Slashdot Mirror
Alpha-Blending On KDE
PimpBot writes: "Check this story out on The Dot. The KDE team is getting some pretty sweet alpha-blending going with their latest CVS for KDE 2.1. The story has pretty eye-candy." Most of what is there is already being done within efm, but kde probably has a larger installed user base. Of course this stuff is really only with icons and images, and not fonts, which await the ubercool Xrender extension which does just that (or even cooler, the RGB Decimation for antialiasing text under X on LCD screens). Yum.
Cool. Now I can have a desktop with anti-aliased fonts, alpha blended icons, and long uptimes. Who would've thunk it.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You make a good point, but these screenshots weren't meant to accompany a press release. This functionality was added in the last week and the pictures were generated in the course of discussion between developers. (See this thread.) I doubt if they were intended to be seen by such a large audience.
Furthermore, Linux is bad for humanity because it means people will no longer take Computer Science degrees - there won't be any money in Computing because of all the free software, so software will suffer a brain drain
Good. People who take CS (or any other discipline) degrees because of the money they can make are precisely the sort of people that Computing (or Architecture, or Law) can well do without.
Most software is never distributed. It is written in-house, to be used in-house. None of that is affected by free software (apart from the bottom line of the vast majority of companies).
Computer Science graduates tend to be the least able programmers of all the people I deal with. For every MIT turning out brilliant programmers (none of whom would dream of working at my company) there are a hundred state universities turning out VB monkeys and Delphi parrots.
Is this flamebait? Sure, but it's also true, and my karma is maxed out anyway.
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I'm spending a lot of life building GUI's (in Java) and I have some questions about icons and eye-candy:
As hackers, we all know that you can unplug one icon and replace it with another, the type of graphic art is totally unrelated to the quality of the code and the app, and so on, but, the look and feel can have a pretty major effect on the way people take to your software.
In my experience, if people are a little unsure how much they should trust your code, and how much time they should invest in it, 'clean and professional' is more likely to give the right impression than 'cute and well drawn'. Think Nokia mobile phone vs. a Micky Mouse novelty candlestick one. (I'm not saying that the icons are as bad as that - just that that's the sort of distinction I'm trying to make).
I know it's all themed, and you can set the theme to be whatever you want, but I would suggest that the default theme should be much more 'serious'. We all love the penguin, some love the KDE dragon, but would we get more respect if the images were less cuddly - harder? I guess this is why the Playstation 2 looks like it does, and why it's logo is made up of a set of straight lines on a white background. It looks hi-tech and cool.
Someone else (rebelcool) made the point that 'looking like Windows is a good thing because Microsoft have spent a lot of money on research and they know what they're doing'. I kind of agree with that, but there is a better reason: Most people who use a computer understand the Microsoft GUI. It might not be the best on a level playing field, but the playing field isn't level - pretty much everyone is familiar with Microsoft's GUI.
To use the same steering wheel analogy: Every car has a steering wheel because every car has a steering wheel. Thus, steering wheels make the best user-interfaces, simply because they mean that anyone with a driving license can just get in and drive off.
One final point, I'm so used to Unix I find typing on a Windows box feels like I have boxing gloves on. I hate it, I find it frustrating. So I install bash shells and emacs, and do everything I can to make it look like what I'm used to. It's a pain, and I certainly can't do it on a stranger's computer I happen to be using for a bit. I have an enormous amount of empathy for Windows users in a hurry who have to make the switch in the other direction.
I don't know if /. should mirror stuff or not, but I think the reasons in the FAQ are a bit weak in places.
/. mirror. Finally, a 24 time limit might make it more palatable for those who are concerned about IP issues.
/. crew, but I think this is a bit overly pretentious. I'm not a hardcore /.er, but my impression is that this is not a place for to find fast-breaking news. Indeed, today's fast-breaking news was a link to one of many traditional (online) news sources. If people want hot news, they monitor the wire services, the secondaries (e.g. CNN), the stock ticker, etc.) If they don't do that, then I doubt they care if the news is 6 minutes old or 6 hours old.
/. kills the site linked to, such that no one can get to it for the next several hours, then what has not waiting a few hours to to get mirror-permissions gained us? (hint: nothing)
Sure, it's a great idea, but it has a lot of implications. For example, commercial sites rely on their banner ads to generate revenue. If I cache one of their pages, this will mess with their statistics, and mess with their banner ads. In other words, this will piss them off.
I agree with that completely. It also avoids nasty legal battles over copyright & IP issues.
Of course, most of the time, the commercial sites that actually have income from banner ads easily withstand the Slashdot Effect. So perhaps we could draw the line at sites that don't have ads. They are, after all, much more likely to buckle under the pressure of all those unexpected hits.
This is sounding good...
But what happens if I cache the site, and they update themselves? Once again, I'm transmitting data that I shouldn't be, only this time my cache is out of date!
Have a 24 hour cache-and-purge policy. The mirror would be an alternate link option, like I see at Download sites, in case the site-proper is overwhelmed. Also, this means that after one day, there's no more risk of people seeing outdated information unknowingly from the
I could try asking permission, but do you want to wait 6 hours for a cool breaking story while we wait for permission to link someone?
I don't mean any disrespect to the
Finally, if the
So the quick answer is: "Sure, caching would be neat." It would make things a lot easier when servers go down, but it's a complicated issue that would need to be thought through in great detail before being implemented.
I imagine there are some real legal and technical issues to be worked out before a mirroring system could be implemented. However, I don't think the reasons given in the FAQ are compelling.
But what do I know? I'm just a joe who doesn't run an insanely popular news/discussion website that can crush small nations with a single link.
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ShoutingMan.com
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...there's probably a lot more but I don't want to misrepresent.
Also, do not confuse Linux (the kernel) with GNU's entourage (compiler, libraries, tools, etc.) and XFree. The distributions put these together. Talk to them about packaging innovative windowing systems.
I'm a CS major. A lot of us Linux users are. We hate not knowing how the NT kernel works. We hate paying thousands of dollars and signing non-disclosure agreements just to take a peek. Linux is an attempt to do it all over. And guess what? It's doing a damn good job, considering that it's practically reverse engineering (minus any BSD stuff). Linux==communism? Hardly. Linux is the means to an end. I think the vendors who see it destined for a desktop market, etc. are disillusioned. It's bringing the Unix environment home. How do you think I learned Solaris (Sys V)? Training courses? Innovation? Here's innovation for you: Kernel modules (no reboots!) Proc filesystem Clone syscall interface
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE