I've found myself using it as my primary web browser. I love the cookie handling and it feels quicker than Netscape 4.x and the overall app is more polished and stable than even recent Mozilla nightlies IMHO.The HTML rendering engine needs work in some places, but people should keep in mind that this is the KDE file browser. The fact that people bother to make criticisms that it doesn't handle complicated Javascript or encryption on certain sites suggests just how well it works as a web browser. And this was done with a tiny fraction of the resources of the Mozilla project! A comparison of the two projects would make an interesting case study for open source proponents.
That was as of last week. Some ugly bugs have popped up in recent CVS (at least for me), but that should be fixed soon.
My main criticism is with the separation of the KDE desktop from the browser. I used to use kfm in WindowMaker or icewm to get a lightweight but vey flexible setup. kdesktop creates massive problems for me with other window managers, even when it's started with the root window option. Hopefully that will be polished in future releases.
Re:Is it just me or is the example .png really ugl
on
Alpha-Blending On KDE
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You make a good point, but these screenshots weren't meant to accompany a press release. This functionality was added in the last week and the pictures were generated in the course of discussion between developers. (See this thread.) I doubt if they were intended to be seen by such a large audience.
He got a particular kick from discovering that GIMP files end in the letters ".xcf." "It made me so proud," he says. "That's really cool."
So that's where that extension comes from -- I always figured the GIMP guys just spell even worse than CmdrTaco.
Enjoyable article. I had vowed to stop reading Salon in disgust after the Henry Hyde incident, but couldn't because back then it was just too good. A few months ago, I saw a link to a Salon story and realized that I haven't bothered looking at it in at least six months. It had quickly degenerated into a boring mess of Clinton lapdoggery and the sort of columns you usually see in 'alternative' newspapers by writers who think they're being important because they say 'fuck' in every paragraph. I think it was the interminable series by the Chinese call girl that eventually sent me packing.
Meanwhile, they've cut costs by laying off their editorial staff (a typical bit of dot-com management savvy) and, in a sure sign of desperation, elevated sex to its own section. And obsequiously and shamelessly repeating the White House party line of the day hasn't proved as rewarding as it did during the Lewinsky days.
I haven't seen the Science paper yet, but I suspect that both the CNN article and people here are missing the main point. The key line is "The researchers said the finding suggests that converting bone marrow cells into brain neurons may be part of a previously unknown natural healing action the body uses to replace failed brain cells. "
It's not so much that we'll be injecting bone marrow into our brains before finals but that there may be an unknown mechanism for generating neurons. If it can be studied and understood (maybe using stem cells as a model) that raises the possibility of drugs that can accelerate that mechanism to speed recovery from brain damage.
Alfredo Kojima was my nominee for "Unsung Hero" in last year's Slashdot awards and his involvement in this project makes me even more likely to renominate him this year.* I'm not sure why he and WindowMaker get none of the drooling adoration that Slashdot lavishes on other desktop project developers but he and Dan Pascu and their team make what I think is the stablest, fastest and best looking desktop around.
* Assuming Andover has another $100,000 to toss away on a contest with rules and vote counting that make Palm Beach County look like a beacon of consistency.
I think the word of mouth on Stile project is mostly in the gamer and Linux communities. I would imagine Mac users are underrrepresented there.
The Linux numbers do surprise me. I don't take the usual estimates (5% of the desktop market!) seriously, but a domain that carries one of the more popular Linux sites only gets 1% Linux hits? It would be very interesting if Slashdot published the OS and browser shares in their hits. They used to, and I can't help thinking they stopped because the results were politically inconvenient. From the SlashNet interview:
[22:10:22] CmdrTaco: the browser stats are the same as always: there is more windows then linux;)
[22:10:28] CmdrTaco: we don't mirror the internet.
[22:10:36] CmdrTaco: *way* more Linux then the internet as a whole.
[22:10:37] hemos: but consider that linux is only about 3-5% of the internet...
[22:10:41] hemos: and we've got a huge amount of linux users.
[22:10:57] CmdrTaco: We used to post it, but I pulled it for CPU reasons.
[22:11:09] CmdrTaco: it was an expensive query and I didn't really find it interesting cuz it never changed.
An expensive query? I suppose if you update it continuously, but it shouldn't be a huge deal to post numbers once a month. I can't believe Andover doesn't already generate those data.
