I follow the KDE panel development mailing lists and blogs so I read just this week that the System tray hiding is going into the KDE SVN or is already in. I don't know if it will be backported to a KDE 4.1.1, but it is a definite for 4.2.
I can't really comment on the state of things in the US, but I have a degree in Electronic Engineering here in Denmark and let me tell you a bit about the differences and what is right or wrong I my humble opinion.
I think you've gotten close to the truth pointing to the High School system in the US. From the descriptions I have of it, it seems to stink as a preparation for College and forces the Colleges to lower their barriers of entry in the basic sciences. In Denmark the final years of your primary education is done in what we call examination courses which last 2-3 years depending on work load. These courses have every thing from History, languages over P.E. to Sciences and their objective is to get the student completely ready for the last part of their education be it in Law, C.S. or Engineering. While the standards and quality fluctuates a bit from class to class as the system is experimentally modified by our government, it mostly prepares the students for their final studies. Now we have struggled with the need to keep up the standards so we have been fighting the same issues, but I know from going through the system myself that it works without insane workloads during your college years and allows for both recognizably good education.
You also mention the need to touch on realistic subjects given the abstract nature of the thing. In Denmark there is two practices for Engineering one that all Engineering has to prepare you directly for a job in the industry through making sure you know how to learn Engineering subjects and two that EVERY semester you have a project with a group of other students where you produce something using your skills learned that semester. Even your final exam is a project where you with a company's help must produce something new. This often gives valuable experience to the students and also serves to network both students and companies albeit only in the local area around the college.
Now I've noticed some people remarking about Planetside, having played it in Beta or after release. I've heard them ragging on PS (Planetside) and I am a mite tired of it.
Now I've been playing PS since European release in late May and I can tell you this game is changing. The performance (FPS wise) is so much better now. The memory leaks and most bugs are gone. The features and tweaks come every month and in fact the game is doing just fine (as most of the Leet geeks have gone back to their CS or UT caves to play). Intentional griefers are far between and becoming rarer. Sure there are still problems, but no worse than any other MMOG.
Planetside is in fact the first and only game to hold my interest for more than a few weeks and why? Because of the teamwork and teamplay. To really planetside is all about not going out thinking of kills, or being leet or getting loads of XP to increase your rank. PS is fun when you play with other people (Teamspeak is also quite useful here). I am apart of one of the top European Vanu Sovereignty Outfits (The Immortal Serial Killers aka ISK) and I have yet to find finer buddies in any game.
Finally the reason I got into PS in the first place is exactly for almost the same reason as the author notes, the game manages to balance rewarding players spending alot of time in, but also allows the newest character to wack the leetest uber killer from one of the two other empires.
theICEBear -C328 with the Immortal Serial Killers on Werner (PS)
Hmm, this looks promising. Now all that is needed is for someone to write either a compatibility layer to bring the XFree drivers over to the freedesktop.org Xserver including GLX compatibility, make the Compositing Manager use OpenGL and eureka we have GPU based compositing.
This is close to the features coming in Longhorn, where the windows are to be considered textures rendered by the GPU.
Now my personal dream is still to see a combination of this and a high level protocol/server in which the applications and window managers send in calls where they ask for things like a button or a menu and include the data, while the rendering mechanism (the widgets) rest on the serverside (allowing for a central repository of widgetsets and almost guaranteed consistency of the UI). Custom widgets could then be implemented as either "server-side" extensions ala the scripts/executables that make up a webapplication or as client side components which are allowed to send drawing instructions to the server. It is intriguing to think about the possibilities of letting each window own a thread and socket connection (as in a modern webserver) to the application so that they can all update their own "scene" concurrently (almost anyway) and then the central compositor/renderer renders these changes from the existing application/windows tree.
Now this was a very trollish comment. The KDE and GNOME ppl are BOTH! (Wow yes they cooperate) working together on freedesktop.org and will both probably use the Compositing extension in the future if it becomes standard as fast as all the other things made by Keith (like XRender, XFt, Fontconfig and the like). The entire point of freedesktop.org is cooperation and it will fail if anyone starts to consider it a Gnome or KDE specific project.
