...what this Jacob Nielsen hype is all about. Seriously. I've tried to figure, I've scimmed one of his books and some of his ideas are way into bullshitting territory while others arent't complete bogus. But to constantly parade this person as the incarnation of the web design god appears just silly to me. It even emphasises what I am inclined to think: That this guy is nothing but an excuse for wannabees to go and make believe they know what webdesign is all about and that's mostly what makes up his 'fame'.
This option has been ruled out long ago. The summary: What would Motorola and VIA do if Wintel goes TCPA? Yeah. Right. Big party. The easiest way for Wintel to kill itself off is to implement an all-out TCPA approach. That would even do the trick faster than ignoring Linux/OSS. I don't think they're *that* stupid.
I and many other people here on/. have said it over and over again: Mickeysoft will generally have to shift away from inhouse all-in-one lock-in concepts only to a more service oriented businessmodel if they want to stay numero uno for another decade. The problem Mickeysoft has, is that it clearly underestimated it's power, clutching to that now deprecating classic businessmodel of theirs instead of seeing what was coming up with the rise of Linux/E/KDE/Gnome/uNameIt. Every single one in the industry I know is gonna switch to OSS when their current stuff isn't sufficient anymore. Everybody, exept for some Mac oriented designers. And they have 'switched' with OS X allready. In this part Steve Jobs is still the entepreneur he was 20 years ago, seeing the light befor the majority of his customers do. Whilst Billy G. just seems to feel a little overconfident in Windows and not grasping a clue about the rest. Now there are to much people out there that have heard of Linux and OSS. 3 years ago that would have been different and MS could have incorperated a Unix/OSS concept of business themselves and everyone would have thought Linux is a new M$ thing. I guess it's to late for that now. So much for being a big, bloated, inflexible and greedy corp. I couldn't care less if M$ shrinks to a normal company due to it's own bloat and blind self-confidence. On the contrary. That's the best that can happen to humanity.
Honestly, I can't take anyone serious who can't tell the differnce between a software brand name and a type of software. Even if he's not a geek but considers himslef an artist. If you plan to act publicly (artists usually do that), you should display enough brains to tell the difference. Otherwise you're not being an artist rather than a complete idiot. Art under a brand name isn't. It's a commercial.
Some researchers believe that the Maya were the first know to us that had computers. Large, mostly wooden mechanical devices operated by Lama towing power. Considering their achievements in astronomy and their highly organized culture I wouldn't be supprised.
There is one payback for OSS and AFAICT its the one that gave us Eclipse and some other nicies like a GPLd QT and stuff. It's called bragging rights. That's the prime reason for companies to invest into OSS.
Considered a transmeta laptop? The Fujitsu Lifebook P runs 16 hrs. on batteries and is strong enough to watch DVDs with. I don't know what CPU power you exactly need since I don't know how you work. If you do lots of compiling it may be worth while having two cheap transmeta desknotes. One for compiling (when you need it) the other for working. Not the fastest, but for anything other than 3D developement and 3D gaming absolutely sufficient, imho. I'd probably go for a transmeta and power that one with extra cells and/or a small solar panel setup.
I consider myself a sort of expert in bags and packs. I actually 'collect' them... well anyway, I'd have three choices: 1) Backpack Brandname 'Lowe'. They've got one called 'Megabyte' and it's made of some super-extra-hyper thick cordura stuff that looks like Flakwest material. Indestructable, looks cool, costs a little.:-) They may have other laptop gear aswell. 2) Eagle Creek. With them I like the bags more than the packs. They got a set that look unobstrusive, yet are specially polstered for laptops. In case you drop it again. Again this is reference grade quality and will cost appropriately. These you can take out to serious business meetings and you won't get queer looks. 3) Big Warehouse inhouse noname brands. Honestly. If you (can) trust your judgement, this is a secret tip. Most brands, exept for the ones I mentioned above, have gone seriously cheapo within the last few years, so it actually is worth a try. My current laptoppack is a no-name from "Horten" (german Warehouse joint), it cost about a third of the brandname stuff, doesn't look to flashy but is of top quality and has some neat extras. Here you have to be carefull and triple check for sloppy seams, cheap material, cheap zippers and brittle cheapo-plastic fastex-rippoff buckles. Keep an eye on all that and you might find a real bargain.