IE 5 on the Mac is great, except that it crashes constantly and there are many sites that knock it over every time. (Don't the IE developers read the Dilbert site?) The browser gets such positive press I assume that other people don't see so many crashes. Any Mac-knowledgeable person out there with a suggestion to improve stability?
In fact, I was very happy about the Mail and News programs because Linux does not have any good KDE IMAP email clients. Before you get up in arms, I am talking about a product that is as feature rich as something like Eudora. Yes, Evolution for GNOME is a good start, but it is still very much a beta product.
It's not clear to me what that even means, but it suggests a point that's lost on a lot of users, including journalists who really should know better.
KDE and Gnome offer desktops as well as a collection of apps -- but you can use the apps with either desktop. I keep reading comments like "I used to use Gnome because of gimp, but then I switched to KDE for Konqueror. When Evolution comes out, I'll probably switch back to Gnome." It's not like you're choosing a religion! Kmail, xchat, grip, Konqueror, Nautilus -- use what you like. There's no need to choose one or the other. For crying out loud, that's why each desktop puts the other guys' apps in the desktop menu!
FYI, my Windows 2000 crashes less than my Mandrake install (Don't flame me about using other distros). I think it is time that people stop with the Windows crashing jokes now that Windows 2000 is here.
And besides, who cares? Linux users are obsessed with uptime, because that's where Linux shines compared to other desktop systems. But the reality is:
Despite what you read here, NT and W2K rarely crash under desktop use, W9x falls over once a day or so and MacOS versions after 8.0 are equally stable. There must be some additional Slashdot Effect that causes readers' computers to crash constantly. (What I, as a Mac/Linux/Solaris user find completely unacceptable is having to reinstall Windows. That shouldn't be.)
Linux may not crash, but those newfangled desktops lock up X all the time, which requires a reboot if you're a typical home user. And rebooting Linux is a lot more damaging than restarting an OS that expects crashes.
In any case, you still need to save your work every minute because even if the OS doesn't crash, Linux office apps constantly do. Linux zealots somehow have the idea that their apps are crashproof, too.
And most importantly, so you have to reboot once a day? So what? I'm vastly more productive using a polished office suite than I would be struggling with the current Linux alternatives, even with the extra 60 seconds I'd have. Uptime is useless without the ability to get work done during it.
I wasn't going to respond until I got to this line: Once again, is it the Eazel Desktop(TM) now?
Heh. After all those articles and interviews that explained how Unix users had to deal with "the cryptic command-line interface" until Gnome 1.0 was released, I can't help but smile at how Eazel has adopted Gnome's tricks.
The whole Red Hat / Helix Code / Eazel / Sun thing is going to be very interesting over the next year or two. It looks like Eazel won this round but they're going directly against against Helix with their software updater. (The disk space thing doesn't have a prayer of making money, IMHO.) I'm skeptical about either of them making any money at it, but the North American Linux mafia is so infatuated with Miguel that I've got to think Helix Code will have the upper hand in keeping mindshare. (Remember how Slashdot used to cover every detail of the Enlightenment developers lives? Have you read a word about them here since the E/Gnome split?)
The great thing is the software is all free. Hey, if venture capitalists want to throw their money away to write GPL software for us, who am I to complain?
If you watch ESPN2, especially late at night, you'll see sports that exist primarily not to be played or even to be watched, but to be turned into video games. Motocross and BMX are the best examples of this.
I read an article in the Economist about pro wrestling that argued that it's an activity particularly suited for a video-game generation. Your typical teenage couch potato can't identify with Mark McGwire or Randy Moss, but he can see himself as Triple H stumbling through a pretend match. I was reminded of that when Kurt Angle appeared on the scene. He's similar to Bob Backlund, from my youth, except that he's the bad guy! After all, he's a real athlete, he's constantly spouting John Wooden rhetoric about hard work and fair play, he's succeeded in the real world -- that bastard!
By the way, for those arguing that video games are really participatory: they are, compared to television, just not when compared to real life.
I just can't imagine a Mac user writing commands on a shell or editing a/etc file by hand. I just can't. Is there anybody out there?
I'd disabuse you of your misconceptions but you obviously have so much of your self-esteem invested in your choice of operating systems that I thought it would be cruel.
