Agreed. The default themes for KDE are so good most users (myself included) feel any need to modify them.
The designers who slaved over KDE's default themes are top-notch professionals with world-class skill.
I sure as hell don't have the design chops to improve upon it.
And by the look of what I see on kde-look.org, neither does anybody else.
To use a car analogy: user-contributed themes are now about as polished as the teenager who bolts a plywood wing and plywood fender extensions to his subcompact car.
Sure, it looks different than stock, but he's going to have a hard time convincing anybody he didn't ruin his car
You are experiencing false nostalgia for a golden age of journalism that never existed.
Indeed. Joseph Pulitzer - the guy the "Pulitzer Prize for Excellence in Journalism" is named for is most famous for yellow journalism.
The "yellow" referred to the color of the paper, which was literally the cheapest they could use; the headlines were carefully crafted to sell a newspaper. These days, we call the practice clickbait.
Think about that for a second: The guy whose name has become associated with the best in journalism was really a pioneer of clickbait.
Never forget: journalism exists to do two things: Make Money, and help people feel "connected". Having facts straight helps with both, but are not a requirement if you're willing to reduce your audience. Very few people even care to know the whole story - give 'em a reason to feel superior, and they'll eat it up.
I wouldn't be surprised that the modern "myth" of honest journalism originates from comic books -- Peter Parker, Lois Lane, and Clark Kent.
If I look at actual historical journalism... it's a smear fest.
This is what drives me nuts about planes. How can a radio altimeter ever be trusted? That is completely fucking batshit.
* I've used LIDAR systems, and they are limited. Laser altimeters have trouble penetrating weather, and can easily cause permanent eye damage to people on the ground. * Ultrasonics are only useful at very close range, and low speeds (high frequency sound attenuates rapidly over distance, doppler shift issues). Totally useless for planes. * While we're at it, barometers are an imperfect solution, because air pressure changes enough from one mile to the next to be dicey when landing. That's why they use radar altimeters for landing.
Commercial aircraft do have multiple redundant systems, and they are designed to be reliable in every kind of weather.
The problem isn't the aircraft: It's the cheap-ass airlines unwilling to maintain the systems the aircraft has. It's capitalism at it worst: The race to the bottom leads to detached management deciding the only "problem" is the plane is not flying (and making money). The plane is allowed to fly because while one system has failed, "it has two backups that work, get 'er done".
It's a reasonable economic decision. It's more profitable to just pay the fines and legal settlements and keep flying.
Their crew and customer's lives don't matter in their equation.
So, of course, they bitch that government regulations (whose whole point is to keep people alive) are driving them out of business.
The regulations are there because it's well known that the airlines are quite willing to commit negligent homicide and call it an "accident".
It would tremendously reduce the strain on his kidneys, liver and similar aging organs.
Even if that is true, it effectively enslaves him to the process, and subjects him to a massive risk of serious infection. As soon as he misses a treatment, his organs will suffer a huge shock, and may fail.
It's bad enough to require pharmaceuticals to continue living. You can carry drugs with you, so it's not as big of a problem if you have some disaster strike. But rooms filled with equipment and fresh blood -- that's harder to transport.
It'd be nice to see ARM being able to play in the HPC field.
The battlefield is littered with the bodies of those that have tried before... I know I worked with Calxeda when they were trying to crack into supercomputers with their 40-core systems.
At the end of the day, the flops/watt was considerably better with Intel's Xeon (and much better with Xeon Phi). But that was 2012...
A company could equally easily put in the small print of their contract that anyone purchasing one of their products must give up their first-born child to go and work in some factory in the far east for no pay, working as child slave labour.
You know, if even a fraction of the things I've heard about Samsung are true... that is exactly the kind of thing I'd expect from them.
There is an open standard for a connection that every mfg can (and does) use, and has been for years: USB-A.
There already are combination DAC/Amplifier units for smartphones. Most new car radios have them built-in, as well as many high end headphone DAC/Amplifiers. Every one of them accepts a standard USB-A cable, and everybody's phone has a cable for USB-A.
USB-C is starting to replace USB-A, and I expect the trend to accelerate.
