Honestly, my editorial bits were considerably shorter and neutral, compared to my expaned post, although the reference to duking it out with the Simpsons was pretty much verbatim.
So tell true, would you see this at a theater? I can't imagine it at the pedestrian cinema, but perhaps at the alternative theater (which IMHO carries most of the films with watching) or d'ya think it's a made-for-TV flick?
I'll make a little note to download that, too, thanks for the reminder!
Memory Lane...more like Memory Boulevard
on
High Score
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
My first exposure to games were Pong and Space Invaders. And I still enjoy a good SI session now and then. After that it was working with some guy (I won't name drop, but you could probably figure out who it is) who was totally infatuated with Apple ][ games and was developing one of his own. He had written, in RSTS Basic Squash and some other games which ran on Delta College's PDP-11/50.
I was more into the interative adventure games (like H2G2), but his enthusiasm was contagious. I got to see, and play test a little, his first game "Sneakers" and even suggested a name for one of the screens, which comemorated the wing of the college where the computer labs were.
He could pretty much kick my butt at anything requiring hand-eye coordination, except one night I truly smoked him on one of those night-driver games (achieving the rank of Speed Racer:-)
He started at Ferris State University, but an offer from a Sacramento game company lured him out of to the city where I visited a couple times and met developers and heard some of their inside stories about what sudden large chunks of cash does to 18-20 year olds.
When the game industry crashed (prior to the NES reviving it) he survived, but many sold off their few extravegances and moved back in with their parents or went back to school.
It was a pretty cool age to grow up in, where entire projects were handled by highly motivated and enthusiastic individuals. Times have changed, where now it's a house thing with teams of 3D artists, sound people, programmers, designers, etc.
Still, between 1980 and 1985 I saw more innovation and truly fun, entertaining games than I have in the past decade. Back when one person could write a game, some pretty neat ideas were manifested.
I'm back into playing games, on Apple ][ and C64 emulators and rediscovering those games I always loved playing.
Oh, and yeah, I did dump some serious money at Alladin's Castle: Mouse Trap, Qixx, Amidar, Tempest, Wizard of Wor and the Black Knight pinball machine. Good thing I had that student job to fund that habi^H^H^H^Haddiction.
I'll probably be playing more Seven Cities of Gold this evening and maybe a little Paradroid for old times sake...
Ok, I submitted this last evening and it was dumped for Joey's and it's all good, except my little editorial thoughts, and here they are (and then some):
Effectively the a front for the music industry (which I personally hold responsible for showing us the worst of what it has to sell) is producing a film about someone utterly demonized by the RIAA. Irony so thick that you could hammer it into a horseshoe.
So how does MTV/Alex Winter portray Shawn? Good guy? Bad guy? Misunderstood genius? Or some horrible crap where Shawn starts out as a devil-may-care music pirate, but sees the shining light of reason, in the angelic form of Hilary B. Rosen (descending from Heaven with a subpoena in her hand), and returns to the light, to take his seat to the right of Bertelsmann AG and expound on the virtues of IP and clamping all possible evil-doers in the irons of DRM.
Slated for 2003-2004 season relsease, I don't expect much in the way of special effects (so Hilary will probably just have to descend on visible wires.)
Last, the burning question on everyones mind: Will it fend off the Simpsons for holiday audiences?
Soon to appear in P2P everywhere... well, maybe not.
One can only listen to "Do the Bartman" for so many times before shuffling the CD to the bottom of the stack. Even the used CD places won't take it, seems they get enough of them and no demand.
Just fox 35. Used to get more stations when I lived in Watsonville, less blockage by the mountains. Coincidentally, I live near a Cell phone dead zone. Stupidly, they changed the local ABC station (to WB, not so bad, but then) to NBC, so I get two NBC, 1 CBS, 1 Fox and Pax.
Me, cheap? Geez. I prop up half the economy of California (or it seems that way at least)
I bought the Simpson's Family Album CD, and I doubt many others have. I'd gladly trade that thing back for the cash to go see the movie.
Seriously, South Park and Beavis and Butthead required someone (probably parents) footing the Cable bill, whereas the Simpsons are broadcast over the ether and only require a reasonably functional (or disfunctional) TV set to watch. I've never seen an episode of South Park on TV, since I moved when it started up and haven't signed on for cable since. Buy tapes or see the movie.
