Slashback: Cooperation, Gravity, Petite

Slashback with more (below) on KDE/GNOME cooperation (hint -- they're not renaming it "GNOMKDE"); the desert parachute nuts, a tiny P4 machine, and another chance to Ask Kevin Mitnick, at least if you're near Pittsburgh. Enjoy!

This is only making my biggest case look even bigger. Andrew Pakula of StealthPC writes: "A little while ago you posted about our Pentium 3 little pc, the size of a CD-ROM. ... Many of emails people sent us however were for people looking for a Pentium 4 little pc but at the time we didn't have anything to offer them with that power.

Well now we do have a Pentium 4 version, slightly taller than the Pentium 3 version it is still very, very small. You can take a look a look at it here. There are several pictures of it there as well as on the images page."

Just don't tell him your full real name. If your question didn't rise to the top of the recent Kevin Mitnick interview, here's your chance: Arvonn Tully points to this site (an activities listing for Carnegie Mellon University) writes "If you look at the bottom of the page you will see that Kevin Mitnick will be coming to Carnegie Mellon and lecturing on March 18th."

Those two are really joined at the XML! JP Schnapper-Casteras of the Free Desktop Accessibility Working Group writes about the post last week titled "KDE And Gnome Cooperate On Interface Guidelines," to clarify the extent of that cooperation: "We're going to co-locate, NOT combine the documents. This means that means there will be separate guidelines for GNOME and KDE in different chapters / sections of the same document. The current overview implies that KDE and GNOME will become stylistically similar, which is not the case. We're simply creating one site and mailing list where HIGs for all desktops can reside."

Lucy in the sky with a junker that's just begging to be dropped. Last September, we mentioned the fellows who like to abuse technology by dropping unusual things (manned automobiles, for one) from the backs of cargo planes for skydiving thrills. If that interested you, you will enjoy (and boggle at) the group's DVD documentary/video montage Good Stuff. I watched it with jaw unhinged; if this doesn't make you want to skydive, nothing will.

Comments

If they can drop automobiles?

[$$$$$exyGal]

Why can't scientists drop bowling balls ?

--naked

Re:If they can drop automobiles?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or Anvils *Loony Tunes Theme*

Re:If they can drop automobiles?

[WatertonMan]

Funny. A few friends of mine dropped some bowling balls off a rather tall building on campus when it was discovered that the doors to the roof were left unlocked. It bounced rather high several times. (They did have someone below checking to make sure no pedestrians were around).

An other friend bought some bowling balls at a thrift store back in High School. They rolled it down the street to hit a curb where it would fly high up in the air - much to their amusement. They did this about 6 times until it smashed through the curb, flew off into the air and went through someones roof. Fortunately no one was home. But it taught them why dropping things isn't always a good idea.

I've been hiking in the backcountry where some stupid mfer was rolling boulders down a mountain thinking no one was around. Unless you know exactly where you are dropping things and have scoped things out, dropping things from a plane isn't too smart. (IMO)

BTW - there was an old B-movie staring Charlie Sheen where they do a cool stunt. Someone is locked in the trunk of a car and dropped out of a cargo plane. The stunt man dives after it, gets the keys out of the ignition, slides to the back, unlocks the trunk, gets the person out, clips them into their chute and then they tangent open together. Horrible movie but very cool stunt. Too bad today it would be handled via CGI. It seems like real stunts are becoming a thing of the past.

Re:If they can drop automobiles?

[FFFish]

I've been hiking in the backcountry where some stupid mfer was rolling boulders down a mountain thinking no one was around.

Oh, shit, I'm sorry, man. I've always worried about that. A little. After it's too late.

Its good to see kooperation.

[Anonymous Coward]

As an end user, who uses kde, and gtk apps, compatibllity is key. The kde team should write a wrapper for gtk to use kde widgets for gtk apps, so they look and feel the same.

Geramik helps, but it would be kool to use the kde file dialog instead of the (yuck) gtk one.

Dedicated Servers

[jpsowin]

Those "little pc's" would be great for a bunch of dedicated servers in a compact space... I wonder if one could remove the CD drive and put a notebook HD in? That would be perfect...

KDE and GNOME, combined documents??

[Cokelee]

WTF, IMHO a common HIG would be great. Geez, talk about getting my hopes up.

Same document, different sections. Why the same document, compare and contrast???
What is wrong with a streamlined HIG- why is it seen as a bad thing to ANYBODY?
The approach doesn't have to be exactly the same, just the ideology behind the approach, that's what matters - SOME consistency.

Re:KDE and GNOME, combined documents??

[bstadil]

WTF, IMHO a common HIG would be great Fewer acronyms would be a good start.