The dongle for Lightning to USB-C would probably look similar to the in-line volume knobs on a 3.5 mm cord; not ideal, but not horrid either. Lightning, at least, has the ability to power a headphone amp from the iDevice's battery; I imagine USB-C does as well. I don't know if the standard allows a device using Micro-USB to switch from being a power sink to a power source.
Electronics companies will go nuts over it, because they can all upsell super-premium DACs and amplifiers, assembled by the most attractive supermodels, and sealed using precious bodily fluids from rock stars.
Is that really the case? Every U.S. carrier I know of has been trying their hardest to shepherd their customers into a plan that offers a new phone each year.
In general, I agree completely - I want an analog headphone jack.
Removing it is not just about the headphone jack, though. Sure, there is the size of the jack, but you also have to have the D/A chip and a nice, clean analog amplifier to drive the headphones - the amp has its own design constraints (needs to be located in a place it won't pick up noise from the rest of the phone), as well as space to hold it.
Ditching the headphone jack (and amp) can allow a decent amount of internal volume to be re-purposed. The D/A and amplifier is moved outside the phone.
Oddly enough, high-end ("audiophile" snake-oil) versions already exist for existing smartphones - you plug in your phone (Android is also supported!) via USB to the D/A+Amp, and then plug in your headphones. Many of the newer car stereos can connect directly via USB and do the same thing.
Consumer electronics is always looking for the next way to sell you the same thing again -- "digital" headphones would be heavily marketed by every brand in the business.
Assuming, of course, that Apple really is removing the headphone jack.
I'd argue that EAX wasn't really that sophisticated; it had a library of cheap DSP effects that was an improvement over nothing, but had no ability to transition from one to another, and didn't handle environments other than closed ones.
It turned out to be far more flexible and pragmatic to do it all in software, where developers weren't constrained by a single, indifferent hardware developer. (With bonus points for working everywhere, instead of requiring a single-source product). Creative was never interested in an API that would allow anybody's hardware to use it.
Insert OpenAL: Loki Software implemented an open and cross-platform API for 3D audio, with software fallback.For a while, OpenAL was one of the audio libraries of choice - Doom 3, BioShock, Unreal Tournament, Jedi Knight, Battlefield 2. Creative even deprecated EAX in favor of OpenAL.
But game makers were pragmatic and started doing the DSP in software, since it would work everywhere instead of being specific to Creative hardware.
I don't even know of modern software that supports anything like EAX in hardware anymore. (Well, other than Creative's Demos...)
From what I've seen, electric more or less breaks even in terms of energy cost vs gasoline - the cost per mile to charge the battery is tiny compared to the cost to refuel the car. However, the battery itself eventually needs replacement, and isn't cheap. Overall, it comes down to paying incrementally (fuel) or in lump sums (battery).
That said, energy source is only one part of a vehicle's cost per mile of ownership (albeit a substantial one).
Maintenance is an area where electric cars may have a substantial advantage - the number of moving (and wearing) parts is much, smaller for an electric vehicle. You don't have to worry about liquid cooling, oil changes, catalytic converters, mufflers, fuel injectors, spark plugs, camshafts, valve heads, head gaskets, fuel pumps, oil pumps, and most of the transmission (most electrics are direct drive).
Electric cars have quite a number of cost advantages that you'll never achieve with an internal combustion engine.
I question the validity of this list, if only because a few are definitely not green, as well as being decades old multinational corporations.
Schneider electric, for example- they make circuit breakers and uninterruptible power supplies, servos, and industrial power distribution (ie. wire & transformers), among a great many other things -- plain old normal electrical infrastructure. They even own APC, who is a longtime producer of UPS's for offices & datacenters -- nobody likes downtime.
Johnson Controls? One of the 800 pound multinational gorillas in the commercial HVAC business? Are you fraking kidding me? The best they can say for being "green" is trying to make a more efficient HVAC system -- you know, R&D for a competitive advantage.