The Simpsons has been on for, what, 11 years? I've still got the entire first season on tape somewhere (and it's not as pretty as the current show, let me tell you, nor is the comedy as smooth.) I don't watch them much anymore because I'm usually hanging out with friends on Sunday evenings and don't set the timer on the VCR. Kinda the rich man taking the wealth of free TV for granted, but following it isn't a priority anymore. Maybe if it started snowing in Santa Cruz I'd stay inside and watch more TV.
I do always make an effort to watch the Halloween Simpsons shows, as those are usually the best of the season.
Honestly, the show is good and if you tape them (like I did) and watch them back to back (like I also did) you can get the effect of watching a movie, provided you edited out the commercials (like I did as well.)
So the only thing different? A further expanded plot. Ok... I'm not sure that makes any difference, in the grand scheme of things, but I'd probably go see it anyway.
The downside is, unless Matt brings in a ton of animators or turns the background over to a Beowulf cluster (I can just imagine that...) of renderers, the show doesn't gain anything cinematic, so big screen, eh!
Maybe they'll get lucky and score a hit like Blame Canada, eh!
After working in XP for the last couple weeks, this much I'll add: And Microsoft keeps changing the damn interface. They must just laugh 'til they pee their pants at the amount of productivity lost as new users try to refind or retrain to find that familiar way of knowing where things are and how they work. Every new version gets them profits and every new version eats into those companies which surrender hours for retraining.
Maybe it's because I grew up in front of an OSI 500.
Maybe it's because I spent so many hours of my youth at a VT52.
Maybe it's because I was happy with my Apple ][ and C64 (and as recently as Sunday was playing Seven Cities of Gold on Vice64 and enjoying it.)
Maybe it's because I always kept at least one CLI open on my Amiga desktop.
Maybe it's because I've spent so many years writing applications with simple user interfaces for rapid data access and update.
Maybe it's just me and I've become a curmudgeon and should just move off to the side and keep to myself, aside from the occasional utterance about 'youts dese days.'
Every time I get a new PC or new version of Microsoft I spend hours figuing out how to get it to stop doing annoying default behavior and trying to figure out where sh!t is, and frequently pissed off becuase there's only one way to get at something and it's buried (i.e. you have to know where to look.)
I've never considered Microsoft's implementations of anything to be best in class. More often myself and coworkers have simply given up on shaping applications and interfaces to work to our advantage, because someone who knows better than us, has taken that decision power.
If RH is mimicking Microsoft, I sure as heck hope they don't mimic them all the way, two cruddy interfaces for two different products isn't any kind of improvement in my book.
Back when Marshall Applewhite and all the other loopy web developers in Rancho Santa Fe, California, put on their Nikes and sweats and dined on chocolate pudding, I was able to get the Heavens Gate webpage, View Source (in Netscape) revealed a lot of meta keywords, I see they still use them.
Ok, I've been watching for the Barracuda V drives for a while and it's nice to see that the Barracuda drives are quiet, with good performance (got the dirt right off Seagate's page), but where the heck are the SATA drives?
One comes up on Pricewatch and Google, which frequently highlights vendors, has only brought up articles, reviews, passing references for the ST3120023AS
Note: The second Seagate link gives some idea of where SATA is going, starting at 150MBytes/sec external transfer speed, yet their tech spec indicates 150Mbits/sec. So far benchs show no advantage, unless you prefer/need the wiring change. Your milage may vary.
But what I'd like to know is why my spam, which has hovered around 40 a day for months, suddenly doubled in the past few weeks. Some duplicates, but I'm wondering if there's a connection with the return to school time and spam. Do college students spam? I know Nigerian college students created some innovative scams (aside from the money in the bank one, which is still making the rounds) back in the early days. Are others jumping on the bandwagon?
Uhhh... standardize? That would make game programming like.... WORK!
This is exacly why I had such short attention for games which came with editors which allowed me to build my own levels. It became work. Creating games should be creative fun. Alas, 1980 was a long time ago, back in the day when a guy could sit in his basement and write up something like Sneakers and submit it to a place like Sirius Software to see if they'd be interested. Now it's all producers and specialists and my nephew actually wants to get into it as a line of work. Take a second major, I say, keep your options open. Games should be a labor of love, first, a way to make a living, second.
Was this a troll, well, maybe not, but I'll address a few items...