Honestly, what are people like you going to do next year when every grandmother lugging an iMac home from Circuit City will be using a BSD Unix with a far cooler-looking desktop than anything you can get on themes.org? I'm thinking we'll be seeing a big upsurge in Plan 9 use.
Basically everyone's 2 least favorite groups have dwindled and there's not much left except a few slashbots going patents are bad, linux rocks, patents are bad, linux etc...
Actually, my impression is that there's been a big drop in the number of mediocre +1 posts. ("Linux is good. Micro$hit is bad. Metallica is bad, too.") You may be right about what drove them away, though.
I dunno - maybe people have just gotten tired. How many times can you have the same arguments again and again? For instance, this is effectively the third Transmeta story today (counting the Daisy story). What's left to say?
The statements says its fewer then 300 NEC laptops, so its not that huge of a deal after all. Of course the egg-on-face factor is still high.
Sure, recalling 300 units wouldn't be a big deal for a nuts-and-bolts company like Fairchild. But for a company that's relies on buzz as much as Transmeta does, egg on the face is a major deal.
(Thinking that over a little, maybe I'm being too harsh -- I mean, Transmeta is trying to leapfrog Intel, not start yet another Internet pet food company, and they deserve credit for thinking big. Still, they profit tremendously from their high public profile and that's going to hurt them here.)
Completely off topic: Does it seem to other people that Slashdot is shrinking back to its pre-Columbine (pre-post-Columbine?) scale? Except for flamebait articles about the election, most stories are down to ~100-200 +1 posts. It's nice not feeling like if you don't post on a story in the first minute there's no point bothering.
Come to think of it, the continuous real-time dick measuring contest called Advogato.org has turned into a desert, at least in the posting area, and LinuxWorld (which I think is underrated) and Linux Today forums are mostly empty, too. Are we seeing a trend here?
Yes, your teacher was on crack. As someone else mentioned, the Torah is the first five books of the Bible. The King James edition isn't the most accurate translation, but Adam and Eve are certainly in the original text. The germ of fact behind your story is that it says God created humans, "male and female" before Eve is mentioned. Various interpretations say that "female" refers to Eve, Lilith or some weird hermaphrodite creature. You can believe me or your teacher, or you can learn Hebrew and see for yourself.;-)
In any case, this doesn't affect religious views on creation any more than existing knowledge did -- pushing fossils back another billion years doesn't make the case for a strict Biblical interpretation any more flimsy. Besides, this is evidence for early terrestrial life. There was life in the oceans well before that.
To clarify this: all individuals with more than one X chromosome undergo inactivation to bring the number of active X chromosomes down to 1 per cell. Normally, women (XX) inactivate 1 chromosome; men (XY) inactivate none. (I assume this is what the "X inactivation is only possible in women" refers to.) However, a Klinefelter (XXY) male also has an inactivated X.
I'm with you. For me, WindowMaker has the perfect balance of speed, light weight, rock-solid stability and great looks. There isn't a single feature from the KDE or Gnome desktops that I miss and a lot (like session management) that I have but don't need. And you can run kdesktop in it if you want desktop icons.
WindowMaker suffers from the fact that its authors are more interested in coding than self-promotion.
Perhaps with more companies looking to be a part of LBE and more of them buying the large "pavillion" type floor space areas complete with seats for presentations and even a boxing ring, - the Hilton didn't have the floor space the LBE wanted so it was moved.
Slashdot poll: Who would you most like to see in the LBE boxing ring?
This reminds me of a Boston Globe review of the iBook where Simson Garfinkel (who is knowledgeable and not a zealot) loved its design but was extremely pessimistic about using MacOS. He noted that the stability has improved to the point that it's barely an issue for desktop users, but said he found himself locked out of all his favorite sites.
What am I missing here? I haven't touched Windows in months. I do all my browsing on PPC, either using IE or Mozilla for MacOS, and Konqueror in LinuxPPC. I haven't even bothered to install any of the available plugins besides Flash and Shockwave. And the only site I have trouble with is mynetscape.com which blocks IE connections. Am I just reading ancient, lame sites? Or has it been so long since I've used Windows that I don't realize every site now has holographic VRML that I'm just not seeing? Could someone point me to a site that will show me what I'm missing?