As for KDE implementing anything in the wrong place at least they are trying to bring such features into the hands of developers and ultimately users.
Well I don't know if this is true or not, but it sure seems pretty saturated in Scandinavia, where I live. I live in a town with 35K citizens and we have had DSL and Cable broadband available since early 2000. Everywhere I go (except most of the old folks read over 60) I find at least one PC and they are nearly always if not always on the internet. It is also getting into everything now. My homework and stuff from the university (I recently returned there to finish up my CS degree) I can get over FTP, all contact with the teachers and faculty in general is strongly encouraged to run over email. Our enrollment includes an university email address, our enrollment list has not only email but ICQ on it. And this goes for all faculties not just the CS and Engineering ones. There is a lot more (e-learning portal, webmail, information and so on) and they are constantly expanding (currently they are working on getting a complete wireless coverage, while they build the new university down by the sea). The student housings for the entire town offer 100 Mbit internal LAN and a mighty big pipe out (I don't know how big, but it is a leased part of a fiber) with all the student housings organized by the independent student housing organization (the school has no say over what goes on).
So the internet has spread fully around here and again this is just a very small town in Denmark:)
I have just been in a situation such as this. First of if you like me don't have the authority to fire or even rain anger on someone for not doing their job, then go to your superior. If he doesn't help you (like mine didn't), then there is very little else to do. I tried the calm way to offer every support I could, talking, teaching, helping with code, taking over most of their tasks. And all it did was burn me out faster than a candle burning on both ends. Keep in mind this was a huge project (very large HR and education system for banks from scratch) so my experiences would differ from yours, but I have learned stuff:
- Some programmers will do anything to shift blame from themselves to others including down right dirty manipulation and backtalk.
-You can't teach someone proper techniques within a project, you need seminars, strict and ENFORCED guidelines for everything from design, to even the naming and structure of your code or the fast and loose (or is it loser) programmers will trample all over the system leaving unmaintainable crud all over the place.
-No amount of extra help with out the preparation of the rest of the team will help and the "oldtimers" on the team are very hard to get to help the newtimers.
-There should always be two leaders. One closer to management and the customers who handles Administrative tasks and One technical benevolent dictator (that was what I became to get everything done in time). And they should both have executive decision power over the team.
-Don't ever expect to meet early time estimates. Only the updated ones made after full understanding of the domain problem sets in can be used, so if you're consultants on a preestimated cost contract and the project runs late then you're shit out of luck.
As for my tips to you now is. First of all: Blow the whistle on your teammates not pitching in. Not to admonish them, but you all have a goal as a whole so you should sit down and find out why the others aren't making it in time or getting things done like you are.
Don't measure people by yourself, you will always either over or underestimate them.
Since I have had my Star Wars, Babylon 5, Buffy and Dark Angel marathons (one of each weekend before christmas:D ) I have been doing a few days of marathon reading. First I read through all books published by David Eddings then Terry Pratchett then Anne McCaffrey and finishing friday with Julian May. Then all of Saturday (and most of Sunday) went to roleplaying with the buddies for hours on end and tomorrow I expect to go through the entire Hobbit and Lord of the Rings before I am back at work Wednesday. Man on top of Christmas and New Years partying vacationing is a job of work:)
What no mention of our all time darling Phillipha (don`t know the spelling)?
Her reports from the pits is what gives the show depths and make the funny. Hell the Diotor team even grilled a vegetarian sausage on the burning fur (a yearly and much loved event).
