I think the idea that it shouldn't be used as a file manager just because it was designed as a browser totally silly. Can you name any other POSIX file manager that does the arbitrary horizontal/vertical tiling combined with all the other awesome features Konqueror has? What feature makes Dolphin better than Konqueror for you?
I don't think there is anything wrong with "right tool for the right job". My POSIX file manager is Konqueror, as for me it beats anything else hands down. So it's my one and only tool for the job.
Konqueror still has a lot of functionality you won't find in Dolphin. There is no limit in horizontal or vertical tiling; Dolphin only does the left/right split. Konqueror uses the space very efficiently in this way. I haven't found anything that comes even close.
I think a general problem in KDE (may be true for other software projects, too) is that the developers are always driven by stuff that's challenging and fun to implement, but they (understandably) don't enjoy taking care of the "easier" but more time consuming details. They start out with great plans and change everything from scratch, but they totally underestimate how much work it will actually be to get everything right again, so they run out of time to do it.
The loser in all of this is the end user, who wants to have a working desktop. Whenever it is working "too well", the developers come up with some great new plan how to do it all better. But in reality, this means that 80%-90% of the time the users will have to put up with a system that is broken to varying degrees. Seems just like a broken design model to begin with. It was like this in both KDE3=>4 and 4=>5 transitions.
And when the users complain, they are told that it's all the work of volunteers and that they should not have any expectations. They are told to fix it themselves, because it's all FOSS. But from a user's point of view, one could say that it's the developers who actually broke it. The ambitious developers get to steer a project into a certain direction, even if the community suffers from it. That's a very fundamental unsolved problem.
Actually, I have seen something similar recently on a kubuntu 12.04 machine. The web cam just went on on its own. If I remember correctly, it went off as soon as I killed skype. I am not sure whether this makes it more or less concerning, but my guess is that skype is involved.
This machine is fully patched and uses pretty strict firewall rules. Of course, this his my wife's machine, and my guess is that her browsing habits are not very safe. She me told that the cam went on and off on its own several times before...
I think this is goddamn just awesome. The only question I have is: why didn't someone think about this before?
I often find myself switching between CLI and GUI, either of which has usability advantages depending on the problem at hand. This one has a good chance of combining the some of advantages of both and come out as a solution outperforming either of the two traditional options. Nice job! So inspiring. Very creative! Way to go, E!
...they also seemed to have a rough spot in the past months. For months, there was no stable version available for ubuntu Precise, which is an LTS. Last month, they finally released 3.5.13.1, with support for Precise. I also had trouble accessing their web page and repos for many days in a row. Not exactly the kind of stability I would expect for my main DE.
By the way, KDE 3.5 was my first Linux experience. It was my DE of choice; it worked well and I liked the configurability. But I always found it butt ugly. Looked way old-fashioned and outdated compared to OSs/DEs. Tried a few different themes, but that only made it worse. I still stayed with it for its functionality. But I always found it totally unsexy.
I think he/she says "sub-$1000 laptop" because GP suggested to try getting all that stuff in a "cheap non-apple laptop" (and not because he/she thinks the MBP is less than $1000).
It's because of what someone else explained further above: Higgs field is a quantum field, which fluctuates constantly. Particles spontaneously emerge and disappear all the time. Same thing is true for photons: even in a perfectly dark room, you have spontaneously photons appearing and disappearing. This leads to the so-called zero-point-field. Even when there are no "real" photons in a dark room, the electromagnetic field is not zero. It fluctuates around zero due to these so-called "virtual photons". Same is true for every quantum field. To generate a "real" Higgs particle you need 125 GeV. Virtual bosons come and go all the time (for free). Interaction with "massive" particles gives them their mass.
Yes ggp has binding energy right. Except this has nothing to with the Higgs Boson. Higgs Boson is about why particles have a rest mass, i. e. the mass that elementary particles still have after taking everything apart (so that binding energy/mass does not play a role).
A photon bounces off mirrors because the electromagnetic field which describes the photon probability density is governed by Maxwell's equations. And according to those, and electromagnetic wave is reflected off a mirror (a perfect metal, for instance). Another way of looking at it is that photons interact with charges. When a photon approaches a metal, it stirs up the charges (electrons) inside the metal, which, in turn, interact with the photon (electromagnetic field) to change the photon's direction.
The way gravity affects the trajectory of photons is because (according to the theory of general relativity) mass distorts space-time itself. In this picture, you could think that the photon flies "straight" in a "bent" space-time.
