Personally, I was skeptical about the KDE 4.0 release too, initially. But given the scope and size of the project it was unavoidable and did not turn out bad at all. You should compare KDE 4.0 with Linux 2.6.0. There too, the problem of chicken (stable finished code) and egg (large userbase) caused delays which led Linus to make a release. The label '2.6.0' finally got distros to shift to the new release and accelerated stabilization.
We are now seeing the same for KDE. Before the schedule became so strict, people were working on the libraries mainly. Since last November progress towards stable and compelling applications went very fast and currently KDE 4.0 is not complete in terms of ported applications, but is a very nice environment to develop for and is perfectly nice to use. This desktop has high potential for the well-integrated sexyness that is the hallmark of KDE.
Strictly speaking, I'd say this is DRM. But it's not DRM as we know it.
The archive, housed at the Nyinkka Nyunyu Art and Culture Centre, contains photos, digital video clips, audio files, and digital reproductions of cultural artifacts and documents.
So this is simply a website with user management. Not everybody is allowed to see everything. This is different from DRM as Microsoft advocates it, where people would not be able to save these pages and images unencrypted onto their machines. Because, you know, they might mail them to somebody of the opposite sex!
It's highly unlikely that this website really relies on complicated DRM schemes (which would require Vista).
More information became available that confirms that Nokia wants to develop more cross platform applications.
The key driver for Nokia in this acquisition is cross-platform development. and
We respect the symbiotic relationship Qt has with the community and we wish to continue and enhance this relationship. source
All in all, they are making the right noises for this to be a good development. When I don my pink shades, I'm seeing a future where Nokia devices will run KDE4.
Yes, I think you are right. As a community we can be very happy that Trolltech released Qt under the GPL v3 before being acquired by Nokia. Now Nokia will be releasing a very large GPL v3 codebase, thus undermining their pro-software patent stance. I too wonder if the trolls have sped up the adoption of GPL v3 on purpose.
The Qt toolkit allows rapid development of nice mobile and desktop application. A Nokia slide on the role of Qt in the company seems to suggest they want to use Qt to write applications that work and look the same on their mobile phones and on the desktop the user might have (be it Windows, Mac or Linux).
The new MacBook Air will hopefully point laptop makers in the right direction: small and silent laptops. From what I can tell from the specs and the review, though, the MacBook Air is not as nice as the laptop on which I'm typing this: the Dell Latitude X1. Although the X1 is now out of production, it is still, in my opinion, the perfect laptop. Someone else has already taken the trouble of comparing the two machines. Here's the summary:
Dell Latitude X1 is smaller (albeit slightly thicker), has a gigabit ethernet port, comes with a external DVD burner, has two USB ports and and SD and a CF slot. The battery is easily removed and replaced or upgraded.
The MacBook Air has a dualcore 1.6 GHz processor where the X1 has a single core that clocks 1.1 GHz. Also the Air can take 2GB versus the 1.25 GB of the X1.
The X1 comes with an obligatory copy of Windows XP, but I upgraded it to Kubuntu Feisty. The MacBook comes with an obligatory copy of Mac OS X.
I have been developing KDE4 on my X1 just fine. The extra speed would be nice, but for a portable machine battery life is more important.
If the X1 were still in production, it would clearly be the better laptop.
But does Trolltech have any way to enforce this? It seems they do not. They even say:
Any software developed with Qt without a commercial license agreement must be released as Open Source software.
Why must the code be released at all? Trolltech cannot force people to publish code. Please show me a license clause from the the commercial license that confirms this.
The copyright on your code remains with you. You can release under as many different licenses as you like. If you use third party libraries, the license you release your code under must fit to the licenses of the code you are linking to.
Searching the google web index with 'qt' and 'trapping clause' gives me one result that talks about cobol and quicktime.
Trolltech has stated that they disapprove of developing using the GPL version and buying the commercial license just in time for a release. There is, however, nothing they can do about such practices.