The Icebear
As an experienced Java server coder I can vouch that the idea that using Tomcat 3.2 as a benchmark is utter stupidity. Tomcat developers and all benchmarks agree that either Resin or Orion server delivers the best performance for JSP. Tomcat is murderously slow in comparsion (ZDNet tipped it off when they said ASP was faster, which by no means matches my experience or general concensus). I have coded components (Bean) and extensions (taglibs) for JSP a few times and I have yet to come across a better general web scripting technology than this. Now I know that/. is the home of a lot of perl/C lovers but can all those companies who are ignoring M$ solutions and going for the Java solution really be that wrong. Anyway to get to the point a java compiled JSP/Servlet container running a web application of JSPs, Servlets, taglibs and Bean, is a very good and portable solution (I am still forced to develop on Windozer but we deploy on Linux as well as Win2k and WinNT).
"Think of something cool and tell yourself it`s my sig" -me adapting a quote from BtVS
I completely adhere to build my web-stuff in java servlets or JSP (depends on time and needs, raw coding or hard stuff is sometimes faster to do in servlets), but as they say on servlet central and as my experience (and that of my company is) the seperation of code (logic), content (data) and presentation (style) is not only a desirable feature is greatly improves and optimizes the site. Take this example: you get telegrams as data, but want them to be put on the site without human intervention, you put them on into a database and use logic and styling to get the data and present it. But now what if the site needs to change be redesigned. Do you recode all the scripts (be they PERL, ASP,PHP or even (this hurts to write) JSP) using expensive developers or do you just leave it to the slightly cheaper and often faster (not that they are better, just that they work in prepared RAD enviroment) Webdesign department (who can do the redesign directly in the stylesheet). This is the way to go and it can be acheived already using the brilliant project Cocoon. This is great stuff, based in XML/XSL and even gives availability of scripting using the XSP and the Bean Scripting Framework from IBM`s AlphaWorks. It`s capable of using SQL/LDAP/... data as XML and format it into correct HTML (or whatever) using XSLT (the XSL:FO support is still sketchy) and logic in XSP and BSF.
Slashdot Mirror
I follow the KDE panel development mailing lists and blogs so I read just this week that the System tray hiding is going into the KDE SVN or is already in. I don't know if it will be backported to a KDE 4.1.1, but it is a definite for 4.2.
I can't really comment on the state of things in the US, but I have a degree in Electronic Engineering here in Denmark and let me tell you a bit about the differences and what is right or wrong I my humble opinion.
I think you've gotten close to the truth pointing to the High School system in the US. From the descriptions I have of it, it seems to stink as a preparation for College and forces the Colleges to lower their barriers of entry in the basic sciences. In Denmark the final years of your primary education is done in what we call examination courses which last 2-3 years depending on work load. These courses have every thing from History, languages over P.E. to Sciences and their objective is to get the student completely ready for the last part of their education be it in Law, C.S. or Engineering. While the standards and quality fluctuates a bit from class to class as the system is experimentally modified by our government, it mostly prepares the students for their final studies. Now we have struggled with the need to keep up the standards so we have been fighting the same issues, but I know from going through the system myself that it works without insane workloads during your college years and allows for both recognizably good education.
You also mention the need to touch on realistic subjects given the abstract nature of the thing. In Denmark there is two practices for Engineering one that all Engineering has to prepare you directly for a job in the industry through making sure you know how to learn Engineering subjects and two that EVERY semester you have a project with a group of other students where you produce something using your skills learned that semester. Even your final exam is a project where you with a company's help must produce something new. This often gives valuable experience to the students and also serves to network both students and companies albeit only in the local area around the college.
Purple valor you say. Pffft :) you need to move over to the ISK ;)
/tell m8.
No really I haven't been seeing that many Purple Valor guys around lately, have your leaders changed or something.
By the way if you see me ( C382 ) blowing up aircraft with my trusty Starfire give me a
C382, Immortal Serial Killers, Werner
Now I've noticed some people remarking about Planetside, having played it in Beta or after release. I've heard them ragging on PS (Planetside) and I am a mite tired of it.