A123 makes lithium batteries - a product in everything from portable electronics to power tools (seriously - who doesn't have an electric screwdriver or drill?) There are a ton of lithium battery manufacturers, and it's no surprise that one manufacturer will be out-competed by another. They don't even clam to be green. The big thing with A123 batteries is they charge fast, and tolerate abuse without exploding. Is not exploding the new green?
Apparently there are people who don't understand economics, and just how wealthy some people are.
Several individuals on Google's board can buy a controlling interest in the entire US music industry -- lock, stock, and barrel, with personal money.
If only one of the board members wanted to go full asshole, they could buy out a controlling interest in the companies suing them, fire the morons who started the lawsuit, and ensure the artists involved never publish with a major label again.
And what could the music industry do? File a lawsuit because somebody bought (a lot of) stock in their company? Hostile takeovers are not new.
+this. I have hundreds of CD's that I've ripped to MP3 or AAC over the past 17 years. I'm doing all of the Apple-y things (iCloud Music Library, Apple Music Trial, etc.)
Nothing has ever been deleted, or even modified from my iTunes library. The SHA1sums match my decade-old backups. It's amazing how easy it is to verify when you actually, you know, back up important data.
I'm wondering exactly what the article's author did differently, or if TFA's author is simply trolling fanbois of all persuasions.
Dietitians are not the same thing as food scientists. The amount of quackery among dietitians is enormous, because it pays the bills.
Comparing a scientist to a dietitian is like comparing a dentist to a guy with a piece of string and a door: One has had years of training and scientific rigor, the other is a quack taking your money.
Though we can use quackery vs science from diets here:
Diets typically favor somebody's political, ethical, or economic views:
One case in point: In the 80's/90's, a few groups big on veganism didn't like that McDonalds used Beef Tallow or Pork lard (animal fat byproducts) to fry their french fries. They lobbied & eventually convinced the industry to convert to trans-fatty and hydrogenated oils from non-animal sources, with the claim that they were "healthier", but tasted the same (because... vegetables!).
Fast forward a few decades, and now that actual reasearch has been done (instead of blind adherence to a 'plants are healthier' dogma), it's been found that Trans Fats (and all hydrogenated oils) that were advocated are far worse for our health than animal fat ever was.
The original change had nothing to do with science, but dogma from lobbying and advocacy groups.
In the same way, we see many people's political or economic views dictate how they behave about Climate -- science or fact has nothing to do with it.
Right now, we have exceedingly wealthy companies selling oil, coal, and natural gas. It's in their economic interest (to the tune of trillions of dollars) to protect their profits. It shouldn't surprise anybody that they will do everything in their power to protect their fortunes.
Oil companies have done so in the past, doing everything in their power to discredit and fight a scientist who proved that tetraethyllead is a highly dangerous neurotoxin. All over a minor change to their operation (unleaded gas), and did not really affect their entire ability to sell.
On the other hand, you have what motivates the scientists: Sure, you have "the pursuit of knowledge", but at the end of the day, they want to be paid and let their families live comfortably. To do that, each scientist is being very interested in disproving somebody else's work, because if you can disprove another paper, you gain notoriety and prestige for knowing your shit better than the other guy. By proving they know more, they can get promotions, positions at better institutions, pay increases, prestige... The stuff everybody wants.
The reason consensus matters is because in general, consensus forms because everything else has had all of its problems exposed.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought the FCC classified them as "common carriers" now.
A point which is being contested in court, if I recall correctly...
Agreed. The default themes for KDE are so good most users (myself included) feel any need to modify them.
The designers who slaved over KDE's default themes are top-notch professionals with world-class skill.
I sure as hell don't have the design chops to improve upon it.
And by the look of what I see on kde-look.org, neither does anybody else.
To use a car analogy: user-contributed themes are now about as polished as the teenager who bolts a plywood wing and plywood fender extensions to his subcompact car.
Sure, it looks different than stock, but he's going to have a hard time convincing anybody he didn't ruin his car
This is what, the 10th season of this show?
Every year AMD boasts next year's chips are going to beat out Intel.
Every year AMD fanbois get frothy at the mouth because Intel will finally get what they have coming.
And every year, two things happen:
- AMD overestimated the speed of next year's chip by a wide margin
- AMD underestimated Intel's performance by a wide margin
I'm rooting for AMD, but they talk a much bigger game than they play.
