Slashdot Mirror
KDE 3.0 is Out
Emilio Hansen noted that KDE 3.0 is
on their site. There
is no official announcement yet, but this looks like the real deal. No debian
packages yet, but you can snag RPMs from various distros or src for the
do it yourself. Updated by HeUnique:Here is the announcement, enjoy.
Good grief.
Give the poor sods a chance to get the distribution ready, please. Perhaps they didn't WANT people downloading it just yet... Hence no announcement, just yet??
Bandwidth and hosting costs money, as poor old distributed.net is finding out. A few mirrors being updated, and then linking to the appropriate announcement would be a bit more considerate than putting up the first submission on the 3.0 release.
ooooooh! What does this button do? - DeeDee, Dexters Lab.
As a user of KDE (and GNOME and WMaker), I am very happy to see this release. The RC's looked great so this must be even better. Now it's GNOME's turn... Keep the competition going, it makes everything better! Congrats to the KDE Team.
------
Random, useless fact: I type in startx entirely with my left hand.
The KDE developers have not announced the release of KDE 3.0 yet because the mirrors have not gotten KDE 3.0 yet. Since they have not announced the release, do you think there might be a *reason* they have not announced it?
The editors at slashdot *know* the effect it has on a web site or ftp site when a story runs about that site. They *know* that the kde ftp site will get hammered because of this story. The *know* that the KDE developers obviously aren't ready yet BECAUSE THEY HAVE NOT ANNOUNCED THE RELEASE.
Yet, you announce the story anyway, before the actual release. Now, the ftp site will be slammed *before* the mirrors get a copy, which insures that things will be a huge mess for quiet some time.
This is the most incredibly discourteous and unprofessional behavior I've seen on a web site. Show some freaking respect towards the open source developers who create code (and give you something to write about on this site) and DO NOT ANNOUNCE A RELEASE BEFORE THE RELEASE.
Your lack of caring about the impact of your actions on this site really disgusts me.
Just check the KDE cvs
:)
KDE 3.0 was tagged a couple of days ago..and they didn't want to announce it on April 1st
!
^_^
Is it just me, or does anyone else find this unethical behavior? Granted, the release of KDE 3.0 is News for Nerds, and Stuff that Matters, but is it so important to get the scoop on something like this that you are unwilling to allow time for propogation? For a popular software release like this, I believe the editors should consider it their ethical duty to wait for the official announcement, and post a list (or at least a link to a list) of mirror sites.
The way it stands now, the mirrors may be having difficulty getting a copy of the distribution, as a hoard of eager slashdotters floods the primary ftp site.
Just to recap, I have no problems with someone submitting this story as soon as they see they possibly can, but I believe the editors have a responsibility to be respectful in their decision when to post the story.
The beauty of Linux is that we will always have a choice. KDE 3.0 will help me get my wife to use Linux, but I prefer something more hardcore, like scwm .
Linux is suitable for server applications, NOT the desktop. Roughly hewn hack jobs like KDE, which openly admit to stealing ideas from Microsoft, only serve to confuse the market, thus reducing the percentage of Linux desktops in the field.
The Linux cause is ultimately self-defeating, for it lacks clear goals other than attempting to destroy one of the world's biggest corporations. A cause which may seem attractive to a pseudo-rebellious white middle-class teenager, but is ultimately futile.
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
Don't confuse Slashdot with journalism. The site is still run like a college kid's pet project. Sure they're making money and have thousands of readers but that doesn't make the staff qualified journalists/editors. They're geeks with a popular geek web-site -- nothing more.
I come here almost everyday to see what they've collected because it's usually a nice mix. It has a the right amounts of tech, science and politics to keep me coming back. But, I never read their 'editorials' or Jon Katz because it's amateurish bunk. And, usually skip or skim the comments for the same reason :).
Microsoft Word has had a separate Equation Editor bundled with it for the past decade. Yet another example of the lengths Microsoft go to to give the average computer user real Value For Money.
Try putting THAT into one of your Matlab equations. You'll find the numbers point to Redmond.
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
I totally agree. Even LinuxToday, beaten up to death some time ago by /. , was respectfull of the schedule and at least up to now did not announce
anything (which by the way is natural since there was no announcement yet).
