Down the line, your mom and pop shop operates on credit. Sometimes, they operate on their own reserves, but this is suboptimal usage of resources.
This does not mean they operate beyond their means, simply that the borrow their rolling funds, so they can ignore seasonal variations in trade.
They borrow from banks, who gladly lend them money when they have money to lend.
The money the banks have to lend is capped by their reserves. The liquid assets they have.
The value of those assets is partly dependent on the market. That is, the belief those assets are worth something.
For many banks, the assets are though to be worth something also because they are insured. By AIG.
So, if AIG fails, the mom and pop shop down the line closes.
If you think this is a big Ponzi scheme, you are actually wrong. It is all about optimally allocating resources. And the market collectively makes bets on where to put the money. Once in a while, it fails. In a centralised economy, you get the same problems if some bureaucrat spectacularly misplaced his bets on the future. But as a bonus, in practise, he hardly ever get it right, unlike the market...
Which mostly makes the correct bets. Except when it also fails spectacularly.
Has it occurred to you that some people don't care much for nationalities at all? That for them, it is basically administrative hassle you go through?
And that doesn't make them bad people, on the contrary: they probably just don't believe there is much of a link between geology and human qualities...
That is precisely his point. version numbers are just that, pointless numbers.
See, LaTeX has a version number converging to e.
Emacs only changes the last digit nowadays, even for big updates.
For a long time, linux odd minor version number meant unstable.
Ubuntu gave up on numbers, they have dates!
A version number means what the devs say it means, nothing less, nothing more. So basically, you _have_ to read what the devs say. You cannot assume anything from the version number.
Hell, someone might decide that the first three characters of the hash of the tgz might be a good version number. And it might be, too.
No, you don't understand. What they did was right.
This is open source, remember? You need to have people using your code so it advances. It is unfortunate that big architecture changes lead to some pain, but if you wait for perfection, you end like enlightenment: nowhere at all.
KDE 2 was necessary as is KDE 4. sometimes, you have reached a point where you cannot refine your soft altogether, you need to take the leap, put all that you learnt in a new architecture WITH those things that were impossible, and go from there.
KDE 4.0 could have been released as a user release, probably. In two-three years. If all developers kept on...
See, major distros have people doing KDE packaging as part of their job description. If the packagers don't follow the development process, frankly, what can KDE do?
Suse did not fuck up. how could that be? Oh, yeah, they actually care about the quality of what they release, and they actually test it. Incredible.
This was really a huge fedora fuck-up. Whch is to be expected, Red hat has a long story of trying to hurt KDE, either through incompetence, or downright GNOME fanboyism...
Past, present and future
While KDE 4.1 aims at being the first release suitable for early adopting users, some features you are used to in KDE 3.5 are not implemented yet. The KDE team is working on those and strives to make them available in one of the next releases. While there is no guarantee that every single feature from KDE 3.5 will be implemented, KDE 4.1 already provides a powerful and feature-rich working environment.
Note that some options in the UI have moved to a place in the context of the data they manipulate, so make sure you have a closer look before you report anything missing in action.
KDE 4.1 is a huge step forward in the KDE4 series and hopefully sets the pace for future development. KDE 4.2 can be expected in January 2009.âoeâ
Uhhh OS X 1.0 was a disaster. It really was. garish, slow as to be unusable.
The Terminal.app was unusable if antialiasing was not turned off!
KDE 4.0 was essentially API-complete, and had to be released so third-party developers would start porting their apps. People think of KDE as a single block, but they forget that its success is based on excellent libraries used to produce such apps as amarok or k3b...
and if they had waited until the state we are at now, 4.2, the apps would be ported a year after that.
Actually, he switched because his distro fucked up and replaced KDE 3.5.x with KDE 4.0, which is amazingly stupid.
In his situation, if I had decided to not change distro, I too would have migrated to GNOME. And to be frank, I am a huge KDE fan (and KDE 4.2 is the best KDE yet to me -- and I use KDE since 1.0.1:) )
I suspect the important fact behind the article is not so much about KDE or GNOME, but really about how fedora completely fucked up their packaging, making the only actual desktop option GNOME.
But it seems desktop flamewars are more interesting to trolls than distro flamewars...
yes... Of course, KDE 3.5.9 simply was never released. It vanished mysteriously one evening from all hard drives around the globe, and was never seen after that.
