'The new release comprises layer groups (which were introduced after 2.7.1), an almost done text-on-canvas feature, the all-new brush engine and of course the new single window mode.'"
Single window mode is all you need to know about why you should upgrade.
While I agree wholeheartedly that KDE4.x is WAY WAY WAY too resource hungry, what really helps is disabling Nepomuk & Akonadi. Those two services are at least 50% of the problem. I have a 1.3 GHz Pentium M & 512 MB of RAM on an old laptop and it runs reasonably once those two are shutdown.
Disclaimer: I left KDE as a desktop (on my laptop) for LXDE (Kubuntu -> LXDE + Ubuntu Minimal -> Lubuntu) about a year ago and have been very happy with the result. I still use some KDE apps - Dolphin & Clementine - but otherwise I've left it behind. The LXDE + Ubuntu Minimal was because I wasn't happy with the maturity of the Lubuntu distro until 10.10.
Most likely it means that the engine has terrible spin up/down times and/or is inefficient at doing them. Its best operated at constant speed, generating electricity for an electric motor which actually pushes you forward.
Much like modern trains except they have diesel engines.
I wish I hadn't commented earlier because I have mod points and you would definitely get one from me.
A large portion of purchasing is the trust aspect. Most of my job is Continuous Improvement and Quality Assurance. I work with new and existing vendors constantly trying to improve our products profitability and believe me the last thing you want is a flaky vendor who will not stand behind their product. A good example I have is a label vendor we had formerly used. Two years ago we decided to revamp the look of one of our lines of hand tools and chose to use a vendor we had been using for over a decade with no real problems due to their price and the performance of their sample labels in our application during testing. Almost immediately after receiving the first batch the labels began to fall off our products. Their first excuse was that during testing the tools we tested on had a different diameter handle then what production had. That was true, but subsequent testing showed the labels coming off irregardless or diameter. Next they blamed the finish, stating that it must have changed - it hadn't. And so on and so forth. Finally this past winter they said they would no longer accept any complaints about their labels nor would reimburse us for failing to adhere. In the meantime this is going on the salesperson for the vendor would directly contact the marketing department over these and other projects after being told expressly numerous times not to do so. they would also constantly be late with deliveries and any promises they gave could not be taken seriously. In the end we decided to pull all of the labels they produced for us from them. Even if they provided the labels for free the amount of time spent dealing with them and their performance did not make it worth while.
In the end, it's about total cost. Not just the actual price of the product but customer service and time spent dealing with issues as they arise is a huge factor. It reminds me of an old saying which has been attributed to John Ruskin: "It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money — that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do."
The same goes for MP3 players which use Flash as well.
My wife was caught by that scam on eBay. About 4 or 5 years ago she bought what was reportedly a 4 GB MP3 player from Hong Kong - no name brand, but it was a good price. (At this point I would like to point out I did council her on not buying anything electronic from Hong Kong. The horror stories about cheap products from that part of the world plus it being far too cheap against anything from north America made me suspicious). After a couple weeks she complains it messed up. So I dutifully wipe it using the disc which came with the player and reloaded on everything she put on previously. Suddenly I get an error message that the player is full when I had put no where near the 4 GB limit on it yet. So before I try again I take the model number and punch it into Google (although it might have been metacrawler back then). The first link which popped up was about this model having the exact same issue I was having. it turns out that the seller was taking 1 GB drives, changing the firmware to read 4 GB and selling them as such. The kicker was that the supplied format disc just rehacked the MP3 player instead of doing it right. I ended up downloading a correct recovery disc for it which did in fact reveal the 1 GB limit. She complained, but being eBay, they did nothing. In the end she bought a 4 GB Sansa and it serves as my daily distraction from my commute. (Note: I did load Rockbox onto it because the Sansa OS is terrible and can't be happier.)
Agreed. My ancient laptop (Pentium M / 512 MB RAM / 30 GB HD) runs Lubuntu flawlessly. Granted I have installed some 'bloatware' due to preferences (Dolphin file manager, Clementine Music Player, Opera Web browser) but overall I love it. And you can even have transparent bars above and below if you like a bit of bling.
I used to prefer KDE 3. Then KDE4 came along and replaced it; and the new design just made too many fixed assumptions about things I wanted to configure, and constantly threw in my face things I didn't want to *have* to configure. I never really cared about the stability / completness issue of the early 4.x series - I respect it took a while to refactor all that code. Still, with the fundamental interface changes they made, even today, I just don't want to use KDE4.
May I suggest trying out LXDE? It's very much like Windows 2000 & KDE3 in terms of minimalist fluff. It does have a few usability issues (PCManFM is nowhere near what Dolphin is at the moment, Menu modifications still require editing a text file) but overall it's lightweight, rock solid and still heavily developed.
