The WSJ article today goes into some detail about the arduous chase with little pay-off. Earthlink must have some really dedicated anti-spam activists to even try this. Think they are getting big bucks? Hardly. From the WSJ:
The lawsuits rarely collect payments because most spammers don't have much money. Last year, EarthLink won one of the industry's biggest settlements -- a $25 million judgment against a Tennessee spammer, but it hasn't yet collected a cent. The Federal Trade Commission has brought 48 actions against spammers who make false claims about products or identities, but it hasn't recovered much money either. "Many times, there is no money left," says Brian Huseman, staff attorney at the FTC.
And it involves a lot of grunt work per spammer. How much is your time worth? It's like "The Cuckoo's Egg" story again. For just this one guy, for example:
The pursuit of the Buffalo spammer became Ms. Youngblood's top priority early last year. She spent about 10 hours a week on the case, and her employees spent another 10 to 20 hours a week, in total, hunting to see where he was hiding on the network.
Unless we start seeing some high-profile jail time, there won't be much of a victory.
We have many different types of keyboards these days: cordless, black, split/ergonomic, even those you can roll up. But it seems that there is no longer much variety in layouts. I can't find one without those pesky Windows keys, for example. My personal issue is the ctrl key placement: my fingers being programmed for Emacs (and before that, Wordstar), I like it where the caps lock key is on the home row so it's more accessible. The classic Northgate Omnikeys gave me that option with a DIP switch setting and replacement keycaps. Alas, the old Northgate died (spilt coffee: my baby's fault).
Stores don't seem to sell keyboards these days with any significant variation in layout, nor keyboards that allow layout customization. There are ways to accomplish this sort of thing in software, but that has its limitations (such as switching between X and text consoles). I sure would like to see a little less conformance in keyboard layouts.
The article noted the absence of Lindows, but a more conspicuous absentee from the consortium's list is Red Hat. While Red Hat is an enthusiastic Gnome supporter that employs few (if any) KDE developers, this list is heavy with KDE supporters. Notably, Ark Linux is a project started by Bero, that ex-Red Hatter who quit because he thought Red Hat "crippled" KDE. Am I reading too much into this? Anybody know more?
View profiles? Yes, but there does not seem to be a way to make a folder open up with a specific view profile. It always opens up with the file management profile if I open up a directory, even with "view properties saved in directory". Moreover, view profiles do not save the window location, only the window size. A simple thing like opening a folder to have a specific location and size automatically seems impossible with KDE. DCOP scripting? Good grief.
Re:kde with gnome
on
Corporate KDE
·
· Score: 4, Informative
If you've never used a fully integrated GUI environment, it will be hard to appreciate what KDE is trying to accomplish on the desktop.
KDE's strength is in the integration. KDE is not about being yet another window manager, but was meant as a holistic answer to the desktop problem. A KDE desktop is meant to be a collection of integrated applications with predictable, uniform behavior. You will see the same file dialog (with URLs and bookmarks), print dialog, toolbar editor, font chooser, color picker, help infrastructure, address book, and predictable cut and paste. Sharing of components means familiar behavior throughout, such as the file manager embedded in the file open dialog or the image viewer embedded in the file manager. When you open a file, the dialog remembers the bookmarks and frequently used directories you used in other KDE apps. In other words, the KDE experience provides a uniformity, familiarity and predictability that goes well beyond mere theming or toolkits. This is good for beginners.
What you get when you mix apps is the usual jumble of X apps doing their own thing in their own way. Apps do not remember your favorite colors, your print settings, your favorite directories. It's the familiar X desktop: a Frankenstein collection of apps not quite fitting together. Red Hat 8's superficial skinning does nothing about this. "KDE" is reduced to being an oversized, slow window manager: nothing more. It is not really KDE. Why would anyone want to use that?
I'm under no delusion that KDE is quite there yet. But some day, the major KDE apps will be merely good enough for everyday use. If they are merely adequate, the overall integration will offer a major advantage over non-KDE apps that can put them over the top for all practical purposes.
Basic desktop functionality
on
KDE 3.1 Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Will we ever see a complete desktop environment? I think of a typical PC GUI desktop as one with folders, each one unique. I want each folder to reopen with its own original size, position, view setting and visual fluff. This was what I took for granted on OS/2's WPS. But on KDE, directories that I create on the desktop or elsewhere all open up in Konqueror in the same standard file management window. Sometimes I want a folder with links to apps or music or pictures or video: a single default view profile will not do. To me, files are better displayed in a list, JPGs as preview icons, etc. Sometimes, the full-featured window with sidebar and command line is great. Other times, I just want a simple window of icons. But there is no way to specify this for each directory.