Now, is KDE 3.5.9 (actually, now is really a KDE 4.2-RC, but what the heck). Now is all that is released now. And the best DE is still KDE (yes I am biased), some flavour thereof at least.
OK. Bullshit. The original desktop layout is in fact an option in 4.2.
Actually, the old-style menu is also. And if you really care about efficiency, ALT-F2 is your friend, not a menu.
No features were removed, the foundations were rebuilt. KDE 4.2 is pretty much were 3.5 was in terms of desktop features. In a quarter of the time. So it _was_ worth the pain.
Every bit of it. Because sometimes, there is no other way, if API and binary compatibility is going to be kept through the whole 4.x.
Except Python always breaks compatibility. It is amazing how people keep inventing nice clean languages, realise they miss this or that crucial feature, develop it in a non-compatible way, and iterate.
And then the nice simple language is not so nice and simple anymore. And people move onto the next fad.
But in python, people stay with the last version they were comfortable with! So you have n versions of the damn thing installed, because devs will not port their pet project to the latest version as it appears (I understand their pain, but in makes user's lives miserable)
No large C++ project well written? Bullshit! KDE? Qt? Hell, Quake for that matter...
I have my own 150 000 loc C++ project which I think is not badly written.
C++ if you understand it _is_ the most versatile language there is. But understanding the compiler's error messages when using templates is a bit of a zen exercise;)
One of the larger problems with the EU is that in general, it is a better, more transparent government than the national ones. It panders very little to special groups, and does almost non of the politics meant to please people instead of doing the right thing.
Because the national governments are so opaque, the people can maintain the illusion that their is democratic. And in general, when something bad comes from the EU, you can trace it to some local political squabble...
This is wrong on many levels. You claim you like your dynamic languages. Fine, but this also means you only use them for tasks where the cost is acceptable.
The run-time cost, and also the hidden errors, because you obviously do not understand why there are types in the first place.
Which in turns means there is something profound about maths and formal logic that you have not yet understood.
So you are in essence claiming that your ignorance is not only a valid opinion, but also the valid opinion.
You also claim that raw machine code is ultimately powerful or versatile. This assumes you are capable of producing better assembly than your compiler. All the time. Which is no small feat nowadays.
Absolutely, those are tech support issues. If you introduce bugs in your software (and intentional bugs and limitations of functionality are bugs too).
21 inches wide-displays not displaying 800x600 is a bug BTW, the VESA standard should be followed, even if by displaying a ridiculously small rectangle at the center of the screen, or absurdly ugly oversampling.
B/W printers are not expected to print in colour, but they are expected to print whatever I send to them that is within their specs.
If your iBrick is supposedly meant to be WiFi enabled, it is legitimate for you to expect VoIP to work.
If your telephone comes with a dev kit, it is legitimate for you to expect it not to be crippled beyond salvation.
Those things are _bugs_ that should not be there and as such grounds for tech support. You will be answered that it is company policy to fuck over users and devs, which is legitimate, but it forces Apple to acknowledge there _is_ a problem.
This is precisely my point. But the grand-parent was arguing that his actions could be devoid of consequences.
As for the actions of defective by design, the reactions they generated are wayyyyy beyond reasonable: it is not as though they are advocating planting bombs. Technically, the restrictions imposed on users and developers by apple _are_ a tech support issue.
It should be so, if only to make sure that hurting the consumer also hurts the bottom line.
Slashdot Mirror
It works something like that.
Down the line, your mom and pop shop operates on credit. Sometimes, they operate on their own reserves, but this is suboptimal usage of resources.
This does not mean they operate beyond their means, simply that the borrow their rolling funds, so they can ignore seasonal variations in trade.
They borrow from banks, who gladly lend them money when they have money to lend.
The money the banks have to lend is capped by their reserves. The liquid assets they have.
The value of those assets is partly dependent on the market. That is, the belief those assets are worth something.
For many banks, the assets are though to be worth something also because they are insured. By AIG.
So, if AIG fails, the mom and pop shop down the line closes.