If you really want to avoid paying the licenses for your commercial application there are plenty of ways of avoiding a legal requirement for paying them. You can, for example, build a thin, GPL-ed GUI that calls a closed application over IPC.
Or you can have one GUI developer that links to a library. In that case you are force into using a sound architecture and you need to buy only one license.
In short, I think the concept of a 'trapping clause' is FUD and I would like you to back up your statement with some references.
The Dell X1 can be gotten for a lot less. It's very similar to this new Airmac. It comes with external DVD drive can run about 7 hours on battery. More if you take a spare battery. I'm typing this post on the one I bought 3 years ago. It is running KUbuntu perfectly.
You can have the same functionality as winscp with konqueror or krusader in combination with fish:// or scp://. You can also use different protocols such as webdav:// or ftp:// to manage remote files.
Going through water at such high speeds would be very inefficient because of large drag. I'm not even sure you can go so fast while submerged.
Perhaps you meant the idea of floating tubes below the ocean surface:
Recent vactrain proposals by Frank Davidson, a founding member of the Channel Tunnel project, and Japanese engineer Yoshihiro Kyonati have tackled the transoceanic problems by floating a tube above the ocean floor, anchored with cables. The transit tube would remain at least 1000 feet below the ocean surface to avoid water turbulence.
You could use one-way valves and have the pressure of the passing train push out most of the air. That should be significantly lower the drag on the (next) train.
That would mean the universe only splits in situations where you would die. Otherwise your conscious self would be allowed to split up.
It also means that if I see someone die, he/she did not have a conscious self. Or that that person was forked off into a different world. But for that to happen, you would also have to be forked, which was not allowed.
Pretty crazy consequences that to me make the Russian roulette theory very implausible.
No, the way to solve the problem is to allow retailers to pre-install any OS they like, but have them charge the same price for this OS as they would for a boxed copy. Also, they should give the consumer the option to buy the machine without an operating system. What is missing at the moment is openness about the price of Windows for your PC and the option to buy a machine without an OS. This option should be a consumer right. This would give the consumer the possibility of reusing your existing Windows copy for your new PC or of using a different operating system altogether.
It's getting worse all the time. Google is just one company of many companies that are doing more and more outsourcing. The pope would certainly not mention Google specifically. This is a horrible article full of innuendo and breaks a very important quality rule: Never use a question mark in the title of a news item. Question marks are a dead giveaway of hysterics without content.
not a single transitionary entity still alive today out of millions of opportunities - COME ON!
There were no transitionary entities. Evolution only occurs in tiny steps and each step means there was an advantage for the organism at that time. There are no transitionary entities because there is no goal and no markers along the way. Actually there is not even a way. Human have evolved into the diverse population we are now over a long time and we are still changing. The changes from generation to generation are tiny, but a billion years is a long time so it's ok.
People seem to think that evolution leads to improvement. This is a strange notion. How do you define improvement? Evolution is just a way to describe how the set of organisms present changed over time.
Not only Beagle but 4 other desktop search engines. Beagle, Strigi, Pinot, Tracker and Recoll are five search engines that work together on a common search API for the free desktop called Xesam. The Xesam API is nice and the free desktop search programs are powerfull. More importantly, they have commandline tools, are faster and allow more tuning of what to index and what not. On top of that an ontology (hierarchy of fields) has been worked out that will be supported by these search engines. This will allow any desktop application to use any of these search engines to integrate tightly. No doubt a translation layer will be written to let GDS also use this API.
Browsing the GDS website, these things are notable. Google Desktop Search
is closed source software
is widely deployed and tested on other platforms
has a stable well documented API
uses COM for communication
has a large brand recognition and there will a demand for it
calls analyzer plugins based on file extension
has a limited, unexpandable list of categories for files
identifies files by mtime + uri
uses wchar_t internally
is file based
has a documented API for querying the search daemon
( I do not know which protocol )
has no command-line tools
This means that just as the existing programs are starting to come to terms, Google comes and returns the chaos on the desktop search scene.