I'm not sure if I am expressing myself clearly. I just want to express my wonder that for all the eye candy and features built into KDE, its basic file and desktop browsing seems so inflexible. It still seems so far from the original 1984 Mac in some ways.
My subjective experience using the Xft stuff under Linux is that hinting does still matter at screen resolutions. Even with anti-aliasing enabled, there is a noticeable difference in quality using the same hinted TT font when bytecode interpretation is switched off in the Freetype library. Note that when bytecode interpretation is turned off, the autohinter is used, but hand-coded TT hinting is still superior.
Remember Edward Yourdon's "The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer"? That was years ago, but it covered the same topic. Yourdon opened his book with an alarming chapter that fits the title, but at the end of the book he concluded that India is not a threat. It was in part because the demand for software work is so high that even India's universities cannot keep up. Later, he followed up with "The Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer". Go figure.
They are from Singapore, which these days is practically a first-world nation. Creative Labs is a bit of an aberration, though, in that its management is quite a bit more aggressive and, well, creative than that of most companies from that part of the world.
On the other hand, I think ideology may be at work also on the part of embryonic stem cells. The promised cures are just promises: vaporware. There are serious difficulties involved in manupilating embryonic stem cells that aren't discussed much, as this article describes. The situation now is:
To date there is
no evidence that cells generated from embryonic stem cells can be safely transplanted back into adult animals to restore the function of damaged or diseased adult tissues. The level of scientific rigor that is normally applied (indeed, legally required) in the development of potential medical treatments would have to be entirely ignored for experiments with human embryos to proceed. As our largely disappointing experience with gene therapy should remind us, many highly vaunted scientific techniques frequently fail to yield the promised results.
So why does embryonic stem cell research -- unproven, dangerous, morally questionable and possibly unworkable -- get so much press? Adult stem cell research gets far less coverage, which is why old news like this sounds like big stuff. Instead the medical equivalent of cold fusion continues to hog the limelight.
There is a certain danger in having too much flexibility. If you stick stem cells into yourself that can replicate indefinitely and transform into anything, then you run the risk of them transforming into everything.
There is a serious quality control problem here: suppose you want to convert totally undifferentiated stem cells into brain tissue to repair an injury. You might mostly succeed, but QA at the cellular level is tricky. Did you differentiate every one of them? Suppose you missed a couple. Being stem cells, those can continue to replicate and morph uncontrollably. You can end up with a messy clump of hair, intestine and toe nail cells growing uncontrollably in your head. We have a name for this problem: it's called cancer.
Adult stem cells have value precisely because they are differentiated. It's safer, because they are easier to control.
Ah, no, Aragorn is not the "universal character" in the books. He is indeed the superhero type character (although I don't think he should have been able to fight off the Ringwraiths in the movie). He is the super-stud in the book, the kind of guy who can lead the Dunedain, manupilate the Palantir, lead ghosts and armies, kick Orc ass and have Eowyn fall in love at a glance. Maybe you should read the books again. Sorry, you should not look for the geek in this guy. For the ordinary-guy characters, look to the hobbits.
Aragorn comes from the lineage of elves (ageless) and Numenoreans (lifespan supernaturally boosted). This is the man that Arwen fell in love with at age 49. After becoming king, he lived an additional 120 years. He should look ragged due to his years as Strider, but no, he should not look to be "at the very last years of his youth".
My Oxford Concise English/Chinese dictionary, that is. The first character, wei, literally does mean danger. It also means imperil or dying. The second character ji has a number of different meanings: 1) machine 2) airplane 3) crucial point 4) opportunity 5) organic 6) quick witted.
So, yes, the equation is literally correct. It's just that to see the correct meaning of the two together, you have to allow for the multiple possible meanings. If you use meaning 3 of ji above, for example, you can see how the "crisis" meaning forms.
It's not unusual. Trying looking up a word in an English dictionary and you will often come up with a multitude of meanings too.
DivX on CDs is a great way to record and distribute home video. My parents want to see their grandkid. I have a camcorder. Trouble is, they live halfway around the planet. It's easy to duplicate and mail DivX video on CDs, and it would be great if my not-all-computer-savvy relatives owned DVD players that happened to play DivX.