The terran troop carrier in StarCraft - the one that kinda looks like the lander from Aliens - plays a second or two from the Aliens soundtrack when clicked on. It's some stuff the woman pilot (dunno her name) says when they are descending onto the planet in the begining.
Before you go ranting about CG - as some are doing just now - beware. OK, 50 meter high elefant creatures. They ought to be CG. But I doubt that real 50 meter high elefant creatures would look that much different. Yeah, horses wouldn't charge into orkish infantry that way, but you ought to know that those are special middle earth horses and real middle earth orks, and they react that way to one-another. I just guess Peter Jackson and his team did a scene that would look coolest.
I consider myself somewhat familiar with the capabilities of CG, and was somewhat upset about how very 'CG' some scenes in the updated 1st Star Wars Trilogy were. What really suprised me was to find out that the scenes I thought were bad CG were in fact real shots of real things.
That being said, for someone who has a knack at CG I though those scenes where I can definitley tell they actually were CG (f.e. giant trolls smashing Minas Tirit Knights left, right and center) were absofuckinlutely awesome. If there were real trolls in this world, it wouldn't have looked any more impressive, that's for sure.
Errm, pardon me, but who in holy hell are these UserLinux people and who's this Bruce Perens guy? Do I have to know them? Am I wrong or have these people not yet managed to roll out even the faintest resemblence of a Linux distro which, if it were there, would be nothing but a sad and sorry rippoff of the Debian project. No? As far as I can see from here there's nothing but a bunch of blockheads on mailing lists, webforums and slashdot generating nothing but a big heap of pointless media hype. Heavens, give us a break on people trying to generate by the most pointless of OSS discussions, KDE vs. GNOME. I want my 5 minutes back.
In Japan, they have a life-time employment kind of system. Yet, they are masters of mass-production and a developed country too.
Yeah, but you shouldn't forget that the average japanese taxi driver or garbage man is about as educated as your average US american vice CEO. That's the problem or, as the top 5% of US people would say, the good part. We've got a simular climate in germany, but it's not even half as intense a working climate as in Nippon, where uppper grade pupils finish school at 10 o'clock at night. I was once sitting in a tram opposite of a young southern italian and a young russian woman talking to one another in their accented german about how the germans are allways working and working all the time and every day. That was at a time where the dot.bomb bubble just had burst I personaly felt quite like a lazy slob. Just listening to that I realized that it was something like 7 o'clock on a fryday evening and I was on my way to a freelancer project meeting. It's all very relative. To bring back the issue: I doubt that US citizens (or any other people) could stand the standard japanese work ethics for more than a month.
It's odd that that such an old Office Suite that was struggling so hard comes to be such a success years later. And that the reason it does is so mundane does make me wonder even more: It simply offers the very same (or even better) performance that an established competition and is dirt cheap. Free as in beer, actually. Coming to think of it, that actually isn't a bad reason to become a Killer Application. What I really find astounding is that Open Office actually tries to emulate MS Office and thus isn't half as intuitive and performant as Lotus Smart Suite, imho.
Anyway: OO.o combined with the new KDE 3.2 is the next big step in toppling a monopoly. I expect Linux to reach critical mass in germany any time soon (within the next 12 months or so).
I'm currently a Mandrake 9.2 user, solidly wedded to KDE, and trying to decide what to upgrade my mother to from Win98. She needs crossover, for sure, but I'm not sure if I should... just add crossover for her or whether something more integrated like Xandros would be appropriate.... Any thoughts?
SuSE 9.0. It's got the crossover stuff too, but afaics in an extra addon package ( http://www.suse.com/us/private/products/suse_linux/winerack/index.html ). Blindly I'd choose SuSE Pro over any other distro. If you have a chance, check both Xandros and SuSE and decide. Otherwise take SuSE. My 2 Cents.
I mean, first off, Linux simply isn't ready for the desktop or the unclued user. I hate to say it guys, but it's true. My dad could install and use Windows, but he could not install use Linux (that would be any distribution you care to name). And I consider him to be an average computer user.