If the paltry performance increases from skylake continue on their -E platform then AMD won't have anything to worry about next year.
Except for the fact that AMD had to downclock and handcuff the Broadwell chip to even compare it on a clock-per-clock basis.
Having approximately equal performance per tick is meaningless when your competitor is able to run 20% more ticks in the same time period.
Matching it clock for clock is a HUGE step forwards.
And here I thought we had finally dispelled the notion that clock speed was all-important.
What matters is throughput per unit of time. It doesn't matter if they get throughput by using higher clock speeds or by more work per tick.
AMD is still being beaten badly at throughput.
The only thing that may even kind of come close is Hyper-V on Windows which is a type-1.
Xen is type-1 as well.
You are experiencing false nostalgia for a golden age of journalism that never existed.
Indeed. Joseph Pulitzer - the guy the "Pulitzer Prize for Excellence in Journalism" is named for is most famous for yellow journalism.
The "yellow" referred to the color of the paper, which was literally the cheapest they could use; the headlines were carefully crafted to sell a newspaper. These days, we call the practice clickbait.
Think about that for a second: The guy whose name has become associated with the best in journalism was really a pioneer of clickbait.
Never forget: journalism exists to do two things: Make Money, and help people feel "connected". Having facts straight helps with both, but are not a requirement if you're willing to reduce your audience. Very few people even care to know the whole story - give 'em a reason to feel superior, and they'll eat it up.
I wouldn't be surprised that the modern "myth" of honest journalism originates from comic books -- Peter Parker, Lois Lane, and Clark Kent.
If I look at actual historical journalism... it's a smear fest.
This is what drives me nuts about planes. How can a radio altimeter ever be trusted? That is completely fucking batshit.
* I've used LIDAR systems, and they are limited. Laser altimeters have trouble penetrating weather, and can easily cause permanent eye damage to people on the ground.
* Ultrasonics are only useful at very close range, and low speeds (high frequency sound attenuates rapidly over distance, doppler shift issues). Totally useless for planes.
* While we're at it, barometers are an imperfect solution, because air pressure changes enough from one mile to the next to be dicey when landing. That's why they use radar altimeters for landing.
Commercial aircraft do have multiple redundant systems, and they are designed to be reliable in every kind of weather.
The problem isn't the aircraft: It's the cheap-ass airlines unwilling to maintain the systems the aircraft has. It's capitalism at it worst: The race to the bottom leads to detached management deciding the only "problem" is the plane is not flying (and making money). The plane is allowed to fly because while one system has failed, "it has two backups that work, get 'er done".
It's a reasonable economic decision. It's more profitable to just pay the fines and legal settlements and keep flying.
Their crew and customer's lives don't matter in their equation.
So, of course, they bitch that government regulations (whose whole point is to keep people alive) are driving them out of business.
The regulations are there because it's well known that the airlines are quite willing to commit negligent homicide and call it an "accident".
Cthulhu for President
If we're all going to choose our means of destruction, I want a president who'll do it properly and indiscriminately.
A terribly ugly Windows programme.
Isn't calling a windows program ugly redundant?
It's pretty sad that most Linux applications have a more attractive UI than Windows; even back in 2003.
It would tremendously reduce the strain on his kidneys, liver and similar aging organs.
Even if that is true, it effectively enslaves him to the process, and subjects him to a massive risk of serious infection. As soon as he misses a treatment, his organs will suffer a huge shock, and may fail.
It's bad enough to require pharmaceuticals to continue living. You can carry drugs with you, so it's not as big of a problem if you have some disaster strike. But rooms filled with equipment and fresh blood -- that's harder to transport.
It'd be nice to see ARM being able to play in the HPC field.
The battlefield is littered with the bodies of those that have tried before... I know I worked with Calxeda when they were trying to crack into supercomputers with their 40-core systems.
At the end of the day, the flops/watt was considerably better with Intel's Xeon (and much better with Xeon Phi). But that was 2012...
It's been said that the South Korean government is really just corporate-owned subsidiary of Samsung.