Now I've been playing PS since European release in late May and I can tell you this game is changing. The performance (FPS wise) is so much better now. The memory leaks and most bugs are gone. The features and tweaks come every month and in fact the game is doing just fine (as most of the Leet geeks have gone back to their CS or UT caves to play). Intentional griefers are far between and becoming rarer. Sure there are still problems, but no worse than any other MMOG.
Planetside is in fact the first and only game to hold my interest for more than a few weeks and why? Because of the teamwork and teamplay. To really planetside is all about not going out thinking of kills, or being leet or getting loads of XP to increase your rank. PS is fun when you play with other people (Teamspeak is also quite useful here). I am apart of one of the top European Vanu Sovereignty Outfits (The Immortal Serial Killers aka ISK) and I have yet to find finer buddies in any game.
Finally the reason I got into PS in the first place is exactly for almost the same reason as the author notes, the game manages to balance rewarding players spending alot of time in, but also allows the newest character to wack the leetest uber killer from one of the two other empires.
theICEBear
-C328 with the Immortal Serial Killers on Werner (PS)
Actually come some spare time I will begin on a prototype.
Hmm, this looks promising. Now all that is needed is for someone to write either a compatibility layer to bring the XFree drivers over to the freedesktop.org Xserver including GLX compatibility, make the Compositing Manager use OpenGL and eureka we have GPU based compositing.
This is close to the features coming in Longhorn, where the windows are to be considered textures rendered by the GPU.
Now my personal dream is still to see a combination of this and a high level protocol/server in which the applications and window managers send in calls where they ask for things like a button or a menu and include the data, while the rendering mechanism (the widgets) rest on the serverside (allowing for a central repository of widgetsets and almost guaranteed consistency of the UI). Custom widgets could then be implemented as either "server-side" extensions ala the scripts/executables that make up a webapplication or as client side components which are allowed to send drawing instructions to the server. It is intriguing to think about the possibilities of letting each window own a thread and socket connection (as in a modern webserver) to the application so that they can all update their own "scene" concurrently (almost anyway) and then the central compositor/renderer renders these changes from the existing application/windows tree.
Now this was a very trollish comment. The KDE and GNOME ppl are BOTH! (Wow yes they cooperate) working together on freedesktop.org and will both probably use the Compositing extension in the future if it becomes standard as fast as all the other things made by Keith (like XRender, XFt, Fontconfig and the like). The entire point of freedesktop.org is cooperation and it will fail if anyone starts to consider it a Gnome or KDE specific project.
As for KDE implementing anything in the wrong place at least they are trying to bring such features into the hands of developers and ultimately users.
Well I don't know if this is true or not, but it sure seems pretty saturated in Scandinavia, where I live. I live in a town with 35K citizens and we have had DSL and Cable broadband available since early 2000. Everywhere I go (except most of the old folks read over 60) I find at least one PC and they are nearly always if not always on the internet. It is also getting into everything now. My homework and stuff from the university (I recently returned there to finish up my CS degree) I can get over FTP, all contact with the teachers and faculty in general is strongly encouraged to run over email. Our enrollment includes an university email address, our enrollment list has not only email but ICQ on it. And this goes for all faculties not just the CS and Engineering ones. There is a lot more (e-learning portal, webmail, information and so on) and they are constantly expanding (currently they are working on getting a complete wireless coverage, while they build the new university down by the sea). The student housings for the entire town offer 100 Mbit internal LAN and a mighty big pipe out (I don't know how big, but it is a leased part of a fiber) with all the student housings organized by the independent student housing organization (the school has no say over what goes on).
:)
So the internet has spread fully around here and again this is just a very small town in Denmark
I have just been in a situation such as this. First of if you like me don't have the authority to fire or even rain anger on someone for not doing their job, then go to your superior. If he doesn't help you (like mine didn't), then there is very little else to do. I tried the calm way to offer every support I could, talking, teaching, helping with code, taking over most of their tasks. And all it did was burn me out faster than a candle burning on both ends. Keep in mind this was a huge project (very large HR and education system for banks from scratch) so my experiences would differ from yours, but I have learned stuff:
- Some programmers will do anything to shift blame from themselves to others including down right dirty manipulation and backtalk.