I hate to be doing wee-wee on your parade, but sorry pal, you're just plain wrong. While there might be the one or other thing that OSS/Linux still suxxors at (multimedia design software, for instance) it's absolutely untrue that Linux is difficult to install to a n00b. That is absolutely not the case. Go check out the current SuSE Personal or Pro distro (should be 9.2 or something). That installation routine stomps everything else to chunky kibbles usability wise. At that most certainly goes for windows aswell! The only exeption probably being MacOS X. But since they use only a small range of hardware specs that doesn't count as an 'installation' at PC level difficulty.
I dunno for you, but my local library, which I visit from time to time, has a set of non-current SuSE Books, CDs and DVDs from me. The revisor took them gladly as a donation. I consider this an obvious way to empty my bloated bookshelves and do a good deed at the same time. Is this idea so special? What's the big deal? If you have old distros that are still in good shape and complete, go to your local library and ask if they'd like it for their collection. If they say 'no', sell them at the next garage sale. If thesy say yes and it's a large donation, maybe you can get a year's membership in exchange. People actually do that with books too. It's not that difficult to come up with that idea.
[The following is a repost. See the original here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=6929737&sid=78 055]
I had a close look at post 3.0 KDE at the LinuxTag earlier this year. I'm still very much a windowmanager fan with E, Fluxbox and Windowmaker on my favorites list. But after I had a guy from the KDE booth show me all the stuff that I can change and activate to get KWin (KDEs WM) away from the default of emulating MS Windows crappines and closer to E/Windowmaker/Fluxbox usability features I thougt I'd give a pure KDE enviroment a chance on Debian Woody with KDE 3.1. It o\/\/nZ0Rz nearly every other desktop I've worked with. The conlusion is that with a proper setup there is no doubt what so ever that KDE kicks MS Windows up and down the street usability wise in every possible detail. It takes me about 30 seconds to get any Windows desktop user conviced that MS days as a monopoly are counted. Further on: Ralph Nolden showed previews of what brewing with the 3.2 version of KDevelop and some other goodies. Apart from built-in support of something like a dozen and more programming languages there is a lot of stuff that will cause me to migrate from 3.1 to 3.2 asap.
To me it's quite evident: If OSS is the hauting horde of MS executives sleepless nights, the current and future KDE is the chief Boogieman of them all.
That first sylable is used so often I'd thought I'd give some details on it. Uber (actually it's a 'U' with two dots on the top which can be substituted with 'Ue' in emergencies: Ueber) Translates from german into 'Over'. So it would be 'Overdevice' or 'Ubergerat' (Uebergeraet) in german. Which in german sounds just as aqward as in english. It's a humorous approach to the bizar and ultrafashist concept of the 'Overhuman' aka 'Ubermensch' propagated by the Nazis in the 'Third Realm' aka 'Drittes Reich' or, mixed again,:'Third Reich'. The Nazis propagated that the 'white race' in gerneral and the 'german race' especially were generally superior 'superrace' as opposed to the bolschweistic jewish asian [fill in Nazi enemy/scapegoat/target of choice here] race of the 'Underhuman' ('Untermensch'). Curiously this term has had a slight renaissance within the german geek community where it is used in the same context as here on/. or other computer geek contexts. I've actually caught the one or other person even emulating the american way of pronouncing 'Uber', namely with the leading english 'oo' sound rather than the german 'ue'.
Sidenote (from a german that formerly was an american citizen): If you at times like to think in nationalistic terms (which is generally wrong) picture the thoughoughness that goes into the engineering of a product that is a clichee for german quality, like for instance, a mercedes. And then imagine the same amount of sense of 'quality' going into the engineering of a fashist political enviroment. Then you get the impression of why even such a 'Uberasshole' Saddam Hussein and his minions are dwarved by the Nazis and their shockingly 'superiour', precise and thourough impressioning of the antichrist. I'm shure Saddam Hussein is the more type of guy to kill people himself than Adolf Hitler, but that's what made the Nazi Camps so 'unique' and 'perfect' in killing: A mechanisim that wouldn't require direkt human interaction to kill people. A killing factory, so to speak.