One is that gaming is moving towards the console. If that was true then the x-box being the closest to a pc would have selled like hot-cakes. It didn't.
Yes, games have moved to the Console, more consoles sell than ever before and I can't find anywhere near the number of game titles for PC's that I can for Consoles. The notable exception is there are some much higher quality games for the PC's than you can play on consoles, but in shear numbers Consoles win. Don't confuse the Likeness to PC's of the Xbox with what should come out for it, it's hardly an open platform, with Microsoft willing to defend exclusive rights of development (i.e. DMCA smackdown for reverse engineering, etc.), thus they get a cut of ever title, same way Sony and Nintendo work.
Two is that $XXXX is to much, it all depends on what youre income is.
No, $4K is in excess of what's needed for a high performance gaming PC. I've been pricing parts to build my own (not particularly for gaming) and $1000-1500 is plenty. What they offer is the same as Gucci does, you can buy a handbag at Kmart or buy a Gucci, they both function equally.
Three is that you presume pc games are mostly played by kids when in fact the average age hovers around 30 and many older people are starting to pick up games as well.
Didn't say anything about kids as the predominant market for games, even I know better than that and I'm pretty stupid at times. The PC with all the lights and gewgaws is most likely to appeal to the less initiated, whereas the more experienced gamer, particularly those with DIY connections save their money for games, not buying glitz.
Four is that everyone is willing to spend the time building their own system. For some people the extra cost is easily offset by the ease of getting it out of the box.
You can buy a pretty high end PC right off the shelf from Dell, CompUSA, Circuit City, etc. for much less if you don't want to build. $2400-4000 (4000 being the one with the 240+gig of drives and liquid cooling) Read any magazines lately? The prices I'm seeing reflect some resepectable horsepower at a reasonable price. Just slap in your 128Meg graphic card and you're off and running.
Youre response sound a bit like you are jealous of people that would have the kind of money to buy this. Get over it. And if you can build the same system for less, well then open youre own bussiness and compete with them.
I'm sometimes jealous of people who have more money, but I'm rarely so of people who flaunt money or blow it stupidly.
Now, if you'd have actually RTFA you would have seen I'm not alone in my opinions:
Sean Aryai, a marketing director at Systemax could be quoted verbatim as of 10 years ago.
"It's hard to fathom that there's a large audience out there for (Double X), particularly in today's market," said Toni Duboise, an analyst with ARS. "But, on the other hand, it could appeal to those kinds of buyers who look at Sony and Apple...and those people who are willing to spend more on a stylized version of a PC."
Seriously I would buy a processor from them if they didn't include that DRM bullshit while AMD, Intel, and other American companies are including it. Even if they aren't quite as fast for the buck or aren't x86 compatible (is fine as long as they can run Linux). I'd even switch to their CPU as my default development platform.
Wouldn't it be ironic for Americans to have to use Chinese products to remain free?
No, but it would be a great service to mankind, to have a second front in technology manufacturing which doesn't represent the interests of the RIAA, MPAA, John Ashcroft, Microsoft, etc. Keep Intel and AMD honest, compete on true horsepower, rather than horsepower-code_to_restrict_rights. Of course, we have some awful law passed in this country where they could try to block it at the border. Maybe it's an opportunity to throw 'freetrade' on WTO terms right back in Washington DC's faces.
"But gaming is moving more into the mainstream now, so we think it's a market we can capture.
Despite some good PC titles, gaming has been trending towards consoles, which cost $200 each. Even with green lights and water cooling $4000 is just way to much. You can still buy systems, which you could pop the latest motherboard in with a faster Athlon or P4 and play fast enough for less than $1500, fully kitted with DVD/CDRW, and all. Maybe they're targeting the rich kids, you know, the ones who never get invited to LAN parties.
"If you don't let me play, I'll take my server straight home!"
I grew up with condemned shows like the A-Team, and Airwolf. Shows that people said were too violent for kids....I did had crap like Captain Planet and other spoon-fed pablum created to make everyone love and respect eachother.
And A-Team wasn't crap? I mean, when did you ever see anyone get shot? It was just waving toy guns around and sound effects and the Team doing good things to help people out, etc., etc. just like Capt Planet, et al. Sorry, man, but you had to watch movies to see real hurt and bleeding. Thank goodness I grew up watching the Duke, among others.:)
Damn... guess I'd better stop playing all those edu-tainment games, which taught me strategy and how to manage resources, and get on the bandwagon of blood, gore and guns galore.