Re:KDE and GNOME, combined documents??

[mmol_6453]

why is it seen as a bad thing to ANYBODY?

Grudges. KDE is based on Qt, which wasn't Software Libre when the first version of KDE was released. (Which is why GNOME was started.)

Also, as an example, I came in on the scene only five years ago, after Trolltech made Qt GPL. Oddly enough, I'm still annoyed at theKompany, because I installed Kivio on my laptop so I could build circuit diagrams on my laptop. Come to find out, I have to buy the electronic schematics before I can use them in Kivio. Granted, they have the right to charge for extraneous material(which these extra stencils are), but I find, as a (P)oor (C)ollege (S)tudent, that free as in Beer is really, really advantageous. So I'm annoyed. I was really looking forward to built-in Python scripting, and, IMO, Dia needs work before I can use it with much comfort.

For the complete set of electronics symbols, at an average of $6 per stencil set, I'd probably be paying out $60 this week. And if I wanted any other users on my laptop to be able to use those stencils, it's another $60 per person.

And, as a final answer to your question, I gaurantee you I'll get at least one down-mod for badmouthing either GNOME or KDE office components. (Though I might not get modded at all as this is a rather old article now.)

Case modder's dream.

[dwdyer]

Nah, get one of these little PCs, stick it in a tower case, then you've got the whole damned thing for cold cathode lights, improbable-looking water cooling systems, etc.

-W-

Re:Why KDE or GNOME anyway?

[WIAKywbfatw]

If you think that Linux doesn't need a stable WIMP interface and desktop environment and that a CLI will suffice for all Linux users then you are sadly mistaken.

A CLI and a CLI alone might be fine for you but it won't work for 99 percent of Linux users. How do you expect to browse the web in Mozilla, edit a picture in Gimp, type and format a letter in OpenOffice or play a game with a CLI alone?

At a time when the Linux community is pushing open source software as a viable alternative to Microsoft-dominated solutions how will forcing every new adopter to learn a non-intuitive set of commands help promote Linux as the way forward?

I'm sorry if you see both GNOME and KDE as a waste of time. Please accept the fact that the overwhelming majority don't and that the future growth of the Linux community is dependent on an easy-to-use desktop that delivers as much as (if not more than) Windows does.

Re:Who the fuck cares about Kevin Mitnick?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Mitnick: you're a goddamned criminal. Rot in hell."

Michael:

Please stop posting all this negative shit anonymously. If you've got a problem then let's meet and talk. Perhaps at 9:00 tonight at Vino's? You've got plenty of gas in your tank, and your Outlook says your free so I'll pencil you in. Please wear something else 'though, that red sweater you've got on makes you look like a tomato.

-me

how about this little mini-itx sized p4 mobo?

[ovidus naso]

As spotted on linitx.org: 7in x 7in P4 mobo
Should be much CHEAPER to build a system than the one refered in this article...

One gratuitous incompatibility in GNOME 2.x

[rsidd]

is the rearrangement of the "OK" and "Cancel" buttons, so that "Cancel" is now on the left and "OK" is on the right, in contrast to GNOME 1.x, KDE (all versions) and Windows. Whose bright idea was this? Perhaps someone who's used to answering questions like "Do you want to do this, no or yes"?

This is my single biggest peeve with GNOME 2.x, which is otherwise looking very nice. Well, if they're cohosting their Human Interface Guide with the KDE folks, hopefully someone will get a clue (the clue being: stay compatible with the rest of the world).

If the GNOME folks ever built a car, very likely they'd put the brake to the right of the accelerator, because that's the way it "should be" for some theoretical reason of their own.

Re:One gratuitous incompatibility in GNOME 2.x

[Fluffy the Cat]

1) It standardises the position of "OK". There are significantly more boxes that only have a single "OK" gadget than there are only having a single "Cancel" gadget.

2) People tend to leave the mouse in the bottom corner of dialog boxes while they're reading them. Dialog boxes should ideally be designed that most of the time the user wishes to choose "OK". Having the "OK" button on the right reduces the time taken to respond to the dialog.

I find it significantly nicer with this arrangement. I'm unconvinced by the "Do it the same as the rest of the world" argument - doing it right is more important.

It's been done

[Wee]

Those "little pc's" would be great for a bunch of dedicated servers in a compact space... I wonder if one could remove the CD drive and put a notebook HD in? That would be perfect

It's already been done, and done better than a stack of these little CD-sized guys. The RLX deals are pretty damn amazing. I've had occasion to see two different models in the past two years, and have been impressed each time. My favorite has to the be Transmeta-based blades, just because the consume like 9 watts when sitting idle. They're cool enough that you'd have a hard time telling they were powered on.