While I like Google internet search, their desktop offering has me feeling eerie. I would prefer using Mono over Googles closed source program. But even better is the ultra-efficient Strigi which will be part of KDE4 and indexes streams instead of files.
Here's the official statement by Mark. This is not an official statement by Canonical or Ubuntu, but I do not think either will disagree with Marks position.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I was skeptical about the KDE 4.0 release too, initially. But given the scope and size of the project it was unavoidable and did not turn out bad at all. You should compare KDE 4.0 with Linux 2.6.0. There too, the problem of chicken (stable finished code) and egg (large userbase) caused delays which led Linus to make a release. The label '2.6.0' finally got distros to shift to the new release and accelerated stabilization.
We are now seeing the same for KDE. Before the schedule became so strict, people were working on the libraries mainly. Since last November progress towards stable and compelling applications went very fast and currently KDE 4.0 is not complete in terms of ported applications, but is a very nice environment to develop for and is perfectly nice to use. This desktop has high potential for the well-integrated sexyness that is the hallmark of KDE.
So this is simply a website with user management. Not everybody is allowed to see everything. This is different from DRM as Microsoft advocates it, where people would not be able to save these pages and images unencrypted onto their machines. Because, you know, they might mail them to somebody of the opposite sex!
It's highly unlikely that this website really relies on complicated DRM schemes (which would require Vista).
Nokia likes C++.
They just paid 105 MEuros. That should be enough for a while.
with the community and we wish to continue and enhance this relationship. source
All in all, they are making the right noises for this to be a good development. When I don my pink shades, I'm seeing a future where Nokia devices will run KDE4.
Yes, I think you are right. As a community we can be very happy that Trolltech released Qt under the GPL v3 before being acquired by Nokia. Now Nokia will be releasing a very large GPL v3 codebase, thus undermining their pro-software patent stance. I too wonder if the trolls have sped up the adoption of GPL v3 on purpose.
The Qt toolkit allows rapid development of nice mobile and desktop application. A Nokia slide on the role of Qt in the company seems to suggest they want to use Qt to write applications that work and look the same on their mobile phones and on the desktop the user might have (be it Windows, Mac or Linux).
source
The new MacBook Air will hopefully point laptop makers in the right direction: small and silent laptops. From what I can tell from the specs and the review, though, the MacBook Air is not as nice as the laptop on which I'm typing this: the Dell Latitude X1. Although the X1 is now out of production, it is still, in my opinion, the perfect laptop. Someone else has already taken the trouble of comparing the two machines. Here's the summary:
Dell Latitude X1 is smaller (albeit slightly thicker), has a gigabit ethernet port, comes with a external DVD burner, has two USB ports and and SD and a CF slot. The battery is easily removed and replaced or upgraded.
The MacBook Air has a dualcore 1.6 GHz processor where the X1 has a single core that clocks 1.1 GHz. Also the Air can take 2GB versus the 1.25 GB of the X1.
The X1 comes with an obligatory copy of Windows XP, but I upgraded it to Kubuntu Feisty. The MacBook comes with an obligatory copy of Mac OS X.
I have been developing KDE4 on my X1 just fine. The extra speed would be nice, but for a portable machine battery life is more important.
If the X1 were still in production, it would clearly be the better laptop.
I'm sure John Cleese can come up with a good excuse for this mishap. See the advert he did for them
Why must the code be released at all? Trolltech cannot force people to publish code. Please show me a license clause from the the commercial license that confirms this.
The copyright on your code remains with you. You can release under as many different licenses as you like. If you use third party libraries, the license you release your code under must fit to the licenses of the code you are linking to.
Searching the google web index with 'qt' and 'trapping clause' gives me one result that talks about cobol and quicktime.
Trolltech has stated that they disapprove of developing using the GPL version and buying the commercial license just in time for a release. There is, however, nothing they can do about such practices.