If you think this is a big Ponzi scheme, you are actually wrong. It is all about optimally allocating resources. And the market collectively makes bets on where to put the money. Once in a while, it fails. In a centralised economy, you get the same problems if some bureaucrat spectacularly misplaced his bets on the future. But as a bonus, in practise, he hardly ever get it right, unlike the market...
Which mostly makes the correct bets. Except when it also fails spectacularly.
Has it occurred to you that some people don't care much for nationalities at all? That for them, it is basically administrative hassle you go through?
And that doesn't make them bad people, on the contrary: they probably just don't believe there is much of a link between geology and human qualities...
That is precisely his point. version numbers are just that, pointless numbers.
See, LaTeX has a version number converging to e.
Emacs only changes the last digit nowadays, even for big updates.
For a long time, linux odd minor version number meant unstable.
Ubuntu gave up on numbers, they have dates!
A version number means what the devs say it means, nothing less, nothing more. So basically, you _have_ to read what the devs say. You cannot assume anything from the version number.
Hell, someone might decide that the first three characters of the hash of the tgz might be a good version number. And it might be, too.
No, you don't understand. What they did was right.
This is open source, remember? You need to have people using your code so it advances. It is unfortunate that big architecture changes lead to some pain, but if you wait for perfection, you end like enlightenment: nowhere at all.
KDE 2 was necessary as is KDE 4. sometimes, you have reached a point where you cannot refine your soft altogether, you need to take the leap, put all that you learnt in a new architecture WITH those things that were impossible, and go from there.
KDE 4.0 could have been released as a user release, probably. In two-three years. If all developers kept on...
yes, but you wrote sftp, and that will require an ftp server at one end ;)
And does he pay the taxes?
See, major distros have people doing KDE packaging as part of their job description. If the packagers don't follow the development process, frankly, what can KDE do?
Suse did not fuck up. how could that be? Oh, yeah, they actually care about the quality of what they release, and they actually test it. Incredible.
This was really a huge fedora fuck-up. Whch is to be expected, Red hat has a long story of trying to hurt KDE, either through incompetence, or downright GNOME fanboyism...
Actually, if you read the actual announcement, it is obvious the 4.0 was put out so people start banging on it:
http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.0/
and that 4.1 was the first user release:
http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.1/
it even says:
Past, present and future
While KDE 4.1 aims at being the first release suitable for early adopting users, some features you are used to in KDE 3.5 are not implemented yet. The KDE team is working on those and strives to make them available in one of the next releases. While there is no guarantee that every single feature from KDE 3.5 will be implemented, KDE 4.1 already provides a powerful and feature-rich working environment.
Note that some options in the UI have moved to a place in the context of the data they manipulate, so make sure you have a closer look before you report anything missing in action.
KDE 4.1 is a huge step forward in the KDE4 series and hopefully sets the pace for future development. KDE 4.2 can be expected in January 2009.âoeâ
Uhhh OS X 1.0 was a disaster. It really was. garish, slow as to be unusable.
The Terminal.app was unusable if antialiasing was not turned off!
KDE 4.0 was essentially API-complete, and had to be released so third-party developers would start porting their apps. People think of KDE as a single block, but they forget that its success is based on excellent libraries used to produce such apps as amarok or k3b...
and if they had waited until the state we are at now, 4.2, the apps would be ported a year after that.
This is an amazingly ignorant post to have been modded informative.
It is not the same people that do PIM and desktop and it is yet another team which does the effects.
So basically, there is absolutely no point in trying to prevent people from polishing the apps, because it will have 0 effect on getting new features.
In fact, it might actually hinder, because the atmosphere for developers becomes poisonous, and they give up.
Actually, he switched because his distro fucked up and replaced KDE 3.5.x with KDE 4.0, which is amazingly stupid.
In his situation, if I had decided to not change distro, I too would have migrated to GNOME. And to be frank, I am a huge KDE fan (and KDE 4.2 is the best KDE yet to me -- and I use KDE since 1.0.1 :) )
No, no, sftp will only work if there is a server on the other side. fish://, however will work if you can log through ssh.
Big difference :)
I suspect the important fact behind the article is not so much about KDE or GNOME, but really about how fedora completely fucked up their packaging, making the only actual desktop option GNOME.
But it seems desktop flamewars are more interesting to trolls than distro flamewars...
Uhhh, KDE 4.2, released next week is not alpha. in fact, it is probably the best KDE release yet.