It doesn't matter and hasn't for years. You can install Gnome & KDE apps side-by-side and they just work. It's even gotten to the point where many distros can be set up to use Gnome or KDE icons across the board, no matter the family. In fact, Canonical's Unity 2D project is based on qt and uses many gtk libraries as well. It's all about the tools and what works the best.
Agreed. I have come to Slashdot every April first hoping to have the return of the OMG Ponies. It was legendary.
While I have too high a number to attempt to discuss how the level of discourse has fallen around here, the number of joke articles on April 1 has truly sucked. I'll take a couple GOOD joke articles but that's it.
As much as it's unpopular, we should all thank Microsoft for putting this great piece of kit out in the public and even moreso for not going after the API which is floatng out there like many corporations do nowadays.
Jabber is missing a lot of stuff which Yahoo messenger does very well - like photo sharing and video chat. When I have to defile myself by using XP (about once a month for MS Publisher) Yahoo messenger is still by far the best chat client I have used - closed and open source.
Agreed. How would this be any different to a demolition company letting people come in and take away the building materials from a building they tore down for whatever project they desire? One person's trash is another's treasure.
Ok, so it's a streaming service (a la Last.fm & Pandora), you can buy music from (a la Amazon & Apple) with the backing of Google. I get it that because it has Google's ecosystem that it has a really good shot at surviving. What I don't understand is what is *REALLY* going on. These guys are notorious for doing funky stuff that either instantly changes the landscape (Chrome, Picasa) or bombs horribly (Buzz). This smells funny - almost too obvious for Google. There has to be something which truly sets it apart, not another 'me too' product. Maybe it's small label work? I'm not really sure.
While I am on the fence about the app being taken down (I think 'curing homosexuality' is silly at best and dangerous at worst, and I also believe that everyone has a right to free speech which in my non-lawyer opinion this covers) I wonder how much it was actually downloaded? Is this thing worth the fury it unleashed? Or did it do a Streisand effect for the group's visibility? Did we cause this organization a favor by getting the app pulled?
Slashdot Mirror
'The new release comprises layer groups (which were introduced after 2.7.1), an almost done text-on-canvas feature, the all-new brush engine and of course the new single window mode.'"
Single window mode is all you need to know about why you should upgrade.
While I agree wholeheartedly that KDE4.x is WAY WAY WAY too resource hungry, what really helps is disabling Nepomuk & Akonadi. Those two services are at least 50% of the problem. I have a 1.3 GHz Pentium M & 512 MB of RAM on an old laptop and it runs reasonably once those two are shutdown.
Disclaimer: I left KDE as a desktop (on my laptop) for LXDE (Kubuntu -> LXDE + Ubuntu Minimal -> Lubuntu) about a year ago and have been very happy with the result. I still use some KDE apps - Dolphin & Clementine - but otherwise I've left it behind. The LXDE + Ubuntu Minimal was because I wasn't happy with the maturity of the Lubuntu distro until 10.10.
What the hell do you have in your luggage that needs THAT?!?
The laser was mounted onto the deck of the Navy’s self-defense test ship, former USS Paul Foster (DD 964).
Too bad the ship wasn't called Sea Bass
Most likely it means that the engine has terrible spin up/down times and/or is inefficient at doing them. Its best operated at constant speed, generating electricity for an electric motor which actually pushes you forward.
Much like modern trains except they have diesel engines.
I wish I hadn't commented earlier because I have mod points and you would definitely get one from me.
A large portion of purchasing is the trust aspect. Most of my job is Continuous Improvement and Quality Assurance. I work with new and existing vendors constantly trying to improve our products profitability and believe me the last thing you want is a flaky vendor who will not stand behind their product. A good example I have is a label vendor we had formerly used. Two years ago we decided to revamp the look of one of our lines of hand tools and chose to use a vendor we had been using for over a decade with no real problems due to their price and the performance of their sample labels in our application during testing. Almost immediately after receiving the first batch the labels began to fall off our products. Their first excuse was that during testing the tools we tested on had a different diameter handle then what production had. That was true, but subsequent testing showed the labels coming off irregardless or diameter. Next they blamed the finish, stating that it must have changed - it hadn't. And so on and so forth. Finally this past winter they said they would no longer accept any complaints about their labels nor would reimburse us for failing to adhere. In the meantime this is going on the salesperson for the vendor would directly contact the marketing department over these and other projects after being told expressly numerous times not to do so. they would also constantly be late with deliveries and any promises they gave could not be taken seriously. In the end we decided to pull all of the labels they produced for us from them. Even if they provided the labels for free the amount of time spent dealing with them and their performance did not make it worth while.
In the end, it's about total cost. Not just the actual price of the product but customer service and time spent dealing with issues as they arise is a huge factor. It reminds me of an old saying which has been attributed to John Ruskin: "It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money — that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do."