...is not the fact of the meek not knowing anymore the difference between a brandname of a monopolist ("Powerpoint") and the type of a computerprogramm ("Presentation Programm"), since that in a twisted way in the context of this article can get people convinced that a Microsoft Product makes you dumb and that you should consider using plain text or classic HTML once in a while. What really pisses me of is the fact that obviously the slashdot crowd uses this monopolists brandname as a synonym for Presentation Programm aswell, without even noticing it. Even though people should know that Powerpoint isn't and never was the best presentation programm.
Then again, we ought to remember that in the US comanies can actually lose their exclusive brandname rights when their product has become synonym for the rest of that product class. Wouldn't that be the case with Powerpoint by now? Any details on this law from US citizens?
Suzanne is modelled in Blender - that's for shure. Probably somebody from the core blender team exported the model to AutoCAD or something 'prototyping industry compatible' to make the mold.
Ton showed a picture of the box that came with the statuettes all broken of on the standing leg. Apparently the dutch company that had made them had forgotten to fill the box with stuffing material. Suzannes standing leg was thickened and then the statuettes were to be remade. Apart from the bad packeging they where definitely professionally done and since there are even examples of professional motion capturing in Blender I'm shure it's not to much of a hassle to export/migrate blender data to CNC machines or the likes. It could be that you need a programm inbetween. Write to the blender team and ask to get a more detailed answer.
Info: The monkey on the picture/other stuff...
on
Blender Adds Raytracing
·
· Score: 5, Informative
FYI: The monkey on the pictures is called "Suzanne" - she's a girl - and is the mascot of blender. This year the Blender "Suzanne" awards got handed out as a small bronze statuette of the very same shape you see rendered on the pictures.
Further down somebody talks about more features (shader, etc.) This was a big issue with the 'future developement talks' at the blender conference this year. Software design issues were discussed and different approaches were evaluated. This years suzanne animation award winner has designed a shader tool that will be integrated into / act as a interface/usability reference for the big blender 3.0 redo. Which will have a shading enviroment integrated. Some other major parts of the new stuff will probably make extensive use of the Yafray raytracer and the basic design that went into it. Far out dreaming into the future led to considering a solid interface to the OSS crystal space 3D engine as to bring back the closed source realtime stuff into blender and provide a professional editor and design tool for crystal space. The problem with that is that CS has a totally different structure than recent and current realtime solutions in blender, so this only is an option after the big Blender 3.0 redo that will shed all the dirty hacks and establish a solid software design to the Blender codebase. So goes the plan for blenders future. Can't say no to this karma-whoring, can you?:-)
You use that same argument when trying to sell OSS solutions to major customers?
CIO: "I don't like this aspect of [whatever]."
Me:"Yepp. That's a real issue. That's what you're paying me 5000 Euro for me to fix it. And not 30 000 Euro for a single CPU license plus 5000 Euro for me to fix it."
CIO:"Yeah, I see. Besides, that other thing realy does suck compared to this OSS stuff, just like you told me. We're actually dropping [fill in hideously overpriced crappy commercial software here] entirely and have a little freelancer team rebuilding the frontend for [fill in groundbreaking free OSS solution with strange UI here] to our needs. But we need x and y to work that way aswell."
Me:"Well, there's a Mister Z who's working on a GPLd solution to that. I recall he needs some funding. We could get him in to the project and have him focus on that specific problem."
CIO:"Gee, yeah. And that could actually be a new product and service we could offer to our clients."
Me:"Yepp. We could sponsor the projects devservers too. We could call it [CIOsCompanyName-FlashyProjectName] and we'd have standard with your name attached to it in no time."
CIO:"Sounds interesting. Market multiplying for free, sort of."
CIO/Me *grin*
CIO:"Write me an estimate on what that would cost in Euros and time, broken down in weeks and required staff, ok? You can bill 6 extra developer hours for that."
Slashdot Mirror
...what this Jacob Nielsen hype is all about. Seriously.
