Hmm... they really do need to update their screenshots -- almost all of them are from KDE 2.0, and much work has been done since then.
But, you'll probably still find them 'pointlessly shiny and obscure'. It's a strange thing to get so worked up over. But, just so I know, can you point me toward examples of icon sets which satisfy your urges?
The aethetics in KDE are among the poorest of any modern desktop. The icons should be improved - what part of that do you disagree with?
All of it. The icons in KDE are much clearer and easier to distinguish than the Gnome ones. Icons should *not* be mini-photographs -- they should be clear simple representations. The Gnome icons give me a headache.
KDE had issues with look and feel back in the KDE 1 days. It doesn't any more. Gnome has the advantage of a larger community developing themes and styles, but the default in KDE 2 is perfectly acceptable, and the recent point releases have greatly increased the 'style candy' aspects over the original 2.0.
--
Don't take the sniping of random Slashdot trolls as a reason for not helping to theme KDE -- but don't go into it with the attitude that you are saving KDE from some horrible design mistake, because there isn't one there.
The GPL is actually quite useful in cases like this -- as QT have found. You release the code base as GPL, which allows it to be used in any GPL compatible code... but if companies want to use the code in their closed products they have to talk to you and pay you to license it to them under something else.
The NSA *strengthened* the DES specification to make it resistant to an attack (differential cryptanalysis) which was unknown on the 'outside', and remained unknown for about 15 years afterwards.
Re:KDE 2.2.x isn't available for Potato (Debian2.2
on
KDE 2.2.1 Up
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· Score: 1
There are a couple of nice things about 2.2 over 2.1... mainly in the use of Konqueror as a file manager rather than a browser:
They've really improved the thumbnail previews, and the detailed list now uses the Nautilus way -- rather than the background being one colour, it interleaves horizontal bars of two colours to make it much easier to read across.
The file open and file save dialogs have been improved as well.
There's a new addons package which adds several tools to Konqueror, like the ability to filter the files you display, and the ability to turn Java/Javascript/cookies on and off from the toolbar.
The killer though is the new printing support. It finally makes printing from Linux satisfying and easy, particularly when you're using CUPS.
In case you really don't know what the problem with LAME is, take a look at
http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/software.html.
To paraphrase, for the patent only license (i.e. just to get permission to use the patents they have out on MP3),
you should pay:
Decoder: 75 cents per unit or $50 thousand one off
Encoder: 2 dollars 50 cents per unit
This does not include the right to stream that content, for which you have to pay more.
In contrast, to decode, encode, stream, store Vorbis you have to pay $0.
Getting away from licensing issues, a
recent listening test
concluded that at 128kbps Vorbis RC2 was right up there with LAME encoded MP3, and better than Xing encoded MP3
-- and RC2 still has a couple of minor issues that will be fixed before the release.
(okay, what the FUCK kind of lameness filter reason is 'Junk character post'? I had to get rid of some dollar signs to get it to post)
Damn right. One of the reasons we're a little more cynical over here in the UK about the US call to remove 'terrorists and those who sponsor terrorism' is that the US have been the main sponsor of the IRA for quite a few years.
When are we going to see people in the CIA convicted of sponsoring terrorism, or is this yet another case of "we'll kill anyone that goes against *our* laws, except *us*"?
Re:*nix has this stupid fixation with case too
on
ZDNet Reviews KOffice
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· Score: 1
"Last Tuesday's Financial Report" is much more readable that "last tuesdays financial report", which is more readable than "last_tuesdays_financial_report", which is more readable than "fr0123.dat".
For a similar reason, every UNIX application which breaks when you use file names with spaces is broken (mainly because they use space as a delimiter) -- this doesn't apply to the command line routines, where you escape the spaces, but mainly to graphical front ends which forget to escape the filenames before calling other programs (leading to problems if you have ' or " or ~ in the filename as well).
Exactly. KDE is one of the few projects I've seen which actually seem to *welcome* new coders, and work to incorporate their code. A brilliant example is the new printing architecture in KDE 2.2: basically the work on one man. Of course, using it was made easier because it basically involved a one line change in applications -- that's the benefit of Object Orientation.
It's also truely a multi-language, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural project: Germans, Dutch, French, English, American, Spanish, etc.... without a real overall 'dictator'... and yet somehow it still seems to work.
For all the sniping at KDE from wierdo Americans, KDE is, for me, the true shining example of an open source project -- far more than Mozilla or any of the other poster boys.
Well, the USSR did quite a good job. Of course, you Americans didn't like that...
