNOME are mature, stable, and accepted as IEEE standards, Apple has elected to use neither. In fact, they don't even use X at all! Their display system is a proprietary, closed-source system called Quartz Extreme. In addition to the moral issues involved with closed software, this precludes the user from running X apps. There is an untested and alpha-quality X11 emulation layer available for download, but it is emulation, so programs will be slow. Does this sound like a standards-based system to you?

Looking under the hood, it gets worse. While all other *nixes use standard ELF binaries, Darwin (Apple's name for their proprietary "Unix" kernel) does not. It uses Mach-O, an unproven format that is proprietary to Apple. The moribund FreeBSD, off which OS X is based, uses ELF, so clearly Apple went to the extra effort of "switching" (heh) simply to break compatibility. With ELF, users would be able to run most of their Lunix apps; with Mach-O this is impossible. Additionally, Apple has moved most configuration info fromhuman readable text files into a proprietary database called "NetInfo", which is much like the Windows registry we all loathe. Why? These are only a few of the ways that Apple has deliberately broken compatibility with other systems, presumably in order to lock users in to expensive Mac hardware.

When we factor in the threat to users' civil liberties that is posed by the DRM included to support the iTunes Music Store (do you really think it will end there?) it is obvious that real *nix gurus should give OS X a wide berth. Caveat emptor.

Let's start with the windowing environment, since that is the first thing users will notice. While both KDE and GNOME are mature, stable, and accepted as IEEE standards, Apple has elected to use neither. In fact, they don't even use X at all! Their display system is a proprietary, closed-source system called Quartz Extreme. In addition to the moral issues involved with closed software, this precludes the user from running X apps. There is an untested and alpha-quality X11 emulation layer available for download, but it is emulation, so programs will be slow. Does this sound like a standards-based system to you?

Looking under the hood, it gets worse. While all other *nixes use standard ELF binaries, Darwin (Apple's name for their proprietary "Unix" kernel) does not. It uses Mach-O, an unproven format that is proprietary to Apple. The moribund FreeBSD, off which OS X is based, uses ELF, so clearly Apple went to the extra effort of "switching" (heh) simply to break compatibility. With ELF, users would be able to run most of their Lunix apps; with Mach-O this is impossible. Additionally, Apple has moved most configuration info fromhuman readable text files into a proprietary database called "NetInfo", which is much like the Windows registry we all loathe. Why? These are only a few of the ways that Apple has deliberately broken compatibility with other systems, presumably in order to lock users in to expensive Mac hardware.

When we factor in the threat to users' civil liberties that is posed by the DRM included to support the iTunes Music Store (do you really think it will end there?) it is obvious that real *nix gurus should give OS X a wide berth. Caveat emptor.

Let's start with the windowing environment, since that is the first thing users will notice. While both KDE and GNOME are mature, stable, and accepted as IEEE standards, Apple has elected to use neither. In fact, they don't even use X at all! Their display system is a proprietary, closed-source system called Quartz Extreme. In addition to the moral issues involved with closed software, this precludes the user from running X apps. There is an untested and alpha-quality X11 emulation layer available for download, but it is emulation, so programs will be slow. Does this sound like a standards-based system to you?

Looking under the hood, it gets worse. While all other *nixes use standard ELF binaries, Darwin (Apple's name for their proprietary "Unix" kernel) does not. It uses Mach-O, an unproven format that is proprietary to Apple. The moribund FreeBSD, off which OS X is based, uses ELF, so clearly Apple went to the extra effort of "switching" (heh) simply to break compatibility. With ELF, users would be able to run most of their Lunix apps; with Mach-O this is impossible. Additionally, Apple has moved most configuration info fromhuman readable text files into a proprietary database called "NetInfo", which is much like the Windows registry we all loathe. Why? These are only a few of the ways that Apple has deliberately broken compatibility with other systems, presumably in order to lock users in to expensive Mac hardware.

When we factor in the threat to users' civil liberties that is posed by the DRM included to support the iTunes Music Store (do you really think it will end there?) it is obvious that real *nix gurus should give OS X a wide berth. Caveat emptor.

Let's start with the windowing environment, since that is the first thing users will notice. While both KDE and GNOME are mature, stable, and accepted as IEEE standards, Apple has elected to use neither. In fact, they don't even use X at all! Their display system is a proprietary, closed-source system called Quartz Extreme. In addition to the moral issues involved with closed software, this precludes the user from running X apps. There is an untested and alpha-quality X11 emulation layer available for download, but it is emulation, so programs will be slow. Does this sound like a standards-based system to you?