I've tried to figure, I've scimmed one of his books and some of his ideas are way into bullshitting territory while others arent't complete bogus. But to constantly parade this person as the incarnation of the web design god appears just silly to me.
It even emphasises what I am inclined to think: That this guy is nothing but an excuse for wannabees to go and make believe they know what webdesign is all about and that's mostly what makes up his 'fame'.
This option has been ruled out long ago.
The summary:
What would Motorola and VIA do if Wintel goes TCPA?
Yeah. Right. Big party.
The easiest way for Wintel to kill itself off is to implement an all-out TCPA approach. That would even do the trick faster than ignoring Linux/OSS.
I don't think they're *that* stupid.
I and many other people here on /. have said it over and over again:
Mickeysoft will generally have to shift away from inhouse all-in-one lock-in concepts only to a more service oriented businessmodel if they want to stay numero uno for another decade.
The problem Mickeysoft has, is that it clearly underestimated it's power, clutching to that now deprecating classic businessmodel of theirs instead of seeing what was coming up with the rise of Linux/E/KDE/Gnome/uNameIt. Every single one in the industry I know is gonna switch to OSS when their current stuff isn't sufficient anymore. Everybody, exept for some Mac oriented designers. And they have 'switched' with OS X allready. In this part Steve Jobs is still the entepreneur he was 20 years ago, seeing the light befor the majority of his customers do. Whilst Billy G. just seems to feel a little overconfident in Windows and not grasping a clue about the rest.
Now there are to much people out there that have heard of Linux and OSS. 3 years ago that would have been different and MS could have incorperated a Unix/OSS concept of business themselves and everyone would have thought Linux is a new M$ thing. I guess it's to late for that now.
So much for being a big, bloated, inflexible and greedy corp. I couldn't care less if M$ shrinks to a normal company due to it's own bloat and blind self-confidence. On the contrary. That's the best that can happen to humanity.
Honestly, I can't take anyone serious who can't tell the differnce between a software brand name and a type of software. Even if he's not a geek but considers himslef an artist.
If you plan to act publicly (artists usually do that), you should display enough brains to tell the difference. Otherwise you're not being an artist rather than a complete idiot.
Art under a brand name isn't. It's a commercial.
Some researchers believe that the Maya were the first know to us that had computers.
Large, mostly wooden mechanical devices operated by Lama towing power.
Considering their achievements in astronomy and their highly organized culture I wouldn't be supprised.
There is one payback for OSS and AFAICT its the one that gave us Eclipse and some other nicies like a GPLd QT and stuff.
It's called bragging rights.
That's the prime reason for companies to invest into OSS.
You may want to also wait for the first fuel cells for laptops to pop up next year....
Just another thought.
Considered a transmeta laptop?
The Fujitsu Lifebook P runs 16 hrs. on batteries and is strong enough to watch DVDs with.
I don't know what CPU power you exactly need since I don't know how you work.
If you do lots of compiling it may be worth while having two cheap transmeta desknotes. One for compiling (when you need it) the other for working. Not the fastest, but for anything other than 3D developement and 3D gaming absolutely sufficient, imho.
I'd probably go for a transmeta and power that one with extra cells and/or a small solar panel setup.
I consider myself a sort of expert in bags and packs. I actually 'collect' them... well anyway, I'd have three choices: :-) They may have other laptop gear aswell.
1) Backpack Brandname 'Lowe'. They've got one called 'Megabyte' and it's made of some super-extra-hyper thick cordura stuff that looks like Flakwest material. Indestructable, looks cool, costs a little.
2) Eagle Creek. With them I like the bags more than the packs. They got a set that look unobstrusive, yet are specially polstered for laptops. In case you drop it again. Again this is reference grade quality and will cost appropriately. These you can take out to serious business meetings and you won't get queer looks.
3) Big Warehouse inhouse noname brands. Honestly. If you (can) trust your judgement, this is a secret tip. Most brands, exept for the ones I mentioned above, have gone seriously cheapo within the last few years, so it actually is worth a try. My current laptoppack is a no-name from "Horten" (german Warehouse joint), it cost about a third of the brandname stuff, doesn't look to flashy but is of top quality and has some neat extras. Here you have to be carefull and triple check for sloppy seams, cheap material, cheap zippers and brittle cheapo-plastic fastex-rippoff buckles. Keep an eye on all that and you might find a real bargain.