If you really want to avoid paying the licenses for your commercial application there are plenty of ways of avoiding a legal requirement for paying them. You can, for example, build a thin, GPL-ed GUI that calls a closed application over IPC.
Or you can have one GUI developer that links to a library. In that case you are force into using a sound architecture and you need to buy only one license.
In short, I think the concept of a 'trapping clause' is FUD and I would like you to back up your statement with some references.
The Dell X1 can be gotten for a lot less. It's very similar to this new Airmac. It comes with external DVD drive can run about 7 hours on battery. More if you take a spare battery. I'm typing this post on the one I bought 3 years ago. It is running KUbuntu perfectly.
At least in the case of Digg it is very clear how they get their money. This quote is from the bottom of the main Digg site:
You can consider the state of KDE 4.0 comparable to that of Linux 2.6.0.
It's the first release in a long line of new releases. The number of changes is really very huge, so it's no wonder that it is not perfect.
That being said, I think it is amazing how well it turned out considering the enormous scale of the project.
oh my, a bookshop named after a forest!
You can have the same functionality as winscp with konqueror or krusader in combination with fish:// or scp://. You can also use different protocols such as webdav:// or ftp:// to manage remote files.
Perhaps you meant the idea of floating tubes below the ocean surface: Recent vactrain proposals by Frank Davidson, a founding member of the Channel Tunnel project, and Japanese engineer Yoshihiro Kyonati have tackled the transoceanic problems by floating a tube above the ocean floor, anchored with cables. The transit tube would remain at least 1000 feet below the ocean surface to avoid water turbulence.
You could use one-way valves and have the pressure of the passing train push out most of the air. That should be significantly lower the drag on the (next) train.
That would mean the universe only splits in situations where you would die. Otherwise your conscious self would be allowed to split up.
It also means that if I see someone die, he/she did not have a conscious self. Or that that person was forked off into a different world. But for that to happen, you would also have to be forked, which was not allowed.
Pretty crazy consequences that to me make the Russian roulette theory very implausible.
No, the way to solve the problem is to allow retailers to pre-install any OS they like, but have them charge the same price for this OS as they would for a boxed copy. Also, they should give the consumer the option to buy the machine without an operating system. What is missing at the moment is openness about the price of Windows for your PC and the option to buy a machine without an OS. This option should be a consumer right. This would give the consumer the possibility of reusing your existing Windows copy for your new PC or of using a different operating system altogether.
Microsoft doesn't hand out free copies of Windows with embedded ads in them.
Not yet, but they might.
It's getting worse all the time. Google is just one company of many companies that are doing more and more outsourcing. The pope would certainly not mention Google specifically. This is a horrible article full of innuendo and breaks a very important quality rule: Never use a question mark in the title of a news item. Question marks are a dead giveaway of hysterics without content.
Has slashdot been bought by Rupert Murdoch?
not a single transitionary entity still alive today out of millions of opportunities - COME ON!
There were no transitionary entities. Evolution only occurs in tiny steps and each step means there was an advantage for the organism at that time. There are no transitionary entities because there is no goal and no markers along the way. Actually there is not even a way. Human have evolved into the diverse population we are now over a long time and we are still changing. The changes from generation to generation are tiny, but a billion years is a long time so it's ok.
People seem to think that evolution leads to improvement. This is a strange notion. How do you define improvement? Evolution is just a way to describe how the set of organisms present changed over time.
This means that just as the existing programs are starting to come to terms, Google comes and returns the chaos on the desktop search scene. While I like Google internet search, their desktop offering has me feeling eerie. I would prefer using Mono over Googles closed source program. But even better is the ultra-efficient Strigi which will be part of KDE4 and indexes streams instead of files.
Which is the same reply general Anthony C. McAuliffe gave the Germans when they asked him to surrender at the siege of Bastogne.
Here's the official statement by Mark. This is not an official statement by Canonical or Ubuntu, but I do not think either will disagree with Marks position.