But I would have loved to have seen Christopher Lee give that recruiting speech to Gandalf.
Yeah, Christopher Lee's speech to Obi Wan would have been a better match, book-fidelity-wise, if he had delivered that to Gandalf instead of the wimpy Sauron-will-win-anyway speech. What tickled me was how he seemed to have cornered the market for traitor-villain characters recently. Perhaps his screen presence lends itself well to self-justifying monologues.
Eclipse easily eats up 100MB of RAM on my machine. Most Java-capable IDEs need lots of memory, unfortunately. It would be nice to have an IDE with a little less footprint, which is why kdevelop looks so promising.
Since we have a bunch of LotR fans here, perhaps somebody could answer a question that has been bugging me after the first movie. In the movie, Count Dooku^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Saruman merely asks Gandalf to join Sauron's side. In the book, he asks Gandalf to join *him* as a force independent of Sauron. In other words, the guy who betrays both sides in the book only betrays one in the movie. Why was this change made? It hardly seemed necessary, whereas other changes have some arguments in their favor.
Adding programmers to a late project ...
on
Slack
·
· Score: 2
Perhaps the book already addresses the issue, but it sounds like it is taking a manufacturing view to tech productivity. Sure, extra margin/slack might be useful if the widgets are interchangeable, but we are talking about people here. A new warm body brought into the project needs to be brought up to speed, slowing other developers down. So we have that famous axiom from "The Mythical Man-Month" that adding a new programmer to a late project makes it later. How exactly does DeMarco (who is no dummy) handle reallocation of human "slack"?
They still suck. You got around the suckiness by installing high quality TT fonts from Microsoft. Out of the box, screen fonts are far inferior to Microsoft's. The open source world does not have comparably high quality fonts.
Most Linux veterans do not appreciate KDE's attempts at achieving the integration, uniformity and predictability that Mac and Windows have, because they are too used to the status quo. It's much more than putting a "k" in front of every app. I've addressed this point elsewhere. The trouble is that Red Hat has substituted a different app for every major KDE app. A typical user would use Red Hat's "KDE" and never use any of its apps nor see its potential. KDE-rh is essentially an oversized, overslow window manager. There is no good reason to use KDE in this form: you might as well use a lightweight environment like xfce instead.
Owen's comment that "these goals don't completely coincide" is an understatement. KDE wants to be the desktop. Red Hat wants to own the desktop. They are completely at odds.
Possible reason why KDE unhappy
on
Red Hat 8.0 Reviewed
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Here's a comment I made on another list:
I doubt if the changing of the themes and such was the problem. I would
not lose any sleep over single vs double-click or a few icons and bitmaps.
This would not justify Bero quitting and claiming that KDE was "crippled".
Part of the real problem, ironically, is that the changes Red Hat made ARE
merely skin-deep. This is exactly what the KDE project is not.
A perceptive Slashdotter earlier saw that the problem was not in the superficial
reskinning, but in the integration. KDE is not about being yet another
window manager, but was meant as a holistic answer to the desktop problem.
A KDE desktop is meant to be a collection of integrated applications with
predictable, uniform behavior. You will see the same file dialog (with
URLs and bookmarks), print dialog, toolbar editor, font chooser, color
picker, help infrastructure, address book, and predictable cut and paste.
Sharing of components means familiar behavior throughout, such as the file
manager embedded in the file open dialog or the image viewer embedded in
the file manager. When you open a file, the dialog remembers the bookmarks
and frequently used directories you used in other KDE apps. In other
words, the KDE experience provides a uniformity, familiarity and
predictability that goes well beyond mere theming or toolkits. This is
good for beginners.
Red Hat has in effect substituted other apps for every major KDE app. The KDE apps are not gone, but they are less visible. This
means that a typical Red Hat user will install "KDE" and never run a single
significant KDE application. What you get is the usual jumble of X apps
doing their own thing in their own way. Apps do not remember your favorite
colors, your print settings, your favorite directories. It's the familiar
X desktop: a Frankenstein collection of apps stitched together by
superficial skinning, but not quite fitting together. "KDE" is reduced to
being an oversized, slow window manager: nothing more. It is
not really KDE. Why would anyone want to use that?