-You can't teach someone proper techniques within a project, you need seminars, strict and ENFORCED guidelines for everything from design, to even the naming and structure of your code or the fast and loose (or is it loser) programmers will trample all over the system leaving unmaintainable crud all over the place.
-No amount of extra help with out the preparation of the rest of the team will help and the "oldtimers" on the team are very hard to get to help the newtimers.
-There should always be two leaders. One closer to management and the customers who handles Administrative tasks and One technical benevolent dictator (that was what I became to get everything done in time). And they should both have executive decision power over the team.
-Don't ever expect to meet early time estimates. Only the updated ones made after full understanding of the domain problem sets in can be used, so if you're consultants on a preestimated cost contract and the project runs late then you're shit out of luck.
As for my tips to you now is. First of all:
Blow the whistle on your teammates not pitching in. Not to admonish them, but you all have a goal as a whole so you should sit down and find out why the others aren't making it in time or getting things done like you are.
Don't measure people by yourself, you will always either over or underestimate them.
Since I have had my Star Wars, Babylon 5, Buffy and Dark Angel marathons (one of each weekend before christmas :D ) I have been doing a few days of marathon reading. First I read through all books published by David Eddings then Terry Pratchett then Anne McCaffrey and finishing friday with Julian May. Then all of Saturday (and most of Sunday) went to roleplaying with the buddies for hours on end and tomorrow I expect to go through the entire Hobbit and Lord of the Rings before I am back at work Wednesday. Man on top of Christmas and New Years partying vacationing is a job of work :)
C-ya
The Icebear
What no mention of our all time darling Phillipha (don`t know the spelling)? Her reports from the pits is what gives the show depths and make the funny. Hell the Diotor team even grilled a vegetarian sausage on the burning fur (a yearly and much loved event). The Icebear
As an experienced Java server coder I can vouch that the idea that using Tomcat 3.2 as a benchmark is utter stupidity. Tomcat developers and all benchmarks agree that either Resin or Orion server delivers the best performance for JSP. Tomcat is murderously slow in comparsion (ZDNet tipped it off when they said ASP was faster, which by no means matches my experience or general concensus). I have coded components (Bean) and extensions (taglibs) for JSP a few times and I have yet to come across a better general web scripting technology than this. Now I know that /. is the home of a lot of perl/C lovers but can all those companies who are ignoring M$ solutions and going for the Java solution really be that wrong. Anyway to get to the point a java compiled JSP/Servlet container running a web application of JSPs, Servlets, taglibs and Bean, is a very good and portable solution (I am still forced to develop on Windozer but we deploy on Linux as well as Win2k and WinNT).
"Think of something cool and tell yourself it`s my sig" -me adapting a quote from BtVS
I completely adhere to build my web-stuff in java servlets or JSP (depends on time and needs, raw coding or hard stuff is sometimes faster to do in servlets), but as they say on servlet central and as my experience (and that of my company is) the seperation of code (logic), content (data) and presentation (style) is not only a desirable feature is greatly improves and optimizes the site. ,PHP or even (this hurts to write) JSP) using expensive developers or do you just leave it to the slightly cheaper and often faster (not that they are better, just that they work in prepared RAD enviroment) Webdesign department (who can do the redesign directly in the stylesheet).
Take this example: you get telegrams as data, but want them to be put on the site without human intervention, you put them on into a database and use logic and styling to get the data and present it. But now what if the site needs to change be redesigned. Do you recode all the scripts (be they PERL, ASP
This is the way to go and it can be acheived already using the brilliant project Cocoon. This is great stuff, based in XML/XSL and even gives availability of scripting using the XSP and the Bean Scripting Framework from IBM`s AlphaWorks. It`s capable of using SQL/LDAP/... data as XML and format it into correct HTML (or whatever) using XSLT (the XSL:FO support is still sketchy) and logic in XSP and BSF.