Ridiculous trademark stops Rooibus Tea at the border, since someone (reads like a squatter, to me) retistered an indigenous tea bush name.
the owner of the trademark is not willing to let the name go either: "The name Rooibos was totally unknown in the US in 1992. No-one was aware of Rooibos tea or the benefits that went with it," says Virginia Burke-Watkins, who is based in Dallas.
Funny, I don't think she's exactly done anything for the name, either. The first I heard of it was on the BBC.
The good of it, govenments will have to come together to keep a database of indigenous names and prevent their trademarking.
Vicegrip writes "In an article on leaked release notes on Redhat 8.0 CNet also revealed that Bernhard Rosenkraenzer,... His worries about what Redhat is doing to KDE for 8.0 have me rather concerned and thinking of switching distributions."
Slashdot Mirror
So tell true, would you see this at a theater? I can't imagine it at the pedestrian cinema, but perhaps at the alternative theater (which IMHO carries most of the films with watching) or d'ya think it's a made-for-TV flick?
The target audience is certainly a mystery to me.
Yeah, played that, too! Fun!
I'll make a little note to download that, too, thanks for the reminder!
I was more into the interative adventure games (like H2G2), but his enthusiasm was contagious. I got to see, and play test a little, his first game "Sneakers" and even suggested a name for one of the screens, which comemorated the wing of the college where the computer labs were.
He could pretty much kick my butt at anything requiring hand-eye coordination, except one night I truly smoked him on one of those night-driver games (achieving the rank of Speed Racer :-)
He started at Ferris State University, but an offer from a Sacramento game company lured him out of to the city where I visited a couple times and met developers and heard some of their inside stories about what sudden large chunks of cash does to 18-20 year olds.
When the game industry crashed (prior to the NES reviving it) he survived, but many sold off their few extravegances and moved back in with their parents or went back to school.
It was a pretty cool age to grow up in, where entire projects were handled by highly motivated and enthusiastic individuals. Times have changed, where now it's a house thing with teams of 3D artists, sound people, programmers, designers, etc.
Still, between 1980 and 1985 I saw more innovation and truly fun, entertaining games than I have in the past decade. Back when one person could write a game, some pretty neat ideas were manifested.
I'm back into playing games, on Apple ][ and C64 emulators and rediscovering those games I always loved playing.
Oh, and yeah, I did dump some serious money at Alladin's Castle: Mouse Trap, Qixx, Amidar, Tempest, Wizard of Wor and the Black Knight pinball machine. Good thing I had that student job to fund that habi^H^H^H^Haddiction.
I'll probably be playing more Seven Cities of Gold this evening and maybe a little Paradroid for old times sake...
Effectively the a front for the music industry (which I personally hold responsible for showing us the worst of what it has to sell) is producing a film about someone utterly demonized by the RIAA. Irony so thick that you could hammer it into a horseshoe.
So how does MTV/Alex Winter portray Shawn? Good guy? Bad guy? Misunderstood genius? Or some horrible crap where Shawn starts out as a devil-may-care music pirate, but sees the shining light of reason, in the angelic form of Hilary B. Rosen (descending from Heaven with a subpoena in her hand), and returns to the light, to take his seat to the right of Bertelsmann AG and expound on the virtues of IP and clamping all possible evil-doers in the irons of DRM.
Slated for 2003-2004 season relsease, I don't expect much in the way of special effects (so Hilary will probably just have to descend on visible wires.)
Last, the burning question on everyones mind: Will it fend off the Simpsons for holiday audiences?
Soon to appear in P2P everywhere... well, maybe not.
It pains me to see two parties, I so much admire, going to court. Hopefully there will be no hard feelings, or what poses for them will pass.
Hums a happy tune and rolls eyes toward ceiling
One can only listen to "Do the Bartman" for so many times before shuffling the CD to the bottom of the stack. Even the used CD places won't take it, seems they get enough of them and no demand.
Just fox 35. Used to get more stations when I lived in Watsonville, less blockage by the mountains. Coincidentally, I live near a Cell phone dead zone. Stupidly, they changed the local ABC station (to WB, not so bad, but then) to NBC, so I get two NBC, 1 CBS, 1 Fox and Pax.