The same goes for MP3 players which use Flash as well.
My wife was caught by that scam on eBay. About 4 or 5 years ago she bought what was reportedly a 4 GB MP3 player from Hong Kong - no name brand, but it was a good price. (At this point I would like to point out I did council her on not buying anything electronic from Hong Kong. The horror stories about cheap products from that part of the world plus it being far too cheap against anything from north America made me suspicious). After a couple weeks she complains it messed up. So I dutifully wipe it using the disc which came with the player and reloaded on everything she put on previously. Suddenly I get an error message that the player is full when I had put no where near the 4 GB limit on it yet. So before I try again I take the model number and punch it into Google (although it might have been metacrawler back then). The first link which popped up was about this model having the exact same issue I was having. it turns out that the seller was taking 1 GB drives, changing the firmware to read 4 GB and selling them as such. The kicker was that the supplied format disc just rehacked the MP3 player instead of doing it right. I ended up downloading a correct recovery disc for it which did in fact reveal the 1 GB limit. She complained, but being eBay, they did nothing. In the end she bought a 4 GB Sansa and it serves as my daily distraction from my commute. (Note: I did load Rockbox onto it because the Sansa OS is terrible and can't be happier.)
I'm trying to figure out if you're trolling or truly insightful.
As an Mechanical Engineer I'd be proud to consider these two my peers.
Agreed. My ancient laptop (Pentium M / 512 MB RAM / 30 GB HD) runs Lubuntu flawlessly. Granted I have installed some 'bloatware' due to preferences (Dolphin file manager, Clementine Music Player, Opera Web browser) but overall I love it. And you can even have transparent bars above and below if you like a bit of bling.
I used to prefer KDE 3. Then KDE4 came along and replaced it; and the new design just made too many fixed assumptions about things I wanted to configure, and constantly threw in my face things I didn't want to *have* to configure. I never really cared about the stability / completness issue of the early 4.x series - I respect it took a while to refactor all that code. Still, with the fundamental interface changes they made, even today, I just don't want to use KDE4.
May I suggest trying out LXDE? It's very much like Windows 2000 & KDE3 in terms of minimalist fluff. It does have a few usability issues (PCManFM is nowhere near what Dolphin is at the moment, Menu modifications still require editing a text file) but overall it's lightweight, rock solid and still heavily developed.
It doesn't matter and hasn't for years. You can install Gnome & KDE apps side-by-side and they just work. It's even gotten to the point where many distros can be set up to use Gnome or KDE icons across the board, no matter the family. In fact, Canonical's Unity 2D project is based on qt and uses many gtk libraries as well. It's all about the tools and what works the best.
If somebody does that again, slap them. Tell them Monstertrimble from Winnipeg said it was OK.
Zune + Android = iPod Killer?
Agreed. I have come to Slashdot every April first hoping to have the return of the OMG Ponies. It was legendary.
While I have too high a number to attempt to discuss how the level of discourse has fallen around here, the number of joke articles on April 1 has truly sucked. I'll take a couple GOOD joke articles but that's it.
As much as it's unpopular, we should all thank Microsoft for putting this great piece of kit out in the public and even moreso for not going after the API which is floatng out there like many corporations do nowadays.
Jabber is missing a lot of stuff which Yahoo messenger does very well - like photo sharing and video chat. When I have to defile myself by using XP (about once a month for MS Publisher) Yahoo messenger is still by far the best chat client I have used - closed and open source.
Agreed. How would this be any different to a demolition company letting people come in and take away the building materials from a building they tore down for whatever project they desire? One person's trash is another's treasure.
Release the protocol on your messenger service. The rest I could care less.
Ok, so it's a streaming service (a la Last.fm & Pandora), you can buy music from (a la Amazon & Apple) with the backing of Google. I get it that because it has Google's ecosystem that it has a really good shot at surviving. What I don't understand is what is *REALLY* going on. These guys are notorious for doing funky stuff that either instantly changes the landscape (Chrome, Picasa) or bombs horribly (Buzz). This smells funny - almost too obvious for Google. There has to be something which truly sets it apart, not another 'me too' product. Maybe it's small label work? I'm not really sure.
Um, UID of 43?!? That's TRWTF.
Oh lord, please mod this up. Amen.
"If we litigate, we have a chance to win."
Maybe by Charlie Sheen's definition of winning.
I am quite aware of what a 'Bender' is - no need to ask.
But why would you be riding a robot anyway?
While I am on the fence about the app being taken down (I think 'curing homosexuality' is silly at best and dangerous at worst, and I also believe that everyone has a right to free speech which in my non-lawyer opinion this covers) I wonder how much it was actually downloaded? Is this thing worth the fury it unleashed? Or did it do a Streisand effect for the group's visibility? Did we cause this organization a favor by getting the app pulled?