So how does the Wayland solution do in terms of bandwidth? I am not sure I fully understand your explanation, but it sounds like entire images are transferred, rather than just the drawing commands. Sounds like it would be using as much bandwidth as the "offscreen image" workaround.
Totally agree. I gave up on Amarok, too. It's crazy how it's bloated with all these UI features I never use. I am using bare VLC now. It's not pretty and quite barebones. The backend is a dream, plays everything. Of course, it's totally lacking DE integration, and for my taste it's a bit too barebones, but what can I do. Surprisingly, there are not too many decent linux audio players around:(
This is what I have been waiting for. After my initial excitement about (k)ubuntu release updates to get all the hardware running and supported, I am now at a state where everything is fine. The ongoing new 6-month releases are more of an annoyance than a great feature. Having to upgrade completely every 6 months just to get access to the latest software releases does not seem like a worth while effort. Sure, you can say that's what the LTS releases are for. But while the LTS releases do enjoy long-term support for security-relevant updates, they do not get a lot of software updates. So if you favorite application gets a major update after the LTS release you are out of luck. (Of course, you can fiddle something together on your own, but that's not really a low-maintenance solution.) Also, from my experience the LTS do not have less bugs than regular releases.
So if they can make rolling releases working with a high level of quality and testing, this would be really awesome from my point of view.
OK. So you are not afraid of Google spying on you, but you would be afraid of government agencies spying on you? Have you thought about that the government agencies may ask Google to hand them over your data set once they get interested in you? I just checked the dashboard. I agree that's not what you are afraid of. What you are afraid of is the data that can be generated by doing a sophisticated search on the complete data base. For instance the one that is a time profile of you telling what you did every minute you were using a computer or you had your android phone switched on. This one will tell which web site you surfed (=google-searched) from which IP address at what time and where you were (GPS in your phone) every minute. I am sure the search could be carried out using many different interesting parameters.
I admit I am guessing a bit here. Correct me if you know more details. But I think this kind of fantasizing will be important to assess how dangerous or not dangerous this data eating of companies like Google is.
I am also tired of all the inconsistencies between the 6-month releases of Ubuntu. I think now that ubuntu is running on a lot of hardware, focusing on consistency and reliability would be much more important. Many changes are only done for the sake of changing! And unfortunately, this usually means that a lot of stuff breaks and that I have to figure out things again. Yes, you could say, then you should be going with the LTS releases. The idea is good, but in reality, my impression is that the LTS releases are not better-cooked than any of the standard 6-month releases; they have about the same amount of bugs. Moreover, with LTS releases, you are stuck with old software in many cases. I think it would make more sense to move to 1-year, or even 2-year release cycles for the core OS, with apps updated and maintained in between.
Of course, when you know science as we do today, it's easy to say that this was an obvious dead end. However, imagine how much was known about anything such a long time ago. How could he have known that these experiments would not lead to success? Many other experiments were done at the same time (and much later) that seem much more esoteric, and which ultimately lead to scientific breakthroughs. What comes to my mind right now are Faraday's electrical experiments with frog legs...
So from that point of view, there's absolutely nothing wrong with Newton trying to "cook" some chemical elements seeking for new insights.
I respectfully disagree on which of these items would be called science or technology. The Physics Nobel Prize was just awarded for graphene with all its electronic applications. So you do not deem it science. Well, you have your right to your point of view. And, btw, it was the first time in 24 years in Madagaskar that they found a new carnivore (at least according to the summary). So it may not be as rare an event considering how many countries and islands there are around the globe...
* Quantum Computing
* Bandwidth of Optical Fibers
* Transistors based on Graphene
* New Display Technology
* New Input Devices
* Image Recognitions Techniques
* Encryption Algorithms
* Computer-powered Mathematics
* Computer-powered Physics
* New Processor Designs
* Laser technology (data transmission)
* Integrated Optics
* Magnetic (and optical) storage
* Solar Cells and other alternative energies
... and if I spend ten more minutes, I can probably come up with 50 more items which I believe are more interesting and relevant to geeks and the technology they like use and like to have in the future. Sounds a lot more "sexy" to me than a rodent-like looking little creature.
Sure, I will admit that my point of view is subjective. Everyone is free to disagree; different readers will prefer different topics. But how is my contribution "off-topic"? There are lots of comments every day discussing whether a submission is "worthy". I thought that this would be a valuable kind of feedback.
Slashdot Mirror
Dolphin still does not do the random horizontal/vertical tiling, does it? That's a killer feature for me.
I think the idea that it shouldn't be used as a file manager just because it was designed as a browser totally silly. Can you name any other POSIX file manager that does the arbitrary horizontal/vertical tiling combined with all the other awesome features Konqueror has? What feature makes Dolphin better than Konqueror for you?