The Linux world has a collective delusion that if we just keep repeating that there's a large market for commercial desktop applications, it will somehow magically become true. Meanwhile, CmdrTaco is booting into Windows to play Diablo and then wonders why software vendors Don't Get It.
Unfortunately, the reality is that the impressive market share numbers are driven by servers, farms and Red Hat partitions that the owner means to get around to using some day. And the folks who are actually using Linux anywhere near full-time on the desktop have been conditioned to believe that paying for software is an unfair imposition on them. Yeah, there's a market for Linux productivity apps but it's nowhere near enough to keep a company like Corel going.
I think the question being asked here (I'm not sure) isn't "Must children learn how a computer works?" but "Given that the child isn't learning anything, is spending a lot of time on the computer something to be encouraged?" Computer use is generally viewed as "better" for kids than television, but if it's only used for activities like games and, well, arguing on Slashdot, is it really better?
Actually, rereading the initial question, I think your interpretation is the correct one. Nonetheless, having bothered to formulate and type it, I'll let my question stand...
Remember that for every elite technique someone creates, there is another eliter person who will find ways around it.
I think I said this in the first/. story but WTF:
Once you start a battle of wits with malicious lusers, you turn it into a game that they'll always win. Think of it as Malda's law. They don't win because they're eliter, but because they have a lot more time on their hands and they have more self-esteem invested in making trouble than you do in stopping them.
(If you're wondering why they're lusers if they always win, think of it as winning the battle (getting an all-caps post through) and losing the war (spending all of Saturday night doing it).
Anyone else do this? I go to my Netscape page, check the weather and sports scores, look at my stocks and think, "Well, I lost money again. But at least Eric Raymond lost more!"
Furthermore, the notion that Mozilla was created primarily by volunteer labor is simply "Oooh, I'm part of the _Community_!" fantasy. For better or worse, the project has been dominated by paid Netscape developers.
If they're smart, they'll choose whatever will allow them to write the best software the quickest, whichever it may be. If a company isn't willing to invest $1000-2000 in something as crucial to developer productivity as a toolkit, either they have incredibly poor business sense or the product is expected to generate so little revenue they'd be better off GPL'ing it and trying to make money from some Eric Raymond voodoo.
As an aside, I've long been irritated by the constant assertions that the restrictions of the GPL constitute freedom. I'm happy to see that break down -- I should have realized that only the release of Qt under the GPL could cause Slashbots to change their tune to, "I don't want to use a GPL library! It's not free!
Slashdot Mirror
I've found myself using it as my primary web browser. I love the cookie handling and it feels quicker than Netscape 4.x and the overall app is more polished and stable than even recent Mozilla nightlies IMHO.The HTML rendering engine needs work in some places, but people should keep in mind that this is the KDE file browser. The fact that people bother to make criticisms that it doesn't handle complicated Javascript or encryption on certain sites suggests just how well it works as a web browser. And this was done with a tiny fraction of the resources of the Mozilla project! A comparison of the two projects would make an interesting case study for open source proponents.
That was as of last week. Some ugly bugs have popped up in recent CVS (at least for me), but that should be fixed soon.
My main criticism is with the separation of the KDE desktop from the browser. I used to use kfm in WindowMaker or icewm to get a lightweight but vey flexible setup. kdesktop creates massive problems for me with other window managers, even when it's started with the root window option. Hopefully that will be polished in future releases.
You make a good point, but these screenshots weren't meant to accompany a press release. This functionality was added in the last week and the pictures were generated in the course of discussion between developers. (See this thread.) I doubt if they were intended to be seen by such a large audience.
So that's where that extension comes from -- I always figured the GIMP guys just spell even worse than CmdrTaco.
Enjoyable article. I had vowed to stop reading Salon in disgust after the Henry Hyde incident, but couldn't because back then it was just too good. A few months ago, I saw a link to a Salon story and realized that I haven't bothered looking at it in at least six months. It had quickly degenerated into a boring mess of Clinton lapdoggery and the sort of columns you usually see in 'alternative' newspapers by writers who think they're being important because they say 'fuck' in every paragraph. I think it was the interminable series by the Chinese call girl that eventually sent me packing.
Meanwhile, they've cut costs by laying off their editorial staff (a typical bit of dot-com management savvy) and, in a sure sign of desperation, elevated sex to its own section. And obsequiously and shamelessly repeating the White House party line of the day hasn't proved as rewarding as it did during the Lewinsky days.