For pros, the best-of-breed approach is the status quo. IMHO, a beginner need not start this way. The default KDE apps may simply be good enough, with the common UI and infrastructure compensating for the individual weakness. Sure, a deliberate decision can be made to pick a better app, now or later. But this should be done with the concious knowledge that this goes "off the KDE ranch", that the various integration, uniformity and usability improvements of KDE will not apply. Starting off a beginner with a best-of-breed approach leaves him with the usual Frankenstein collection of disintegrated apps, all unalike. I.e., this is the status quo that KDE was supposed to fix. Trouble is, Red Hat will not let KDE be KDE.
I wish somebody would moderate your post up. This is solid information that nobody else here on/. seems to know. Perhaps the KDE project would consider offering a set of RPMs for Red Hat, particularly for upcoming versions of KDE that users would like to upgrade to anyway. The KDE project should not have to live with stability problems introduced by Red Hat.
Slashdot Mirror
The WSJ article today goes into some detail about the arduous chase with little pay-off. Earthlink must have some really dedicated anti-spam activists to even try this. Think they are getting big bucks? Hardly. From the WSJ:
And it involves a lot of grunt work per spammer. How much is your time worth? It's like "The Cuckoo's Egg" story again. For just this one guy, for example:
Unless we start seeing some high-profile jail time, there won't be much of a victory.
We have many different types of keyboards these days: cordless, black, split/ergonomic, even those you can roll up. But it seems that there is no longer much variety in layouts. I can't find one without those pesky Windows keys, for example. My personal issue is the ctrl key placement: my fingers being programmed for Emacs (and before that, Wordstar), I like it where the caps lock key is on the home row so it's more accessible. The classic Northgate Omnikeys gave me that option with a DIP switch setting and replacement keycaps. Alas, the old Northgate died (spilt coffee: my baby's fault).
Stores don't seem to sell keyboards these days with any significant variation in layout, nor keyboards that allow layout customization. There are ways to accomplish this sort of thing in software, but that has its limitations (such as switching between X and text consoles). I sure would like to see a little less conformance in keyboard layouts.
The article noted the absence of Lindows, but a more conspicuous absentee from the consortium's list is Red Hat. While Red Hat is an enthusiastic Gnome supporter that employs few (if any) KDE developers, this list is heavy with KDE supporters. Notably, Ark Linux is a project started by Bero, that ex-Red Hatter who quit because he thought Red Hat "crippled" KDE. Am I reading too much into this? Anybody know more?
View profiles? Yes, but there does not seem to be a way to make a folder open up with a specific view profile. It always opens up with the file management profile if I open up a directory, even with "view properties saved in directory". Moreover, view profiles do not save the window location, only the window size. A simple thing like opening a folder to have a specific location and size automatically seems impossible with KDE. DCOP scripting? Good grief.
If you've never used a fully integrated GUI environment, it will be hard to appreciate what KDE is trying to accomplish on the desktop.
KDE's strength is in the integration. KDE is not about being yet another window manager, but was meant as a holistic answer to the desktop problem. A KDE desktop is meant to be a collection of integrated applications with predictable, uniform behavior. You will see the same file dialog (with URLs and bookmarks), print dialog, toolbar editor, font chooser, color picker, help infrastructure, address book, and predictable cut and paste. Sharing of components means familiar behavior throughout, such as the file manager embedded in the file open dialog or the image viewer embedded in the file manager. When you open a file, the dialog remembers the bookmarks and frequently used directories you used in other KDE apps. In other words, the KDE experience provides a uniformity, familiarity and predictability that goes well beyond mere theming or toolkits. This is good for beginners.
What you get when you mix apps is the usual jumble of X apps doing their own thing in their own way. Apps do not remember your favorite colors, your print settings, your favorite directories. It's the familiar X desktop: a Frankenstein collection of apps not quite fitting together. Red Hat 8's superficial skinning does nothing about this. "KDE" is reduced to being an oversized, slow window manager: nothing more. It is not really KDE. Why would anyone want to use that?
I'm under no delusion that KDE is quite there yet. But some day, the major KDE apps will be merely good enough for everyday use. If they are merely adequate, the overall integration will offer a major advantage over non-KDE apps that can put them over the top for all practical purposes.
Will we ever see a complete desktop environment? I think of a typical PC GUI desktop as one with folders, each one unique. I want each folder to reopen with its own original size, position, view setting and visual fluff. This was what I took for granted on OS/2's WPS. But on KDE, directories that I create on the desktop or elsewhere all open up in Konqueror in the same standard file management window. Sometimes I want a folder with links to apps or music or pictures or video: a single default view profile will not do. To me, files are better displayed in a list, JPGs as preview icons, etc. Sometimes, the full-featured window with sidebar and command line is great. Other times, I just want a simple window of icons. But there is no way to specify this for each directory.