The terran troop carrier in StarCraft - the one that kinda looks like the lander from Aliens - plays a second or two from the Aliens soundtrack when clicked on. It's some stuff the woman pilot (dunno her name) says when they are descending onto the planet in the begining.
Wasn't it 6.56 times better?
Before you go ranting about CG - as some are doing just now - beware.
OK, 50 meter high elefant creatures. They ought to be CG. But I doubt that real 50 meter high elefant creatures would look that much different. Yeah, horses wouldn't charge into orkish infantry that way, but you ought to know that those are special middle earth horses and real middle earth orks, and they react that way to one-another. I just guess Peter Jackson and his team did a scene that would look coolest.
I consider myself somewhat familiar with the capabilities of CG, and was somewhat upset about how very 'CG' some scenes in the updated 1st Star Wars Trilogy were. What really suprised me was to find out that the scenes I thought were bad CG were in fact real shots of real things.
That being said, for someone who has a knack at CG I though those scenes where I can definitley tell they actually were CG (f.e. giant trolls smashing Minas Tirit Knights left, right and center) were absofuckinlutely awesome. If there were real trolls in this world, it wouldn't have looked any more impressive, that's for sure.
Errm, pardon me, but who in holy hell are these UserLinux people and who's this Bruce Perens guy?
Do I have to know them?
Am I wrong or have these people not yet managed to roll out even the faintest resemblence of a Linux distro which, if it were there, would be nothing but a sad and sorry rippoff of the Debian project. No?
As far as I can see from here there's nothing but a bunch of blockheads on mailing lists, webforums and slashdot generating nothing but a big heap of pointless media hype. Heavens, give us a break on people trying to generate by the most pointless of OSS discussions, KDE vs. GNOME.
I want my 5 minutes back.
In Japan, they have a life-time employment kind of system. Yet, they are masters of mass-production and a developed country too.
Yeah, but you shouldn't forget that the average japanese taxi driver or garbage man is about as educated as your average US american vice CEO. That's the problem or, as the top 5% of US people would say, the good part.
We've got a simular climate in germany, but it's not even half as intense a working climate as in Nippon, where uppper grade pupils finish school at 10 o'clock at night.
I was once sitting in a tram opposite of a young southern italian and a young russian woman talking to one another in their accented german about how the germans are allways working and working all the time and every day. That was at a time where the dot.bomb bubble just had burst I personaly felt quite like a lazy slob. Just listening to that I realized that it was something like 7 o'clock on a fryday evening and I was on my way to a freelancer project meeting.
It's all very relative. To bring back the issue: I doubt that US citizens (or any other people) could stand the standard japanese work ethics for more than a month.
Killer Application.
It's odd that that such an old Office Suite that was struggling so hard comes to be such a success years later. And that the reason it does is so mundane does make me wonder even more: It simply offers the very same (or even better) performance that an established competition and is dirt cheap. Free as in beer, actually.
Coming to think of it, that actually isn't a bad reason to become a Killer Application.
What I really find astounding is that Open Office actually tries to emulate MS Office and thus isn't half as intuitive and performant as Lotus Smart Suite, imho.
Anyway: OO.o combined with the new KDE 3.2 is the next big step in toppling a monopoly. I expect Linux to reach critical mass in germany any time soon (within the next 12 months or so).
I'm currently a Mandrake 9.2 user, solidly wedded to KDE, and trying to decide what to upgrade my mother to from Win98. She needs crossover, for sure, but I'm not sure if I should ... just add crossover for her or whether something more integrated like Xandros would be appropriate. ...
x /winerack/index.html ). Blindly I'd choose SuSE Pro over any other distro.
Any thoughts?
SuSE 9.0. It's got the crossover stuff too, but afaics in an extra addon package ( http://www.suse.com/us/private/products/suse_linu
If you have a chance, check both Xandros and SuSE and decide. Otherwise take SuSE.
My 2 Cents.