Who immediately sends aid to every country
The Marshall Plan is widely credited with being the single biggest reason that the UK could no longer afford to be an Empire after WW2. Your 'aid' in that case destroyed a 200 year old infrastructure. But hey, I guess you were still pissed off at us.
I'd be interested how your sketch of America as a benevolent loving friend ties in with (to take three random examples) Cuba, Grenada and Palestine.
(Oh, and don't think I'm holding the UK up as a shining light of freedom -- we're just as worse, if not more, than the US. The only reason we don't screw up more lives is that we don't have the influence we used to).
Pearl Harbour wasn't about killing people. It was about destroying machinery. At that it was stunningly successful -- the once reason it wasn't *more* successful is that the US had advance warning, and had managed to move much of the fleet out of danger.
--
As to what happens to your country now: reactionary opinion will make the government much more hard-line and right wing. Many of your rights will be taken away in the interests of 'national security', and never given back, even when the threat is long gone. Your govenment will use an (imagined or not) external threat to pull the country together, and to stop the economy from collapsing.
The golden age of information and encryption freedom may well be over. Remember -- 'only people with something illegal to say would need to encrypt their messages'.
My heart goes out to anyone connected to someone who died today -- family, friend, co-worker. I am also genuinely scared about what your country is going to do next.
I was watching a truely scary interview today with a military analyst. He said that the US should 'strike back, and strike back quickly against the terrorists that did this'. When the interviewer pointed out that we don't know who did this, and asked which terrorist groups America should attack, the analyst said 'all of them'.
I can see a lot of innocent people being killed, a lot of countries destabilized, and an escalation in the hatred of the US coming from this. Thank god the USSR isn't still around, or we would probably be watching the nukes dropping around now.
Talking about the middle east is a little premature. I only put the Israel vs Palestine thing in as an aside -- I should have realised it was too sensitive. That said:
You can't have reconcilliation with them. They don't reason. They don't ask for any quarter.
Oh, they reason, and you can have reconcilliation. Don't make the mistake of making Islam into some uncaring, sand-blast the world religion. Just like the Spanish Inquisition, like the Crusaders, like the Conquistadors were no representatives of Christianity, Islam can be twisted and tainted by fanatical madman. They don't represent Islam, but their own idiocy.
The trick is to make countries secure enough that they don't need to resort to extremism. Isolating a country is not the way to do this (I am amazed, for example, that the US still isolate Cuba -- this is another example that the fundamentalist uses to illustate the arbirary uncaring nature of the US).
Laugh all you want, but bombing places into the ground and killing isn't the answer. If it were, 1/4 of the world would still be part of the glorious British empire. The US is now the biggest, the wealthiest, the most important country in the world. Learn from the lessons of previous empires if you want to stay that way.
You're dealing, most likely, with Arab terrorists.
Damn right - just like Oklahoma, yes?
I'm more sorry than I can express about the loss of life in your country. I wish there were some way I could help the families and friends of the people who died.
I know what *won't* help: a war.
It must be terribly hard for you to realise, given that you've probably never been out your country, but Syrians and Afghani are *just as human as you*. One American isn't worth *more* in some sense than a non-American, despite what you might think.
You know how to stop hatred? Build prosperity. Pick the countries that you think may have caused this, and make them happy, so they never need to resort to something like this again. Suicide missions aren't something that you do lightly -- there is years of hatred and tension that America needs to *defuse*.
And yes, I said the same about Britain when the IRA were killing people in my country.
Releasing the prisoners was a culmination of a process going back many many years (involving, among other things, Ireland re-writing its constitution to remove the claim on Northern Ireland).
Israel and Palestine have had 50 years to hate each other -- the Protestants and Catholics in Ireland have had about 300. You don't defuse a situation like that by bombing the hell out of one side (we know, Thatcher did her best).
Peace and reconciliation is, in the long run, the only way forward.
The biggest thing the American government can do now is say 'What have we done to these people? How have the affected their lives so badly that they will kill themselves just to hurt our civilians? How can *we* change *our* behaviour so that something like this never happens again.'
But they won't. They'll pick some small, badly defended country, and have a one-sided TV war so all the folks back home can sit back and see that Uncle Sam is *sorting them bastards out*. And the whole thing will start all over again.
Don't make the US into Zimbabwe. Make it into South Africa.
The problem I find with Java (and C++, it's cousin), is the sheer amount of verbiage you need to write anything. For example - both Lisp and Python are strongly typed, but not statically typed, which means you don't have to declare the types of variables... which cuts down on clutter. After a couple of hours of apprehension, I've also grown to love Python's semantic spacing - I've always indended code to indicate nesting, and now I don't have to indicate it in a second, redundant fashion.