I bought the Simpson's Family Album CD, and I doubt many others have. I'd gladly trade that thing back for the cash to go see the movie.
Seriously, South Park and Beavis and Butthead required someone (probably parents) footing the Cable bill, whereas the Simpsons are broadcast over the ether and only require a reasonably functional (or disfunctional) TV set to watch. I've never seen an episode of South Park on TV, since I moved when it started up and haven't signed on for cable since. Buy tapes or see the movie.
The Simpsons has been on for, what, 11 years? I've still got the entire first season on tape somewhere (and it's not as pretty as the current show, let me tell you, nor is the comedy as smooth.) I don't watch them much anymore because I'm usually hanging out with friends on Sunday evenings and don't set the timer on the VCR. Kinda the rich man taking the wealth of free TV for granted, but following it isn't a priority anymore. Maybe if it started snowing in Santa Cruz I'd stay inside and watch more TV.
I do always make an effort to watch the Halloween Simpsons shows, as those are usually the best of the season.
So the only thing different? A further expanded plot. Ok... I'm not sure that makes any difference, in the grand scheme of things, but I'd probably go see it anyway.
The downside is, unless Matt brings in a ton of animators or turns the background over to a Beowulf cluster (I can just imagine that...) of renderers, the show doesn't gain anything cinematic, so big screen, eh!
Maybe they'll get lucky and score a hit like Blame Canada, eh!
After working in XP for the last couple weeks, this much I'll add: And Microsoft keeps changing the damn interface. They must just laugh 'til they pee their pants at the amount of productivity lost as new users try to refind or retrain to find that familiar way of knowing where things are and how they work. Every new version gets them profits and every new version eats into those companies which surrender hours for retraining.
Maybe it's because I spent so many hours of my youth at a VT52.
Maybe it's because I was happy with my Apple ][ and C64 (and as recently as Sunday was playing Seven Cities of Gold on Vice64 and enjoying it.)
Maybe it's because I always kept at least one CLI open on my Amiga desktop.
Maybe it's because I've spent so many years writing applications with simple user interfaces for rapid data access and update.
Maybe it's just me and I've become a curmudgeon and should just move off to the side and keep to myself, aside from the occasional utterance about 'youts dese days.'
Every time I get a new PC or new version of Microsoft I spend hours figuing out how to get it to stop doing annoying default behavior and trying to figure out where sh!t is, and frequently pissed off becuase there's only one way to get at something and it's buried (i.e. you have to know where to look.)
I've never considered Microsoft's implementations of anything to be best in class. More often myself and coworkers have simply given up on shaping applications and interfaces to work to our advantage, because someone who knows better than us, has taken that decision power.
If RH is mimicking Microsoft, I sure as heck hope they don't mimic them all the way, two cruddy interfaces for two different products isn't any kind of improvement in my book.
Back when Marshall Applewhite and all the other loopy web developers in Rancho Santa Fe, California, put on their Nikes and sweats and dined on chocolate pudding, I was able to get the Heavens Gate webpage, View Source (in Netscape) revealed a lot of meta keywords, I see they still use them.
One comes up on Pricewatch and Google, which frequently highlights vendors, has only brought up articles, reviews, passing references for the ST3120023AS
Note: The second Seagate link gives some idea of where SATA is going, starting at 150MBytes/sec external transfer speed, yet their tech spec indicates 150Mbits/sec. So far benchs show no advantage, unless you prefer/need the wiring change. Your milage may vary.
Bummer tho, since to use the Sharp monitor in 3D you sacrifice half the horizontal resolution. Who wants to see 640x? again? :P
But what I'd like to know is why my spam, which has hovered around 40 a day for months, suddenly doubled in the past few weeks. Some duplicates, but I'm wondering if there's a connection with the return to school time and spam. Do college students spam? I know Nigerian college students created some innovative scams (aside from the money in the bank one, which is still making the rounds) back in the early days. Are others jumping on the bandwagon?
This is exacly why I had such short attention for games which came with editors which allowed me to build my own levels. It became work. Creating games should be creative fun. Alas, 1980 was a long time ago, back in the day when a guy could sit in his basement and write up something like Sneakers and submit it to a place like Sirius Software to see if they'd be interested. Now it's all producers and specialists and my nephew actually wants to get into it as a line of work. Take a second major, I say, keep your options open. Games should be a labor of love, first, a way to make a living, second.