I mean, first off, Linux simply isn't ready for the desktop or the unclued user. I hate to say it guys, but it's true. My dad could install and use Windows, but he could not install use Linux (that would be any distribution you care to name). And I consider him to be an average computer user.
I hate to be doing wee-wee on your parade, but sorry pal, you're just plain wrong.
While there might be the one or other thing that OSS/Linux still suxxors at (multimedia design software, for instance) it's absolutely untrue that Linux is difficult to install to a n00b.
That is absolutely not the case. Go check out the current SuSE Personal or Pro distro (should be 9.2 or something). That installation routine stomps everything else to chunky kibbles usability wise. At that most certainly goes for windows aswell!
The only exeption probably being MacOS X. But since they use only a small range of hardware specs that doesn't count as an 'installation' at PC level difficulty.
I dunno for you, but my local library, which I visit from time to time, has a set of non-current SuSE Books, CDs and DVDs from me. The revisor took them gladly as a donation. I consider this an obvious way to empty my bloated bookshelves and do a good deed at the same time. Is this idea so special? What's the big deal?
If you have old distros that are still in good shape and complete, go to your local library and ask if they'd like it for their collection. If they say 'no', sell them at the next garage sale. If thesy say yes and it's a large donation, maybe you can get a year's membership in exchange. People actually do that with books too. It's not that difficult to come up with that idea.
[The following is a repost. See the original here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=6929737&sid=78 055]
I had a close look at post 3.0 KDE at the LinuxTag earlier this year. I'm still very much a windowmanager fan with E, Fluxbox and Windowmaker on my favorites list. But after I had a guy from the KDE booth show me all the stuff that I can change and activate to get KWin (KDEs WM) away from the default of emulating MS Windows crappines and closer to E/Windowmaker/Fluxbox usability features I thougt I'd give a pure KDE enviroment a chance on Debian Woody with KDE 3.1. It o\/\/nZ0Rz nearly every other desktop I've worked with.
The conlusion is that with a proper setup there is no doubt what so ever that KDE kicks MS Windows up and down the street usability wise in every possible detail. It takes me about 30 seconds to get any Windows desktop user conviced that MS days as a monopoly are counted.
Further on: Ralph Nolden showed previews of what brewing with the 3.2 version of KDevelop and some other goodies. Apart from built-in support of something like a dozen and more programming languages there is a lot of stuff that will cause me to migrate from 3.1 to 3.2 asap.
To me it's quite evident: If OSS is the hauting horde of MS executives sleepless nights, the current and future KDE is the chief Boogieman of them all.
You seem to be a really good artist who knows what he's talking about. Your arguments are so very well grounded. Any examples?
That first sylable is used so often I'd thought I'd give some details on it. /. or other computer geek contexts. I've actually caught the one or other person even emulating the american way of pronouncing 'Uber', namely with the leading english 'oo' sound rather than the german 'ue'.
Uber (actually it's a 'U' with two dots on the top which can be substituted with 'Ue' in emergencies: Ueber) Translates from german into 'Over'.
So it would be 'Overdevice' or 'Ubergerat' (Uebergeraet) in german.
Which in german sounds just as aqward as in english.
It's a humorous approach to the bizar and ultrafashist concept of the 'Overhuman' aka 'Ubermensch' propagated by the Nazis in the 'Third Realm' aka 'Drittes Reich' or, mixed again,:'Third Reich'. The Nazis propagated that the 'white race' in gerneral and the 'german race' especially were generally superior 'superrace' as opposed to the bolschweistic jewish asian [fill in Nazi enemy/scapegoat/target of choice here] race of the 'Underhuman' ('Untermensch').
Curiously this term has had a slight renaissance within the german geek community where it is used in the same context as here on
Sidenote (from a german that formerly was an american citizen):
If you at times like to think in nationalistic terms (which is generally wrong) picture the thoughoughness that goes into the engineering of a product that is a clichee for german quality, like for instance, a mercedes. And then imagine the same amount of sense of 'quality' going into the engineering of a fashist political enviroment. Then you get the impression of why even such a 'Uberasshole' Saddam Hussein and his minions are dwarved by the Nazis and their shockingly 'superiour', precise and thourough impressioning of the antichrist. I'm shure Saddam Hussein is the more type of guy to kill people himself than Adolf Hitler, but that's what made the Nazi Camps so 'unique' and 'perfect' in killing: A mechanisim that wouldn't require direkt human interaction to kill people. A killing factory, so to speak.