Whenever I try to read Java, I find it very hard to see the wood for the trees -- it's the same problem people have with the parentheses in Lisp, I suppose.
I *think* I replied to an anonymous coward, who must subsequently have been moderated down to -1.
Lisp is easier to read than Java in a couple of ways. Mainly because the brackets tell you all you need to know about the program structure. no need to look for semi-colons, or braces, or line breaks, or whatever. This makes lisp incredibly easy to parse and manipulate... particularly if you use a decent editor.
But yes, prefix notation is not what we are conditioned to read these days -- infix is the way. That's why I tend to use Python.
Why should analysing complexity have anything to do with readability or easy of debugging?
I've not have to analyse complexity for a while, but I'd be happier to do it with clear recursive functions and a handy copy of Concrete Mathematics by my side than some god-awful iterative mess that hides the whole point of the function.
At the risk of sounding faecetious: Yes - learn Python instead. A lot of people describe aspects of Python as 'Lisp without the parentheses'... it's certainly easier than Lisp for someone coming from C or Basic to understand. Once you're happy with things like list comprehensions and lambda functions, Lisp will make a lot more sense (and you can appreciate it's power and beauty).
Once more suggestion : never ever write Lisp without a decent editor (Emacs comes to mind). Backeting hell awaits.
Recursion is neither evil nor unnatural. It's the natural way to define many things.
For example, what's the natural way to define the factorial, n! ?
0! = 1
n! = n * (n-1)! if n > 0
Clear and simple.
Suppose I have to perform a function on every node of a rooted tree:
starting with the root:
walk through any children.
process the current node.
And that will translate directly into clear and easy to understand (and easy to debug) code.
You think and use recursion every day, you just don't recognise it. That's not to say that recursion is the only thing that should be used, but when used correctly it makes code very easy to understand.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm... they really do need to update their screenshots -- almost all of them are from KDE 2.0, and much work has been done since then.
But, you'll probably still find them 'pointlessly shiny and obscure'. It's a strange thing to get so worked up over. But, just so I know, can you point me toward examples of icon sets which satisfy your urges?
The aethetics in KDE are among the poorest of any modern desktop. The icons should be improved - what part of that do you disagree with?
All of it. The icons in KDE are much clearer and easier to distinguish than the Gnome ones. Icons should *not* be mini-photographs -- they should be clear simple representations. The Gnome icons give me a headache.
KDE had issues with look and feel back in the KDE 1 days. It doesn't any more. Gnome has the advantage of a larger community developing themes and styles, but the default in KDE 2 is perfectly acceptable, and the recent point releases have greatly increased the 'style candy' aspects over the original 2.0.
--
Don't take the sniping of random Slashdot trolls as a reason for not helping to theme KDE -- but don't go into it with the attitude that you are saving KDE from some horrible design mistake, because there isn't one there.
The GPL is actually quite useful in cases like this -- as QT have found. You release the code base as GPL, which allows it to be used in any GPL compatible code... but if companies want to use the code in their closed products they have to talk to you and pay you to license it to them under something else.
No, you have it the wrong way around.
The NSA *strengthened* the DES specification to make it resistant to an attack (differential cryptanalysis) which was unknown on the 'outside', and remained unknown for about 15 years afterwards.
There are a couple of nice things about 2.2 over 2.1 ... mainly in the use of Konqueror as a file manager rather than a browser:
They've really improved the thumbnail previews, and the detailed list now uses the Nautilus way -- rather than the background being one colour, it interleaves horizontal bars of two colours to make it much easier to read across.
The file open and file save dialogs have been improved as well.
There's a new addons package which adds several tools to Konqueror, like the ability to filter the files you display, and the ability to turn Java/Javascript/cookies on and off from the toolbar.
The killer though is the new printing support. It finally makes printing from Linux satisfying and easy, particularly when you're using CUPS.
This does not include the right to stream that content, for which you have to pay more. In contrast, to decode, encode, stream, store Vorbis you have to pay $0.
Getting away from licensing issues, a recent listening test concluded that at 128kbps Vorbis RC2 was right up there with LAME encoded MP3, and better than Xing encoded MP3 -- and RC2 still has a couple of minor issues that will be fixed before the release.
(okay, what the FUCK kind of lameness filter reason is 'Junk character post'? I had to get rid of some dollar signs to get it to post)
Damn right. One of the reasons we're a little more cynical over here in the UK about the US call to remove 'terrorists and those who sponsor terrorism' is that the US have been the main sponsor of the IRA for quite a few years.