I'm not sure if I am expressing myself clearly. I just want to express my wonder that for all the eye candy and features built into KDE, its basic file and desktop browsing seems so inflexible. It still seems so far from the original 1984 Mac in some ways.
So what stops Sun or somebody else from doing a Java.NET?
My subjective experience using the Xft stuff under Linux is that hinting does still matter at screen resolutions. Even with anti-aliasing enabled, there is a noticeable difference in quality using the same hinted TT font when bytecode interpretation is switched off in the Freetype library. Note that when bytecode interpretation is turned off, the autohinter is used, but hand-coded TT hinting is still superior.
Remember Edward Yourdon's "The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer"? That was years ago, but it covered the same topic. Yourdon opened his book with an alarming chapter that fits the title, but at the end of the book he concluded that India is not a threat. It was in part because the demand for software work is so high that even India's universities cannot keep up. Later, he followed up with "The Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer". Go figure.
They are from Singapore, which these days is practically a first-world nation. Creative Labs is a bit of an aberration, though, in that its management is quite a bit more aggressive and, well, creative than that of most companies from that part of the world.
So why does embryonic stem cell research -- unproven, dangerous, morally questionable and possibly unworkable -- get so much press? Adult stem cell research gets far less coverage, which is why old news like this sounds like big stuff. Instead the medical equivalent of cold fusion continues to hog the limelight.
There is a certain danger in having too much flexibility. If you stick stem cells into yourself that can replicate indefinitely and transform into anything, then you run the risk of them transforming into everything.
There is a serious quality control problem here: suppose you want to convert totally undifferentiated stem cells into brain tissue to repair an injury. You might mostly succeed, but QA at the cellular level is tricky. Did you differentiate every one of them? Suppose you missed a couple. Being stem cells, those can continue to replicate and morph uncontrollably. You can end up with a messy clump of hair, intestine and toe nail cells growing uncontrollably in your head. We have a name for this problem: it's called cancer.
Adult stem cells have value precisely because they are differentiated. It's safer, because they are easier to control.
Ah, no, Aragorn is not the "universal character" in the books. He is indeed the superhero type character (although I don't think he should have been able to fight off the Ringwraiths in the movie). He is the super-stud in the book, the kind of guy who can lead the Dunedain, manupilate the Palantir, lead ghosts and armies, kick Orc ass and have Eowyn fall in love at a glance. Maybe you should read the books again. Sorry, you should not look for the geek in this guy. For the ordinary-guy characters, look to the hobbits.
Aragorn comes from the lineage of elves (ageless) and Numenoreans (lifespan supernaturally boosted). This is the man that Arwen fell in love with at age 49. After becoming king, he lived an additional 120 years. He should look ragged due to his years as Strider, but no, he should not look to be "at the very last years of his youth".
My Oxford Concise English/Chinese dictionary, that is. The first character, wei, literally does mean danger. It also means imperil or dying. The second character ji has a number of different meanings: 1) machine 2) airplane 3) crucial point 4) opportunity 5) organic 6) quick witted.
So, yes, the equation is literally correct. It's just that to see the correct meaning of the two together, you have to allow for the multiple possible meanings. If you use meaning 3 of ji above, for example, you can see how the "crisis" meaning forms.
It's not unusual. Trying looking up a word in an English dictionary and you will often come up with a multitude of meanings too.
DivX on CDs is a great way to record and distribute home video. My parents want to see their grandkid. I have a camcorder. Trouble is, they live halfway around the planet. It's easy to duplicate and mail DivX video on CDs, and it would be great if my not-all-computer-savvy relatives owned DVD players that happened to play DivX.
Here's why South Korea is so wired:
1. 80% of the population live in urban areas.
2. About half of these live in humongous high-rise housing complexes.
That pretty much explains why it was so easy to wire up the place for broadband.
Yeah, Christopher Lee's speech to Obi Wan would have been a better match, book-fidelity-wise, if he had delivered that to Gandalf instead of the wimpy Sauron-will-win-anyway speech. What tickled me was how he seemed to have cornered the market for traitor-villain characters recently. Perhaps his screen presence lends itself well to self-justifying monologues.
Eclipse easily eats up 100MB of RAM on my machine. Most Java-capable IDEs need lots of memory, unfortunately. It would be nice to have an IDE with a little less footprint, which is why kdevelop looks so promising.