...is not the fact of the meek not knowing anymore the difference between a brandname of a monopolist ("Powerpoint") and the type of a computerprogramm ("Presentation Programm"), since that in a twisted way in the context of this article can get people convinced that a Microsoft Product makes you dumb and that you should consider using plain text or classic HTML once in a while.
What really pisses me of is the fact that obviously the slashdot crowd uses this monopolists brandname as a synonym for Presentation Programm aswell, without even noticing it. Even though people should know that Powerpoint isn't and never was the best presentation programm.
Then again, we ought to remember that in the US comanies can actually lose their exclusive brandname rights when their product has become synonym for the rest of that product class. Wouldn't that be the case with Powerpoint by now? Any details on this law from US citizens?
Suzanne is modelled in Blender - that's for shure. Probably somebody from the core blender team exported the model to AutoCAD or something 'prototyping industry compatible' to make the mold.
Ton showed a picture of the box that came with the statuettes all broken of on the standing leg. Apparently the dutch company that had made them had forgotten to fill the box with stuffing material. Suzannes standing leg was thickened and then the statuettes were to be remade.
Apart from the bad packeging they where definitely professionally done and since there are even examples of professional motion capturing in Blender I'm shure it's not to much of a hassle to export/migrate blender data to CNC machines or the likes. It could be that you need a programm inbetween. Write to the blender team and ask to get a more detailed answer.
FYI: The monkey on the pictures is called "Suzanne" - she's a girl - and is the mascot of blender. This year the Blender "Suzanne" awards got handed out as a small bronze statuette of the very same shape you see rendered on the pictures.
:-)
Further down somebody talks about more features (shader, etc.)
This was a big issue with the 'future developement talks' at the blender conference this year. Software design issues were discussed and different approaches were evaluated. This years suzanne animation award winner has designed a shader tool that will be integrated into / act as a interface/usability reference for the big blender 3.0 redo. Which will have a shading enviroment integrated. Some other major parts of the new stuff will probably make extensive use of the Yafray raytracer and the basic design that went into it.
Far out dreaming into the future led to considering a solid interface to the OSS crystal space 3D engine as to bring back the closed source realtime stuff into blender and provide a professional editor and design tool for crystal space.
The problem with that is that CS has a totally different structure than recent and current realtime solutions in blender, so this only is an option after the big Blender 3.0 redo that will shed all the dirty hacks and establish a solid software design to the Blender codebase.
So goes the plan for blenders future.
Can't say no to this karma-whoring, can you?
You use that same argument when trying to sell OSS solutions to major customers?
CIO: "I don't like this aspect of [whatever]."
Me:"Yepp. That's a real issue. That's what you're paying me 5000 Euro for me to fix it. And not 30 000 Euro for a single CPU license plus 5000 Euro for me to fix it."
CIO:"Yeah, I see. Besides, that other thing realy does suck compared to this OSS stuff, just like you told me. We're actually dropping [fill in hideously overpriced crappy commercial software here] entirely and have a little freelancer team rebuilding the frontend for [fill in groundbreaking free OSS solution with strange UI here] to our needs. But we need x and y to work that way aswell."
Me:"Well, there's a Mister Z who's working on a GPLd solution to that. I recall he needs some funding. We could get him in to the project and have him focus on that specific problem."
CIO:"Gee, yeah. And that could actually be a new product and service we could offer to our clients."
Me:"Yepp. We could sponsor the projects devservers too. We could call it [CIOsCompanyName-FlashyProjectName] and we'd have standard with your name attached to it in no time."
CIO:"Sounds interesting. Market multiplying for free, sort of."
CIO/Me *grin*
CIO:"Write me an estimate on what that would cost in Euros and time, broken down in weeks and required staff, ok? You can bill 6 extra developer hours for that."
Me:"OK, Sir."