Yesterday night I saw 3.0 in ftp.kde.org, and I almost posted a story (not supposed to be published) asking the /. editors to please NOT announce anything until the release was official .
Then I thought, no, they will not do that again. Oh well ...
Just consider. Presume that 97.5% of Slashdot readers will be courteous. No, make that 99%. That means that only .01 will react inappropriately. Say that there are 10,000 slashdot readers who are both discourteous enough and interested enough to do the download (with a 5 second interval between tries).
.05 seconds. How long does a response cycle take?
Then that gives 100 people trying every 5 seconds. This averages one try every
Now try to make a better guess at the real numbers.
There are things that are wrong to do because of the effects that you can predict with fair certainty that they will have. In fact, those are the only things that are wrong to do (they are also the only things that are right to do, but that's a separate discussion).
It is fairly certain that the posting of this story will cause the distributing servers to become clogged at nearly the worst time. Causing this to happen sounds to me like an ungood thing. If you do something, and the effects of doing it are predictable, then those effects are caused by what you did. Therefore this posting is the Slashdot editors causing the KDE servers to be overloaded.
I'm not saying that the individual downloaders aren't also culpable. But that sure doesn't exonerate the Slashdot editor.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The news story they posted isn't true. KDE 3.0 has NOT been released yet.The fact that there are some packages on their ftp site does not mean it is a release.
The KDE 3.0 release happens when the developers say that the release is official, and slashdot should respect that.
The KDE developers *are* being reponsible. They put the packages on the main ftp site so that the mirrors could mirror it. They were obviously going to wait until the mirrors had finished before announcing it.
This has nothing to do with violence and video games or any other half ass analogy you may try to make. This is clear cut and simple. Slashdot ran a false news story about an application that has not been released yet.
First you don't even know when to stop posting ridiculous stories on 1st April (one or two may be funny, half-a-dozen isn't).
Then you can't wait for the fucking official KDE 3.0 announcement, which would have included details about mirrors, screenshots, compiling instructions, etc.
Umm; try writing some real world application with more than 5 lines of code in it, and then come back here telling about impossible memory leaks.
Slashdot does not /. a site, the users do. Put the blame where blame belongs. /. Posted a story which was NEWS, if the users of /. beat the tarshit out of the KDE ftp server before the mirror is up then the fault belongs to the users and the sys admins that are incapable of handling the load.
This is like saying that Napster shouldn't have let the cat out of the bag on mp3 sharing until the music industry had time to react. Tit-for-tat, be consistent.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
Linking to the kde.org ftp site before they've had a chance to mirror and announce it first is like bombing a hospital.
No it's not. It's not even close. If I really have to explain why, it wouldn't do you any good anyway.
Nope, no sig
And this is the beauty of using Linux, if you do not like the interface....don't use it! Use gnome or command line or any one of the other windowing interfaces. Unlike Windows. If you must use XP but don't like XP well then you have no choice you use XP. Ain't free software beautifull? Not only is it free but it gives you variety and choice... it gives you freedom. (I can see a geek running through a field of flowers jumping over fallen XP users laptop in hand, laughing like a love sick maiden) aaagh... just use something else if you don't like KDE!
Who modded this post as "insightful"?
I can't see any reason why this is supposed to be insightful. There IS NO "desktop war"!
No, there is no war between GNOME and KDE
wether you believe it or not, that is the truth.
They aren't fighting over anything, this is healthy competition people! KDE wouldn't have to so far if GNOME didn't exists, and GNOME wouldn't have been so far either without KDE.
You don't believe me? Subscribe to the mailing list, congratulate the developers about that they won the "Linux desktop war", and they will flame at you instead, saying that the desktop war does not exist.
Still not convinced? Both GNOME and KDE have already decided on a unified launcher format (.desktop files), drag and drop (both QT and GTK+ support Xdnd) and cut & paste (the clipboard code in QT 3.0 is fixed, so yes, you CAN cut & paste properly between GTK+ and QT apps). Now they are even working on a unified theme format.
Really, comments like this make me sick.