Including the 3.5. In fact, I am using the svn, and I could never return to 3.5, it feels so outdated...
yes... Of course, KDE 3.5.9 simply was never released. It vanished mysteriously one evening from all hard drives around the globe, and was never seen after that.
Now, is KDE 3.5.9 (actually, now is really a KDE 4.2-RC, but what the heck). Now is all that is released now. And the best DE is still KDE (yes I am biased), some flavour thereof at least.
OK. Bullshit. The original desktop layout is in fact an option in 4.2.
Actually, the old-style menu is also. And if you really care about efficiency, ALT-F2 is your friend, not a menu.
No features were removed, the foundations were rebuilt. KDE 4.2 is pretty much were 3.5 was in terms of desktop features. In a quarter of the time. So it _was_ worth the pain.
Every bit of it. Because sometimes, there is no other way, if API and binary compatibility is going to be kept through the whole 4.x.
Except Python always breaks compatibility. It is amazing how people keep inventing nice clean languages, realise they miss this or that crucial feature, develop it in a non-compatible way, and iterate.
And then the nice simple language is not so nice and simple anymore. And people move onto the next fad.
But in python, people stay with the last version they were comfortable with! So you have n versions of the damn thing installed, because devs will not port their pet project to the latest version as it appears (I understand their pain, but in makes user's lives miserable)
The thing is that kubuntu has the worst packaging of KDE4. Much worse than if you compile from source!
I will not attribute to malice what is obviously incompetence, but such incompetence is nearly art.
Bullshit. There is no panel hiding in 4.1. Blame our distro, not KDE.
Happily, hiding is really back for 4.2
No large C++ project well written? Bullshit!
KDE? Qt?
Hell, Quake for that matter...
I have my own 150 000 loc C++ project which I think is not badly written.
C++ if you understand it _is_ the most versatile language there is. But understanding the compiler's error messages when using templates is a bit of a zen exercise ;)
I wish I had mod points...
One of the larger problems with the EU is that in general, it is a better, more transparent government than the national ones. It panders very little to special groups, and does almost non of the politics meant to please people instead of doing the right thing.
Because the national governments are so opaque, the people can maintain the illusion that their is democratic. And in general, when something bad comes from the EU, you can trace it to some local political squabble...
This is wrong on many levels. You claim you like your dynamic languages. Fine, but this also means you only use them for tasks where the cost is acceptable.
The run-time cost, and also the hidden errors, because you obviously do not understand why there are types in the first place.
Which in turns means there is something profound about maths and formal logic that you have not yet understood.
So you are in essence claiming that your ignorance is not only a valid opinion, but also the valid opinion.
You also claim that raw machine code is ultimately powerful or versatile. This assumes you are capable of producing better assembly than your compiler. All the time. Which is no small feat nowadays.
Actually, the KDE e.V. is distinct from the KDE project, so you can be a contributor and yet have no connections whatsoever with the e.V.
And you can contribute more than just bugs and feedback. Artwork is appreciated, so is contributing text for the websites, and help on IRC.
Absolutely, those are tech support issues. If you introduce bugs in your software (and intentional bugs and limitations of functionality are bugs too).
21 inches wide-displays not displaying 800x600 is a bug BTW, the VESA standard should be followed, even if by displaying a ridiculously small rectangle at the center of the screen, or absurdly ugly oversampling.
B/W printers are not expected to print in colour, but they are expected to print whatever I send to them that is within their specs.
If your iBrick is supposedly meant to be WiFi enabled, it is legitimate for you to expect VoIP to work.
If your telephone comes with a dev kit, it is legitimate for you to expect it not to be crippled beyond salvation.
Those things are _bugs_ that should not be there and as such grounds for tech support. You will be answered that it is company policy to fuck over users and devs, which is legitimate, but it forces Apple to acknowledge there _is_ a problem.
This is precisely my point. But the grand-parent was arguing that his actions could be devoid of consequences.
As for the actions of defective by design, the reactions they generated are wayyyyy beyond reasonable: it is not as though they are advocating planting bombs. Technically, the restrictions imposed on users and developers by apple _are_ a tech support issue.
It should be so, if only to make sure that hurting the consumer also hurts the bottom line.