Since we have a bunch of LotR fans here, perhaps somebody could answer a question that has been bugging me after the first movie. In the movie, Count Dooku^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Saruman merely asks Gandalf to join Sauron's side. In the book, he asks Gandalf to join *him* as a force independent of Sauron. In other words, the guy who betrays both sides in the book only betrays one in the movie. Why was this change made? It hardly seemed necessary, whereas other changes have some arguments in their favor.
Perhaps the book already addresses the issue, but it sounds like it is taking a manufacturing view to tech productivity. Sure, extra margin/slack might be useful if the widgets are interchangeable, but we are talking about people here. A new warm body brought into the project needs to be brought up to speed, slowing other developers down. So we have that famous axiom from "The Mythical Man-Month" that adding a new programmer to a late project makes it later. How exactly does DeMarco (who is no dummy) handle reallocation of human "slack"?
They still suck. You got around the suckiness by installing high quality TT fonts from Microsoft. Out of the box, screen fonts are far inferior to Microsoft's. The open source world does not have comparably high quality fonts.
Most Linux veterans do not appreciate KDE's attempts at achieving the integration, uniformity and predictability that Mac and Windows have, because they are too used to the status quo. It's much more than putting a "k" in front of every app. I've addressed this point elsewhere. The trouble is that Red Hat has substituted a different app for every major KDE app. A typical user would use Red Hat's "KDE" and never use any of its apps nor see its potential. KDE-rh is essentially an oversized, overslow window manager. There is no good reason to use KDE in this form: you might as well use a lightweight environment like xfce instead.
Owen's comment that "these goals don't completely coincide" is an understatement. KDE wants to be the desktop. Red Hat wants to own the desktop. They are completely at odds.
Here's a comment I made on another list:
I doubt if the changing of the themes and such was the problem. I would not lose any sleep over single vs double-click or a few icons and bitmaps. This would not justify Bero quitting and claiming that KDE was "crippled". Part of the real problem, ironically, is that the changes Red Hat made ARE merely skin-deep. This is exactly what the KDE project is not.
A perceptive Slashdotter earlier saw that the problem was not in the superficial reskinning, but in the integration. KDE is not about being yet another window manager, but was meant as a holistic answer to the desktop problem. A KDE desktop is meant to be a collection of integrated applications with predictable, uniform behavior. You will see the same file dialog (with URLs and bookmarks), print dialog, toolbar editor, font chooser, color picker, help infrastructure, address book, and predictable cut and paste. Sharing of components means familiar behavior throughout, such as the file manager embedded in the file open dialog or the image viewer embedded in the file manager. When you open a file, the dialog remembers the bookmarks and frequently used directories you used in other KDE apps. In other words, the KDE experience provides a uniformity, familiarity and predictability that goes well beyond mere theming or toolkits. This is good for beginners.
Red Hat has in effect substituted other apps for every major KDE app. The KDE apps are not gone, but they are less visible. This means that a typical Red Hat user will install "KDE" and never run a single significant KDE application. What you get is the usual jumble of X apps doing their own thing in their own way. Apps do not remember your favorite colors, your print settings, your favorite directories. It's the familiar X desktop: a Frankenstein collection of apps stitched together by superficial skinning, but not quite fitting together. "KDE" is reduced to being an oversized, slow window manager: nothing more. It is not really KDE. Why would anyone want to use that?
For pros, the best-of-breed approach is the status quo. IMHO, a beginner need not start this way. The default KDE apps may simply be good enough, with the common UI and infrastructure compensating for the individual weakness. Sure, a deliberate decision can be made to pick a better app, now or later. But this should be done with the concious knowledge that this goes "off the KDE ranch", that the various integration, uniformity and usability improvements of KDE will not apply. Starting off a beginner with a best-of-breed approach leaves him with the usual Frankenstein collection of disintegrated apps, all unalike. I.e., this is the status quo that KDE was supposed to fix. Trouble is, Red Hat will not let KDE be KDE.
Subject says it all. Does this reduce Mozilla's elephantine bulk? Top output, anyone?
I wish somebody would moderate your post up. This is solid information that nobody else here on /. seems to know. Perhaps the KDE project would consider offering a set of RPMs for Red Hat, particularly for upcoming versions of KDE that users would like to upgrade to anyway. The KDE project should not have to live with stability problems introduced by Red Hat.