Looking under the hood, it gets worse. While all other *nixes use standard ELF binaries, Darwin (Apple's name for their proprietary "Unix" kernel) does not. It uses Mach-O, an unproven format that is proprietary to Apple. The moribund FreeBSD, off which OS X is based, uses ELF, so clearly Apple went to the extra effort of "switching" (heh) simply to break compatibility. With ELF, users would be able to run most of their Lunix apps; with Mach-O this is impossible. Additionally, Apple has moved most configuration info fromhuman readable text files into a proprietary database called "NetInfo", which is much like the Windows registry we all loathe. Why? These are only a few of the ways that Apple has deliberately broken compatibility with other systems, presumably in order to lock users in to expensive Mac hardware.

When we factor in the threat to users' civil liberties that is posed by the DRM included to support the iTunes Music Store (do you really think it will end there?) it is obvious that real *nix gurus should give OS X a wide berth. Caveat emptor.

Kroupware Server is an open source project that was funded by the German government - Bundesamt fur Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (Federal Agency of IT-Security).

This post has been automagically generated by the FirstPostCore Robot.

FirstPostCore Robot uses technology from Apple, primarily WebCore. WebCore is an open source product, which is, in turn, based off the KHTML library from the fine people working on the KDE project.

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Why would you need to compile kde twice in a week? A simple 'ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge kde' will get you your wonderful kde 3.1.3. Note that 3.1.3 has a nasty scrollbar bug in konqueror, so you might actually want to wait for 3.1.4 :). 3.1.3 is mainly only cosmetic facelifts and small bugfixes, I haven't seen much new functionality compared with 3.1.2.

Fight Microsoft where it hurts: ignore them.

But in the mean time,

• KDE 3.1.3 was released
• Gnome 2.2 was released
• Novell bough Ximian
• SuSe was granted Evaluation Assurance Level 2 (EAL2) of the Common Criteria
• Opera is gaining users

The results, really are in KDE;s favor and the people at ComputerWorld have spun it as pro Windoze as the could. There was no real difference in any of the meaures, besides the "apearance" survey. If one more person in the Windoze group had said it would taken more than a week to "master" the interface, the two groups would have been equal. The time difference was less than 10%, a difference that could easily be made up by one or two slow winoze users. To me, those kinds or results are identical. That's astounding when you consider that most of the users have been brainwashed by years of M$ use. As a test of migration, this says KDE is just as easy to move to as XP is, depite years of M$ "training", which has plauged users in the past. Only people begging for M$ advert money would describe the results as KDE not as easy to use as XP, which is what the spin implies.

That's a great result to get out of 45 minutes of computer use. Free software has made great improvements for total newbies to be able to jump right into a free desktop and do as well as users of the new Windoze GUI. I've thought things were this way since KDE 2, but it's nice to see a study of head to head competition with potential migrators.

For those who are running linux and want to track Mars (among other things), you can use KStars to do just that. KStars with telescope control can be checked out from the CVS now.

Here is a screenshot showing KStars tracking the moon.

For those who are running linux and want to track Mars (among other things), you can use KStars to do just that. KStars with telescope control can be checked out from the CVS now.

Here is a screenshot showing KStars tracking the moon.

haha youre funny, posting links to the gnome site, cleverly disguised as links to the KDE 3.1.3 update, which was, btw, released yesterday. Go troll elsewhere, moron.

Seven months already? mmm it seems to correlate with the increase in the amount of bugs resolved lately, see graph:

bugs.kde.org graph for product Konqueror

This is great news as I have eagerly awaited the 1.0 version of Kolab since its announcement last October. But in the months that have transpired others have also toiled to produce similar Exchange "killers". Today, we have three relatively new candidates that all claim to be Exchange killers. They are Kolab, SuSE OpenExchange, and the recently announced OpenGroupware.

So, the Open Source world has gone from a complete derth of groupware servers to a seeming abundance of groupware servers and all in just six to nine months. Or has it? How do these different groupware systems compare with each other with respect to features, performance, scalability, ease of use and ease of integration? More importantly, how do these same packages compare with Exchange itself with respect to the same metrics? It would be very nice to see an article that thoroughly reviews and benchmarks these for groupware systems. One final note, to those that may take on the challenge of doing such a review, Exchange is now at version 2003. A review that compares these systems with Exchange 5.5 will be worthless.