It's not so much that we'll be injecting bone marrow into our brains before finals but that there may be an unknown mechanism for generating neurons. If it can be studied and understood (maybe using stem cells as a model) that raises the possibility of drugs that can accelerate that mechanism to speed recovery from brain damage.
* Assuming Andover has another $100,000 to toss away on a contest with rules and vote counting that make Palm Beach County look like a beacon of consistency.
The Linux numbers do surprise me. I don't take the usual estimates (5% of the desktop market!) seriously, but a domain that carries one of the more popular Linux sites only gets 1% Linux hits? It would be very interesting if Slashdot published the OS and browser shares in their hits. They used to, and I can't help thinking they stopped because the results were politically inconvenient. From the SlashNet interview:
[22:10:22] CmdrTaco: the browser stats are the same as always: there is more windows then linux ;)
[22:10:28] CmdrTaco: we don't mirror the internet.
[22:10:36] CmdrTaco: *way* more Linux then the internet as a whole.
[22:10:37] hemos: but consider that linux is only about 3-5% of the internet...
[22:10:41] hemos: and we've got a huge amount of linux users.
[22:10:57] CmdrTaco: We used to post it, but I pulled it for CPU reasons.
[22:11:09] CmdrTaco: it was an expensive query and I didn't really find it interesting cuz it never changed.
An expensive query? I suppose if you update it continuously, but it shouldn't be a huge deal to post numbers once a month. I can't believe Andover doesn't already generate those data.
IE 5 on the Mac is great, except that it crashes constantly and there are many sites that knock it over every time. (Don't the IE developers read the Dilbert site?) The browser gets such positive press I assume that other people don't see so many crashes. Any Mac-knowledgeable person out there with a suggestion to improve stability?
It's not clear to me what that even means, but it suggests a point that's lost on a lot of users, including journalists who really should know better.
KDE and Gnome offer desktops as well as a collection of apps -- but you can use the apps with either desktop. I keep reading comments like "I used to use Gnome because of gimp, but then I switched to KDE for Konqueror. When Evolution comes out, I'll probably switch back to Gnome." It's not like you're choosing a religion! Kmail, xchat, grip, Konqueror, Nautilus -- use what you like. There's no need to choose one or the other. For crying out loud, that's why each desktop puts the other guys' apps in the desktop menu!
And besides, who cares? Linux users are obsessed with uptime, because that's where Linux shines compared to other desktop systems. But the reality is:
Once again, is it the Eazel Desktop(TM) now?
Heh. After all those articles and interviews that explained how Unix users had to deal with "the cryptic command-line interface" until Gnome 1.0 was released, I can't help but smile at how Eazel has adopted Gnome's tricks.
The whole Red Hat / Helix Code / Eazel / Sun thing is going to be very interesting over the next year or two. It looks like Eazel won this round but they're going directly against against Helix with their software updater. (The disk space thing doesn't have a prayer of making money, IMHO.) I'm skeptical about either of them making any money at it, but the North American Linux mafia is so infatuated with Miguel that I've got to think Helix Code will have the upper hand in keeping mindshare. (Remember how Slashdot used to cover every detail of the Enlightenment developers lives? Have you read a word about them here since the E/Gnome split?)
The great thing is the software is all free. Hey, if venture capitalists want to throw their money away to write GPL software for us, who am I to complain?
By the way, for those arguing that video games are really participatory: they are, compared to television, just not when compared to real life.
I'd disabuse you of your misconceptions but you obviously have so much of your self-esteem invested in your choice of operating systems that I thought it would be cruel.
Honestly, what are people like you going to do next year when every grandmother lugging an iMac home from Circuit City will be using a BSD Unix with a far cooler-looking desktop than anything you can get on themes.org? I'm thinking we'll be seeing a big upsurge in Plan 9 use.
Actually, my impression is that there's been a big drop in the number of mediocre +1 posts. ("Linux is good. Micro$hit is bad. Metallica is bad, too.") You may be right about what drove them away, though.
I dunno - maybe people have just gotten tired. How many times can you have the same arguments again and again? For instance, this is effectively the third Transmeta story today (counting the Daisy story). What's left to say?