A company could equally easily put in the small print of their contract that anyone purchasing one of their products must give up their first-born child to go and work in some factory in the far east for no pay, working as child slave labour.
You know, if even a fraction of the things I've heard about Samsung are true... that is exactly the kind of thing I'd expect from them.
There is an open standard for a connection that every mfg can (and does) use, and has been for years: USB-A.
There already are combination DAC/Amplifier units for smartphones. Most new car radios have them built-in, as well as many high end headphone DAC/Amplifiers. Every one of them accepts a standard USB-A cable, and everybody's phone has a cable for USB-A.
USB-C is starting to replace USB-A, and I expect the trend to accelerate.
The dongle for Lightning to USB-C would probably look similar to the in-line volume knobs on a 3.5 mm cord; not ideal, but not horrid either. Lightning, at least, has the ability to power a headphone amp from the iDevice's battery; I imagine USB-C does as well. I don't know if the standard allows a device using Micro-USB to switch from being a power sink to a power source.
Electronics companies will go nuts over it, because they can all upsell super-premium DACs and amplifiers, assembled by the most attractive supermodels, and sealed using precious bodily fluids from rock stars.
And there are even cheaper options. There are standalone bluetooth A2DP receivers with a 3.5mm output jack for $12.
I've owned and used one for close to a decade now.
Is that really the case? Every U.S. carrier I know of has been trying their hardest to shepherd their customers into a plan that offers a new phone each year.
In general, I agree completely - I want an analog headphone jack.
Removing it is not just about the headphone jack, though. Sure, there is the size of the jack, but you also have to have the D/A chip and a nice, clean analog amplifier to drive the headphones - the amp has its own design constraints (needs to be located in a place it won't pick up noise from the rest of the phone), as well as space to hold it.
Ditching the headphone jack (and amp) can allow a decent amount of internal volume to be re-purposed. The D/A and amplifier is moved outside the phone.
Oddly enough, high-end ("audiophile" snake-oil) versions already exist for existing smartphones - you plug in your phone (Android is also supported!) via USB to the D/A+Amp, and then plug in your headphones. Many of the newer car stereos can connect directly via USB and do the same thing.
Consumer electronics is always looking for the next way to sell you the same thing again -- "digital" headphones would be heavily marketed by every brand in the business.
Assuming, of course, that Apple really is removing the headphone jack.
I'd argue that EAX wasn't really that sophisticated; it had a library of cheap DSP effects that was an improvement over nothing, but had no ability to transition from one to another, and didn't handle environments other than closed ones.
It turned out to be far more flexible and pragmatic to do it all in software, where developers weren't constrained by a single, indifferent hardware developer. (With bonus points for working everywhere, instead of requiring a single-source product). Creative was never interested in an API that would allow anybody's hardware to use it.
Insert OpenAL: Loki Software implemented an open and cross-platform API for 3D audio, with software fallback.For a while, OpenAL was one of the audio libraries of choice - Doom 3, BioShock, Unreal Tournament, Jedi Knight, Battlefield 2. Creative even deprecated EAX in favor of OpenAL.
But game makers were pragmatic and started doing the DSP in software, since it would work everywhere instead of being specific to Creative hardware.
I don't even know of modern software that supports anything like EAX in hardware anymore. (Well, other than Creative's Demos...)
From what I've seen, electric more or less breaks even in terms of energy cost vs gasoline - the cost per mile to charge the battery is tiny compared to the cost to refuel the car. However, the battery itself eventually needs replacement, and isn't cheap. Overall, it comes down to paying incrementally (fuel) or in lump sums (battery).
That said, energy source is only one part of a vehicle's cost per mile of ownership (albeit a substantial one).
Maintenance is an area where electric cars may have a substantial advantage - the number of moving (and wearing) parts is much, smaller for an electric vehicle. You don't have to worry about liquid cooling, oil changes, catalytic converters, mufflers, fuel injectors, spark plugs, camshafts, valve heads, head gaskets, fuel pumps, oil pumps, and most of the transmission (most electrics are direct drive).
Electric cars have quite a number of cost advantages that you'll never achieve with an internal combustion engine.