Hmm - that's not how I remember it from the time. The KDE developers encouraged users to spam the GIMP mailing list (see http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde&m=90221990129738&w=2). As if it were some particular obstructionism by the GIMP developers that prevented their code being linked with Qt. In the end the GIMP developers had to write a message (posted as a story on Slashdot, though I can't find it now) asking the KDE users to please stop spamming the list.

..and people are working on it. Seek KDE and I found this project on Sourceforge. I assume that you already turn on "large fonts" in Windows. Windows can theoretcally support font sizes that are larger, but the problem is that most applications aren't designed with varying font sizes in mind. Some applications already look messed up with the dpi setting that "large fonts" uses. It's a matter of poor UI design. People use fixed-size images in their programs and expect them to line up.

Kolab, the server :
Architecture paper :
Kontact, the KDE client
Bynari insight connector (not free)LA
Kolab server download :

Back in late 1997, I started a thread suggesting a mascot for KDE. For awhile there it looked like we were going to get a inanimate object:

http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde&m=88665769314384&w =2

I orginally wanted a real animal (like Tux is) but to throw the inanimate object ideas out I compromised in agreeing to imaginary animals. Later, after an informal design competition of sorts, we ended up with our choice, Konqi.

http://www.kde.org/stuff/

It's the only open source mascot I can say I've ever contributed to it's development.

Back in late 1997, I started a thread suggesting a mascot for KDE. For awhile there it looked like we were going to get a inanimate object:

http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde&m=88665769314384&w =2

I orginally wanted a real animal (like Tux is) but to throw the inanimate object ideas out I compromised in agreeing to imaginary animals. Later, after an informal design competition of sorts, we ended up with our choice, Konqi.

http://www.kde.org/stuff/

It's the only open source mascot I can say I've ever contributed to it's development.

(No, I didn't forget PNG. It has some technical and ideological advantages, but browser support is still, well, incomplete.)

So what's wrong with SVG plugins? They don't exploit the full power of SVG. It's not just a graphics format, it's an XML application. In other words, it's a markup language, just like HTML. A good XML-aware browser (something both IE and Mozilla pretend to be) shouldn't isolate SVG from the rest of the document.

Consider the gif-filled Slashdot page you're looking at right now. They have gotten rid of a lot of bitmaps (though the left hand clickbar looks slightly less cool as a result). But they still use some weird little bitmaps, plus a lot of weird tables and font kludges that are hard to maintain and tend to be browser dependent.

There's a simple fix: put SVG support in the browser (it is a W3C invention after all) and allow indiscriminate embedding of XHTML and SVG in each other. (Not to mention any other XML applications the browser happens to support.) The Mozilla people know this, but still consider SVG support experimental and non-standard. This has been the status quo for quite some time, and given AOL's abandonment of Gecko, is not likely to change.

Maybe if Mozilla had concentrated on basic technological improvements like this and less on eye-candy and silly features... well, AOL, would probably still have screwed them over. But I might feel bad about it.

KHTML looks to be the new leader in open-source web browsers. And their does seem to be a lot of interest in using the engine to render SVG. Alas, the KDE people still think of SVG as something you embed in something else.

I agree completely that browsers need to support SVG, and until this is more advanced, tools like the one in this article are getting ahead of things (not that that's necessarily bad). People should vote for Mozilla bug 122092: "Enable SVG support". Ultimately, this needs to be done without plugins -- its really just another image format.

The Konqueror browser seems to have a push to get SVG going too: KSVG, but it has a way to go ("Release 0.1 pending").

There are a good set of SVG resources for Linux. The Apache Jakarta projects java SVG viewer, Batik is probably the farthest along.

It does look exactly like my mail client. It's called KMail: http://kmail.kde.org/art/screenshot_main.png Nice to see they caught up :)

Anyone know if KDE/Gnome or even Xfree is planning something like this? I heard talk about multiple X servers, but its not out of the box simple use, of even possible.

There are two definitions of groupware in the industry. The Microsoft one: groupware consists of email with some additional productivity: Calendar, Mail, and basic forms(which are hardly ever used). And the IBM Lotus one: groupware consists of database forms for routing and document management and email.