Sure, recalling 300 units wouldn't be a big deal for a nuts-and-bolts company like Fairchild. But for a company that's relies on buzz as much as Transmeta does, egg on the face is a major deal.
(Thinking that over a little, maybe I'm being too harsh -- I mean, Transmeta is trying to leapfrog Intel, not start yet another Internet pet food company, and they deserve credit for thinking big. Still, they profit tremendously from their high public profile and that's going to hurt them here.)
Completely off topic: Does it seem to other people that Slashdot is shrinking back to its pre-Columbine (pre-post-Columbine?) scale? Except for flamebait articles about the election, most stories are down to ~100-200 +1 posts. It's nice not feeling like if you don't post on a story in the first minute there's no point bothering.
Come to think of it, the continuous real-time dick measuring contest called Advogato.org has turned into a desert, at least in the posting area, and LinuxWorld (which I think is underrated) and Linux Today forums are mostly empty, too. Are we seeing a trend here?
The part about Shakespeare comes from a parody of numerology in Scientific American years ago - Shakespeare had nothing to do with the King James translation.
In any case, this doesn't affect religious views on creation any more than existing knowledge did -- pushing fossils back another billion years doesn't make the case for a strict Biblical interpretation any more flimsy. Besides, this is evidence for early terrestrial life. There was life in the oceans well before that.
To clarify this: all individuals with more than one X chromosome undergo inactivation to bring the number of active X chromosomes down to 1 per cell. Normally, women (XX) inactivate 1 chromosome; men (XY) inactivate none. (I assume this is what the "X inactivation is only possible in women" refers to.) However, a Klinefelter (XXY) male also has an inactivated X.
WindowMaker suffers from the fact that its authors are more interested in coding than self-promotion.
Slashdot poll: Who would you most like to see in the LBE boxing ring?
This reminds me of a Boston Globe review of the iBook where Simson Garfinkel (who is knowledgeable and not a zealot) loved its design but was extremely pessimistic about using MacOS. He noted that the stability has improved to the point that it's barely an issue for desktop users, but said he found himself locked out of all his favorite sites.
What am I missing here? I haven't touched Windows in months. I do all my browsing on PPC, either using IE or Mozilla for MacOS, and Konqueror in LinuxPPC. I haven't even bothered to install any of the available plugins besides Flash and Shockwave. And the only site I have trouble with is mynetscape.com which blocks IE connections. Am I just reading ancient, lame sites? Or has it been so long since I've used Windows that I don't realize every site now has holographic VRML that I'm just not seeing? Could someone point me to a site that will show me what I'm missing?
Unfortunately, the reality is that the impressive market share numbers are driven by servers, farms and Red Hat partitions that the owner means to get around to using some day. And the folks who are actually using Linux anywhere near full-time on the desktop have been conditioned to believe that paying for software is an unfair imposition on them. Yeah, there's a market for Linux productivity apps but it's nowhere near enough to keep a company like Corel going.
Actually, rereading the initial question, I think your interpretation is the correct one. Nonetheless, having bothered to formulate and type it, I'll let my question stand...
I think I said this in the first /. story but WTF:
Once you start a battle of wits with malicious lusers, you turn it into a game that they'll always win. Think of it as Malda's law. They don't win because they're eliter, but because they have a lot more time on their hands and they have more self-esteem invested in making trouble than you do in stopping them.
(If you're wondering why they're lusers if they always win, think of it as winning the battle (getting an all-caps post through) and losing the war (spending all of Saturday night doing it).
Yeah, I'm a bitter person ;-)
Furthermore, the notion that Mozilla was created primarily by volunteer labor is simply "Oooh, I'm part of the _Community_!" fantasy. For better or worse, the project has been dominated by paid Netscape developers.
If they're smart, they'll choose whatever will allow them to write the best software the quickest, whichever it may be. If a company isn't willing to invest $1000-2000 in something as crucial to developer productivity as a toolkit, either they have incredibly poor business sense or the product is expected to generate so little revenue they'd be better off GPL'ing it and trying to make money from some Eric Raymond voodoo.
As an aside, I've long been irritated by the constant assertions that the restrictions of the GPL constitute freedom. I'm happy to see that break down -- I should have realized that only the release of Qt under the GPL could cause Slashbots to change their tune to, "I don't want to use a GPL library! It's not free!