You're acting as if everything in life is meant to be competitive and to kill each other.
well her needs are probably more than extremely basic. I tried that experience with my cousin, a casual user who doesn't know much about computers, so I rebooted in Linux and told him to try it out. His first impression is that it was ugly. He used KWord and plenty of other apps and most of the time he was unable to understand what was going on because of the lack of messages. Why not put messages like "Please wait while loading", "Cannot open file", etc.? Some apps have it but many don't.
For some reason, he didn't like Mozilla. What bothered him is that he couldn't use the microphone to talk with his MSN Messenger Buddies, he could only type the messages. He didn't like the games much, im some games he had to use the mouse in other games he had to use the keyboard. What bothered him most in this is that he couldn't exit some games by clicking on the X, I told him that he had to press ESC.
In short, there's way too many usability problems. If KDE or GNOME had at least 1 usability expert helping them, they would get rid of most of those problems.
{
....
/* must manually free(buffer) */
// MyBuffer::~MyBuffer() automagically called
::operator=() method.
char *buffer;
buffer = (char *)malloc(4096);
}
vs.
{
class MyBuffer buffer(4096);
}
Sure it's just syntactic sugar, but it does make life easier.
Anyhow, if you don't want a bitwise copy of an object made, privatize the
It was tagged more than a couple of days ago - I've been running 3_0_BRANCH since 28th March - RELEASE has been around since 26th or so.
My take on it: Much faster, much more options (very useful ones too), interesting and annoying changes to clipboard behaviour, KMail much improved, Liquid for KDE3 looks sooo sweet its unbelievable, basically just loads more of what we love!
It's quite doable if you use a decent language to start with. I'd recommend Smalltalk, Lisp, ML, etc. All of these (especially ML and Lisp) can reach "good enough" speeds to compete with C/C++ in the case of most GUI app and, where they don't, a few simple C stubs (which are much easier to check for memory leaks) are usually sufficient to remedy the issue.
In short, don't excuse the difficulty of writing software on the basis of YOUR choice of poor technology.
That is all.
does it really make any difference? jeez just get your work done, who cares if run X or Y. But then I guess I'm not caught up in the my juvenile my desktop is better then your crap anymore.
C++ doesn't make bitwise copies of objects. The default copy constructors in C++ does a per-member assignment; that's important. And in order to avoid bad pointers, you disable the default copy constructors. That's easy to do and hard to overlook (in fact, you can grep for its occurrence).
You've always had to pair allocate/free constructs in C and C++. The syntax being different shouldn't make them less likely to occur.
It's not a question of syntax. With almost no exceptions, the only places new/delete should occur in well-written C++ code are in constructors and destructors. That, and a few other rules, ensure that you can't get memory leaks while still being able to express whatever you could in C. If KDE code calls new or delete anywhere else, it's unnecessarily inviting memory leaks.
I hate to defend slashdot here, but if they didn't put out the information first, another news service would. If slashdot didn't report this newsworthy information, then I would question the ethics of slashdot. People might even switch to a service that would report this.
As far as I'm concerned, this was a mistake of KDE to put this on their FTP site before announcing it. I'm sure there is a better mirror system than putting the files up before releasing them.
Unfortunately MicroSoft has f**ked us there, if you are interested in making portable shared libraries. It will fail to build a shared library if the implementation of the function is not there. The best this does then is that non-member functions cannot do a copy, but unfortunately member or friend functions still can. Of course you can make the function abort but that is enourmously less useful than detecting things at compile time.
I ifdef these things out on Unix but this useful thing is lost on Windows users.
Or, you could post it to Freenet. It's designed to be an efficient distributed caching and load balancing system and is architecturally built to counter the dreaded Slashdot Effect.
Basically, the idea is that people run a Freenet node and data gets passed around from node to node. If no one requests a file, it eventually gets dropped from nodes that are "far away" in the keyspace, and eventually from the only node that remains carrying it. But, if a bunch of people request it, the file will be cached at a large number of intermediate nodes, effectively giving the requester a whole lot more bandwidth to work from.
Also, it would be an example of how Freenet can serve an important and legal purpose, instead of just a haven for software pirates and child pornographers.