I question the validity of this list, if only because a few are definitely not green, as well as being decades old multinational corporations.
Schneider electric, for example- they make circuit breakers and uninterruptible power supplies, servos, and industrial power distribution (ie. wire & transformers), among a great many other things -- plain old normal electrical infrastructure. They even own APC, who is a longtime producer of UPS's for offices & datacenters -- nobody likes downtime.
Johnson Controls? One of the 800 pound multinational gorillas in the commercial HVAC business? Are you fraking kidding me? The best they can say for being "green" is trying to make a more efficient HVAC system -- you know, R&D for a competitive advantage.
A123 makes lithium batteries - a product in everything from portable electronics to power tools (seriously - who doesn't have an electric screwdriver or drill?) There are a ton of lithium battery manufacturers, and it's no surprise that one manufacturer will be out-competed by another. They don't even clam to be green. The big thing with A123 batteries is they charge fast, and tolerate abuse without exploding. Is not exploding the new green?
Noah Webster strikes again.
Magick is a valid spelling, much like colour or flavour. Now stop proving your ignorance.
Apparently there are people who don't understand economics, and just how wealthy some people are.
Several individuals on Google's board can buy a controlling interest in the entire US music industry -- lock, stock, and barrel, with personal money.
If only one of the board members wanted to go full asshole, they could buy out a controlling interest in the companies suing them, fire the morons who started the lawsuit, and ensure the artists involved never publish with a major label again.
And what could the music industry do? File a lawsuit because somebody bought (a lot of) stock in their company? Hostile takeovers are not new.
+this. I have hundreds of CD's that I've ripped to MP3 or AAC over the past 17 years. I'm doing all of the Apple-y things (iCloud Music Library, Apple Music Trial, etc.)
Nothing has ever been deleted, or even modified from my iTunes library. The SHA1sums match my decade-old backups. It's amazing how easy it is to verify when you actually, you know, back up important data.
I'm wondering exactly what the article's author did differently, or if TFA's author is simply trolling fanbois of all persuasions.
Dietitians are not the same thing as food scientists. The amount of quackery among dietitians is enormous, because it pays the bills.
Comparing a scientist to a dietitian is like comparing a dentist to a guy with a piece of string and a door: One has had years of training and scientific rigor, the other is a quack taking your money.
Though we can use quackery vs science from diets here:
Diets typically favor somebody's political, ethical, or economic views:
One case in point: In the 80's/90's, a few groups big on veganism didn't like that McDonalds used Beef Tallow or Pork lard (animal fat byproducts) to fry their french fries. They lobbied & eventually convinced the industry to convert to trans-fatty and hydrogenated oils from non-animal sources, with the claim that they were "healthier", but tasted the same (because... vegetables!).
Fast forward a few decades, and now that actual reasearch has been done (instead of blind adherence to a 'plants are healthier' dogma), it's been found that Trans Fats (and all hydrogenated oils) that were advocated are far worse for our health than animal fat ever was.
The original change had nothing to do with science, but dogma from lobbying and advocacy groups.
In the same way, we see many people's political or economic views dictate how they behave about Climate -- science or fact has nothing to do with it.
Right now, we have exceedingly wealthy companies selling oil, coal, and natural gas. It's in their economic interest (to the tune of trillions of dollars) to protect their profits. It shouldn't surprise anybody that they will do everything in their power to protect their fortunes.
Oil companies have done so in the past, doing everything in their power to discredit and fight a scientist who proved that tetraethyllead is a highly dangerous neurotoxin. All over a minor change to their operation (unleaded gas), and did not really affect their entire ability to sell.
On the other hand, you have what motivates the scientists: Sure, you have "the pursuit of knowledge", but at the end of the day, they want to be paid and let their families live comfortably. To do that, each scientist is being very interested in disproving somebody else's work, because if you can disprove another paper, you gain notoriety and prestige for knowing your shit better than the other guy. By proving they know more, they can get promotions, positions at better institutions, pay increases, prestige... The stuff everybody wants.
The reason consensus matters is because in general, consensus forms because everything else has had all of its problems exposed.