What makes something like an RLX chassis better than stacking in "little PCs" is that RLX has some very nice mgmt software that comes with the whole unit. Basically, you dedicate one blade to do mgmt stuff, and the rest (whether you have one chassis or ten) can all be managed by it. You can have all the blades sitting there blank, and remotely (and programmatically) boot up and then re-image any number of them with Windows or Linux, in any configuration you've set up. (The OS images are actually just tarballs of previously-installed operating systems you've set up and saved. So you can dedicate one blade to OS imaging duty, put Red Hat in whater config you want on it, upgrade the kernel or whatever and then push that tarball out to a "test blade" if you want to see how your apps runs.)

You also get more hardware with something like an RLX. The newer ones have dual fibre channel NICs, dual Gig Ethernet NICS, and a dedicated backplane network for "out of band" management, and an optional layer 2 switch for that chassis. That all means that you can make a cluster out of them really easily. And it means that you can do away with their hard drives, boot off the net and use network disk everywhere while still keeping them as "individual" servers. One more bonus: you don't have a cabling nightmare, and don't really need KVM for every server. They are also designed with heat output in mind. You can literally fill a 42U rack full of them (which is a total of like 330-something P3s) and still power it up. They're hot-swappable, too.

I don't work for RLX, I've just seen them up close a couple times (we're demoing one unit now, and will get another soon). If you are thinking of making a cheap cluster, or just want a lot of PCs in a little space withut a management headache, you might do well to look into RLX.

-B

Little PCs -- Do you actually want to sell one?

[Cokelee]

Wow, tiny computer. Nice. Look a n o t h e r tiny computer.

Re:Skydiving

[Shishak]

I don't have a 100% accurate statistic handy but about 95% of all skydiving fatalities are pilot related. People downsizing their canopies too quickly (smaller = faster = more fun). Hook turning that new uber canopy into the ground at 70 MPH.

The fact is, Skydiving equipment is very safe. When used properly, kept well maintained it will rarely fail. If it does you always have your reserve. It is the skydiver that screws up and dies. Complacency = death in this sport.

My first reserve ride was on a borrowed rig and it was all my fault. I deployed too quickly on a hop-n-pop and had my main wrap around my legs. Let me tell you, going to reserve at terminal hurts like a mother, but I'm alive :)

Take your life into your own hands, SKYDIVE!

Other Small PCs

[OrangeHairMan]

Most of these small PCs I've looked at have been >$300 (the one linked in the story doesn't list a price), and haven't been fast enough for my needs, so I looked and found a better solution: Mini-ITX.

These motherboards are only 100 dollars and a little more than 6 inches square. They have integrated video, 800MHz VIA C3 processors, ethernet, TV out, sound, and 2 IDE busses. And the fact that they use C3 processors, they only consume 10 watts, for the whole motherboard! You can get more info here:

http://mini-itx.com/
http://shop2.outpost.com/product/3349552
http://www.via.com.tw/en/VInternet/mini_itx.jsp

Orange

Combined

[Shadow Wrought]

So Kevin Mitnick loaded both Gnome and KDE onto a Stealth Pentium 4 Little PC only to drop it out of an airplane?

Cool;-)

Carmack follow-up

[Reality Master 101]

Following up on a recent story (Carmack Needs Rocket Fuel), John an interesting post to the CATS board, which I'll reproduce here to save Slashdotting:

Something a little weird happened on friday -- out of the blue, the local FAA guy that had been running us around about low altitude flight testing at my property outside Dallas, just called up and said that we can do flight tests to 3,500' if we call them on Wednesday, then again on Saturday before we fly. Someone must have prodded him.

A couple of the OSIDA folks visited with us on Saturday. I was complaining about our current peroxide supply problems with FMC, and they asked if it would be helpful to have a governor or senator call someone. Yes indeed, I think that would be helpful!

I'm not too worried about things getting worse on the clearance side. Especially in our case, where we really don't overfly anything -- we just go straght up, then straight down. We expect to come down pretty fast on the parachutes, so we shouldn't even drift very far.

John Carmack

So perhaps things are moving forward after all! All you "chem majors" can now stop e-mailing him. :)

roads have built in gutters

[AlaskanUnderachiever]

Doesn't mention where they rolled it. But in Anchorage, Alaska at least the vast majority of our roads all have two nice "ruts" per lane that would be deep enough to guide a bowling ball nicely for a mile or two. I've personally seen them be up to 4" deep. And while it's nice that a road is "designed" to be convex, they rarely stay that way for long in any area with heavy traffic and poor quality asphalt.