I don't think there is anything wrong with "right tool for the right job". My POSIX file manager is Konqueror, as for me it beats anything else hands down. So it's my one and only tool for the job.
Please mod this up.
Konqueror still has a lot of functionality you won't find in Dolphin. There is no limit in horizontal or vertical tiling; Dolphin only does the left/right split. Konqueror uses the space very efficiently in this way. I haven't found anything that comes even close.
I think a general problem in KDE (may be true for other software projects, too) is that the developers are always driven by stuff that's challenging and fun to implement, but they (understandably) don't enjoy taking care of the "easier" but more time consuming details. They start out with great plans and change everything from scratch, but they totally underestimate how much work it will actually be to get everything right again, so they run out of time to do it.
The loser in all of this is the end user, who wants to have a working desktop. Whenever it is working "too well", the developers come up with some great new plan how to do it all better. But in reality, this means that 80%-90% of the time the users will have to put up with a system that is broken to varying degrees. Seems just like a broken design model to begin with. It was like this in both KDE3=>4 and 4=>5 transitions.
And when the users complain, they are told that it's all the work of volunteers and that they should not have any expectations. They are told to fix it themselves, because it's all FOSS. But from a user's point of view, one could say that it's the developers who actually broke it. The ambitious developers get to steer a project into a certain direction, even if the community suffers from it. That's a very fundamental unsolved problem.
Actually, I have seen something similar recently on a kubuntu 12.04 machine. The web cam just went on on its own. If I remember correctly, it went off as soon as I killed skype. I am not sure whether this makes it more or less concerning, but my guess is that skype is involved.
This machine is fully patched and uses pretty strict firewall rules. Of course, this his my wife's machine, and my guess is that her browsing habits are not very safe. She me told that the cam went on and off on its own several times before...
I think this is goddamn just awesome. The only question I have is: why didn't someone think about this before?
I often find myself switching between CLI and GUI, either of which has usability advantages depending on the problem at hand. This one has a good chance of combining the some of advantages of both and come out as a solution outperforming either of the two traditional options. Nice job! So inspiring. Very creative! Way to go, E!
What would you like to do an cannot?
...they also seemed to have a rough spot in the past months. For months, there was no stable version available for ubuntu Precise, which is an LTS. Last month, they finally released 3.5.13.1, with support for Precise. I also had trouble accessing their web page and repos for many days in a row. Not exactly the kind of stability I would expect for my main DE.
By the way, KDE 3.5 was my first Linux experience. It was my DE of choice; it worked well and I liked the configurability. But I always found it butt ugly. Looked way old-fashioned and outdated compared to OSs/DEs. Tried a few different themes, but that only made it worse. I still stayed with it for its functionality. But I always found it totally unsexy.
Why do you think the Linux community would pay more attention to a particular kind of hardware once Apple uses it?
I think he/she says "sub-$1000 laptop" because GP suggested to try getting all that stuff in a "cheap non-apple laptop" (and not because he/she thinks the MBP is less than $1000).
It's because of what someone else explained further above: Higgs field is a quantum field, which fluctuates constantly. Particles spontaneously emerge and disappear all the time. Same thing is true for photons: even in a perfectly dark room, you have spontaneously photons appearing and disappearing. This leads to the so-called zero-point-field. Even when there are no "real" photons in a dark room, the electromagnetic field is not zero. It fluctuates around zero due to these so-called "virtual photons". Same is true for every quantum field. To generate a "real" Higgs particle you need 125 GeV. Virtual bosons come and go all the time (for free). Interaction with "massive" particles gives them their mass.
Yes ggp has binding energy right. Except this has nothing to with the Higgs Boson. Higgs Boson is about why particles have a rest mass, i. e. the mass that elementary particles still have after taking everything apart (so that binding energy/mass does not play a role).
A photon bounces off mirrors because the electromagnetic field which describes the photon probability density is governed by Maxwell's equations. And according to those, and electromagnetic wave is reflected off a mirror (a perfect metal, for instance). Another way of looking at it is that photons interact with charges. When a photon approaches a metal, it stirs up the charges (electrons) inside the metal, which, in turn, interact with the photon (electromagnetic field) to change the photon's direction.
The way gravity affects the trajectory of photons is because (according to the theory of general relativity) mass distorts space-time itself. In this picture, you could think that the photon flies "straight" in a "bent" space-time.
... or maybe they belong to the previous owner's "missing" spouse?