Competing with the Outlook definition:
OS foundations Chandler (Calendar focused)
Mozilla Mail (+calendar proj)
Evolution
Open Groupware
kmail/KGroupware


And from the Lotus Perspective:
www.phpgroupware.org
zope
OpenACS
And Lotus Domino which runs on Linux. The client works fine in wine or crossover - but is not officially supported.

Woops, meant here

KDE Discussion

Yep: Valgrind is an automatic fish-barrel shooter. Finding memory bugs is just so easy.

I'd be really sad if I had to work on a platform other than x86 Linux that doesn't have it. In fact, I know people in BSD production environments who develop on Linux specifically so that they can use it.

Of course, if this is set in the 80s presumably it didn't exist yet....

Then perhaps you can explain why it was listed in the "What's new in KDE 3.1" dated in January of 2003 on kde.org.

Last I knew we were still in 2003, making that less than a year. See here: the kde 3.1 feature guide

Obviously not.
The patent application was filed December 28, 2001. The translator plugin was added to Kopete September 30, 2002 (Kopete Changelog).

Rob

Kopete has a plugin for this already in CVS. I've been using it for the past few days. Kopete is really comming along nicely.

C'mon, I understand using it for web browsing, but email?

Most of the posts that I see in mailing-lists are written with Pine, gnus (emacs' mail thingy), Mutt, KMail or MS Outlook. Maybe there's some Mozilla too, but it's not near "99%", not by a extremely long shot.

Ob-"I use": I'm very happy with Mutt myself, and my friends use also Mutt or Pine. Maybe we're all oldschool guys :-)

Ob-"Kids these days": Kids these days! When I was your age, we didn't have email. We had to shout to each other from miles and miles of distance! Sore throats were quite usual, trust me :-)

There is an Open Source Exchange replacement in the way. They have release either a RC or a Beta (can't remember). It uses only open sourced projects and is freely available albeit maybe hard/long to install.

So go and check out Kolab

Artaxerxes

How the hell is this insightful!? It's FUD!

Windows XP has USB 2.0

Wow, what an innovation... they have drivers for USB 2.0 devices. Wow... So do we.

it has low-latency audio

Let's see, does Linux...? Yep, we got that too.

it can play DVDs

Wow, do you think other platforms could do that? Yes, I think so.

it has translucent windows

Well actually, it doesn't. However, these guys have had it for a while and these guys are pretty close.

built-in NAT

Linux has had this since version 2.0. It worked great even back in 1999.

drag-and-drop CD recording

OKay, I'll conceed on this point, but I'll definitely mention you could find this here before Microsoft ever had a clue. As for XP drag and drop CD recording... it still doesn't work right.

an MPEG-4 media player

Once again, I reference these guys again. What's so impressive about that? Microsoft aren't even the people who introduced it.

it has an encrypted, compressed file system

Well, let's see here... yes, we definite have that too. As a matter of fact, I've been using encrypted file systems in Linux for years. As far as I recall, I was doing that before Windows was. No wait, Windows still doesn't offer encryption beneath the file system. Weak.

they have fine-grained access controls

Only very recently. Linux has enjoyed ACL from here and here as well.

they have a common language runtime

Funny thing is it was implemented by the open source community faster than Microsoft did.

They are pushing and developing modern programming languages so that we aren't all stuck programming in C.

A language is a tool Some languages are good for some tasks, some are better for others. For example, you couldn't quite write an operating system in Lisp like you could with C. To make this point shows how much of a fool you are. By the way, GCC compiles langauges other than C too.

Some of this technology sucks, and most of it they didn't invent, but they are pushing new technology.

Yes, most of it does suck but none of it is new. Microsoft only pushes regurgitations of what the rest of the industry has had (often for years).

(I also know that most of this stuff is available on linux, but it's also kind of a pain in the ass.)

I don't see any problems. None of what you mentioned was hard to find nor is any of it any harder to use than in Windows. For example, I play a DVD by loading my DVD player and press the button with the little triangle on it (play).

Your "points" fall down to absolutely nothing. Microsoft offers no advantages, just disadvantages over open source technologies.

You sir are a major corporate whore, completely deceived, clueless, not too bright, and giving free marketing hype to a multibillion dollar company. How does that make you feel?

Because of KDE's excellent KParts mechanisms, and goal of reusing the existing applications for the most part (with better communication and integratoin between them), the project is moving fast despite the lack of recent "news" on the site above. It all exists within the KDE PIM package.

Still too many gratiutous K's in the names for my tastes... but at least it's a lot better than the working name given to the project.