My 2 centimes anyway...
One is that gaming is moving towards the console. If that was true then the x-box being the closest to a pc would have selled like hot-cakes. It didn't.
Yes, games have moved to the Console, more consoles sell than ever before and I can't find anywhere near the number of game titles for PC's that I can for Consoles. The notable exception is there are some much higher quality games for the PC's than you can play on consoles, but in shear numbers Consoles win. Don't confuse the Likeness to PC's of the Xbox with what should come out for it, it's hardly an open platform, with Microsoft willing to defend exclusive rights of development (i.e. DMCA smackdown for reverse engineering, etc.), thus they get a cut of ever title, same way Sony and Nintendo work.
Two is that $XXXX is to much, it all depends on what youre income is.
No, $4K is in excess of what's needed for a high performance gaming PC. I've been pricing parts to build my own (not particularly for gaming) and $1000-1500 is plenty. What they offer is the same as Gucci does, you can buy a handbag at Kmart or buy a Gucci, they both function equally.
Three is that you presume pc games are mostly played by kids when in fact the average age hovers around 30 and many older people are starting to pick up games as well.
Didn't say anything about kids as the predominant market for games, even I know better than that and I'm pretty stupid at times. The PC with all the lights and gewgaws is most likely to appeal to the less initiated, whereas the more experienced gamer, particularly those with DIY connections save their money for games, not buying glitz.
Four is that everyone is willing to spend the time building their own system. For some people the extra cost is easily offset by the ease of getting it out of the box.
You can buy a pretty high end PC right off the shelf from Dell, CompUSA, Circuit City, etc. for much less if you don't want to build. $2400-4000 (4000 being the one with the 240+gig of drives and liquid cooling) Read any magazines lately? The prices I'm seeing reflect some resepectable horsepower at a reasonable price. Just slap in your 128Meg graphic card and you're off and running.
Youre response sound a bit like you are jealous of people that would have the kind of money to buy this. Get over it. And if you can build the same system for less, well then open youre own bussiness and compete with them.
I'm sometimes jealous of people who have more money, but I'm rarely so of people who flaunt money or blow it stupidly.
Now, if you'd have actually RTFA you would have seen I'm not alone in my opinions:
Sean Aryai, a marketing director at Systemax could be quoted verbatim as of 10 years ago.
"It's hard to fathom that there's a large audience out there for (Double X), particularly in today's market," said Toni Duboise, an analyst with ARS. "But, on the other hand, it could appeal to those kinds of buyers who look at Sony and Apple...and those people who are willing to spend more on a stylized version of a PC."
Wouldn't it be ironic for Americans to have to use Chinese products to remain free?
No, but it would be a great service to mankind, to have a second front in technology manufacturing which doesn't represent the interests of the RIAA, MPAA, John Ashcroft, Microsoft, etc. Keep Intel and AMD honest, compete on true horsepower, rather than horsepower-code_to_restrict_rights. Of course, we have some awful law passed in this country where they could try to block it at the border. Maybe it's an opportunity to throw 'freetrade' on WTO terms right back in Washington DC's faces.
Despite some good PC titles, gaming has been trending towards consoles, which cost $200 each. Even with green lights and water cooling $4000 is just way to much. You can still buy systems, which you could pop the latest motherboard in with a faster Athlon or P4 and play fast enough for less than $1500, fully kitted with DVD/CDRW, and all. Maybe they're targeting the rich kids, you know, the ones who never get invited to LAN parties.
"If you don't let me play, I'll take my server straight home!"
And A-Team wasn't crap? I mean, when did you ever see anyone get shot? It was just waving toy guns around and sound effects and the Team doing good things to help people out, etc., etc. just like Capt Planet, et al. Sorry, man, but you had to watch movies to see real hurt and bleeding. Thank goodness I grew up watching the Duke, among others. :)
*sigh*
I just want to be of presidential timber...
Funny, I don't think she's exactly done anything for the name, either. The first I heard of it was on the BBC.
The good of it, govenments will have to come together to keep a database of indigenous names and prevent their trademarking.
Vicegrip writes "In an article on leaked release notes on Redhat 8.0 CNet also revealed that Bernhard Rosenkraenzer, ... His worries about what Redhat is doing to KDE for 8.0 have me rather concerned and thinking of switching distributions."
Mandrake, maybe?