So how does the Wayland solution do in terms of bandwidth? I am not sure I fully understand your explanation, but it sounds like entire images are transferred, rather than just the drawing commands. Sounds like it would be using as much bandwidth as the "offscreen image" workaround.
Totally agree. I gave up on Amarok, too. It's crazy how it's bloated with all these UI features I never use. I am using bare VLC now. It's not pretty and quite barebones. The backend is a dream, plays everything. Of course, it's totally lacking DE integration, and for my taste it's a bit too barebones, but what can I do. Surprisingly, there are not too many decent linux audio players around :(
... why hasn't anyone figured this out before? Is it too easy and too obvious to be true?
This is what I have been waiting for. After my initial excitement about (k)ubuntu release updates to get all the hardware running and supported, I am now at a state where everything is fine. The ongoing new 6-month releases are more of an annoyance than a great feature. Having to upgrade completely every 6 months just to get access to the latest software releases does not seem like a worth while effort. Sure, you can say that's what the LTS releases are for. But while the LTS releases do enjoy long-term support for security-relevant updates, they do not get a lot of software updates. So if you favorite application gets a major update after the LTS release you are out of luck. (Of course, you can fiddle something together on your own, but that's not really a low-maintenance solution.) Also, from my experience the LTS do not have less bugs than regular releases.
So if they can make rolling releases working with a high level of quality and testing, this would be really awesome from my point of view.
Summary: Republicans won. Democrats lost.
OK. So you are not afraid of Google spying on you, but you would be afraid of government agencies spying on you? Have you thought about that the government agencies may ask Google to hand them over your data set once they get interested in you? I just checked the dashboard. I agree that's not what you are afraid of. What you are afraid of is the data that can be generated by doing a sophisticated search on the complete data base. For instance the one that is a time profile of you telling what you did every minute you were using a computer or you had your android phone switched on. This one will tell which web site you surfed (=google-searched) from which IP address at what time and where you were (GPS in your phone) every minute. I am sure the search could be carried out using many different interesting parameters.
I admit I am guessing a bit here. Correct me if you know more details. But I think this kind of fantasizing will be important to assess how dangerous or not dangerous this data eating of companies like Google is.
I am also tired of all the inconsistencies between the 6-month releases of Ubuntu. I think now that ubuntu is running on a lot of hardware, focusing on consistency and reliability would be much more important. Many changes are only done for the sake of changing! And unfortunately, this usually means that a lot of stuff breaks and that I have to figure out things again. Yes, you could say, then you should be going with the LTS releases. The idea is good, but in reality, my impression is that the LTS releases are not better-cooked than any of the standard 6-month releases; they have about the same amount of bugs. Moreover, with LTS releases, you are stuck with old software in many cases. I think it would make more sense to move to 1-year, or even 2-year release cycles for the core OS, with apps updated and maintained in between.
Of course, when you know science as we do today, it's easy to say that this was an obvious dead end. However, imagine how much was known about anything such a long time ago. How could he have known that these experiments would not lead to success? Many other experiments were done at the same time (and much later) that seem much more esoteric, and which ultimately lead to scientific breakthroughs. What comes to my mind right now are Faraday's electrical experiments with frog legs...
So from that point of view, there's absolutely nothing wrong with Newton trying to "cook" some chemical elements seeking for new insights.
Awesome. You just made my day. That was a good laugh. Thanks!
I respectfully disagree on which of these items would be called science or technology. The Physics Nobel Prize was just awarded for graphene with all its electronic applications. So you do not deem it science. Well, you have your right to your point of view.
And, btw, it was the first time in 24 years in Madagaskar that they found a new carnivore (at least according to the summary). So it may not be as rare an event considering how many countries and islands there are around the globe...
* Quantum Computing
... and if I spend ten more minutes, I can probably come up with 50 more items which I believe are more interesting and relevant to geeks and the technology they like use and like to have in the future. Sounds a lot more "sexy" to me than a rodent-like looking little creature.
* Bandwidth of Optical Fibers
* Transistors based on Graphene
* New Display Technology
* New Input Devices
* Image Recognitions Techniques
* Encryption Algorithms
* Computer-powered Mathematics
* Computer-powered Physics
* New Processor Designs
* Laser technology (data transmission)
* Integrated Optics
* Magnetic (and optical) storage
* Solar Cells and other alternative energies
Sure, I will admit that my point of view is subjective. Everyone is free to disagree; different readers will prefer different topics. But how is my contribution "off-topic"? There are lots of comments every day discussing whether a submission is "worthy". I thought that this would be a valuable kind of feedback.