When are we going to see people in the CIA convicted of sponsoring terrorism, or is this yet another case of "we'll kill anyone that goes against *our* laws, except *us*"?
"Last Tuesday's Financial Report" is much more readable that "last tuesdays financial report", which is more readable than "last_tuesdays_financial_report", which is more readable than "fr0123.dat".
For a similar reason, every UNIX application which breaks when you use file names with spaces is broken (mainly because they use space as a delimiter) -- this doesn't apply to the command line routines, where you escape the spaces, but mainly to graphical front ends which forget to escape the filenames before calling other programs (leading to problems if you have ' or " or ~ in the filename as well).
But there is a standard UNIX document processing format -- TeX (or LaTeX if you want lots of predefined things).
And it's easily converted to that other UNIX standard: Postscript.
Exactly. KDE is one of the few projects I've seen which actually seem to *welcome* new coders, and work to incorporate their code. A brilliant example is the new printing architecture in KDE 2.2: basically the work on one man. Of course, using it was made easier because it basically involved a one line change in applications -- that's the benefit of Object Orientation.
... without a real overall 'dictator'... and yet somehow it still seems to work.
It's also truely a multi-language, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural project: Germans, Dutch, French, English, American, Spanish, etc.
For all the sniping at KDE from wierdo Americans, KDE is, for me, the true shining example of an open source project -- far more than Mozilla or any of the other poster boys.
Standard American guide to overthrowing a govenment:
1. Find an opposition movement
2. Do they know how to use weapons? If not, train them.
3. Give them lots of weapons either free or at drastically reduced prices.
4. Ensure them the support of America come the glorious revolution.
5. Step back and ignore the massacres for 5 years or so.
6. Have the opposition won? If so, then declare them the new 'evil government' and return to step 1. Otherwise go to step 3.
Who rebuilt the world after WW/II?
Well, the USSR did quite a good job. Of course, you Americans didn't like that...
Who immediately sends aid to every country
The Marshall Plan is widely credited with being the single biggest reason that the UK could no longer afford to be an Empire after WW2. Your 'aid' in that case destroyed a 200 year old infrastructure. But hey, I guess you were still pissed off at us.
I'd be interested how your sketch of America as a benevolent loving friend ties in with (to take three random examples) Cuba, Grenada and Palestine.
(Oh, and don't think I'm holding the UK up as a shining light of freedom -- we're just as worse, if not more, than the US. The only reason we don't screw up more lives is that we don't have the influence we used to).
Pearl Harbour wasn't about killing people. It was about destroying machinery. At that it was stunningly successful -- the once reason it wasn't *more* successful is that the US had advance warning, and had managed to move much of the fleet out of danger.
--
As to what happens to your country now: reactionary opinion will make the government much more hard-line and right wing. Many of your rights will be taken away in the interests of 'national security', and never given back, even when the threat is long gone. Your govenment will use an (imagined or not) external threat to pull the country together, and to stop the economy from collapsing.
The golden age of information and encryption freedom may well be over. Remember -- 'only people with something illegal to say would need to encrypt their messages'.
My heart goes out to anyone connected to someone who died today -- family, friend, co-worker. I am also genuinely scared about what your country is going to do next.
I was watching a truely scary interview today with a military analyst. He said that the US should 'strike back, and strike back quickly against the terrorists that did this'. When the interviewer pointed out that we don't know who did this, and asked which terrorist groups America should attack, the analyst said 'all of them'.
I can see a lot of innocent people being killed, a lot of countries destabilized, and an escalation in the hatred of the US coming from this. Thank god the USSR isn't still around, or we would probably be watching the nukes dropping around now.
May your personal choice of God be with you.
Talking about the middle east is a little premature. I only put the Israel vs Palestine thing in as an aside -- I should have realised it was too sensitive. That said:
You can't have reconcilliation with them. They don't reason. They don't ask for any quarter.
Oh, they reason, and you can have reconcilliation. Don't make the mistake of making Islam into some uncaring, sand-blast the world religion. Just like the Spanish Inquisition, like the Crusaders, like the Conquistadors were no representatives of Christianity, Islam can be twisted and tainted by fanatical madman. They don't represent Islam, but their own idiocy.
The trick is to make countries secure enough that they don't need to resort to extremism. Isolating a country is not the way to do this (I am amazed, for example, that the US still isolate Cuba -- this is another example that the fundamentalist uses to illustate the arbirary uncaring nature of the US).
Laugh all you want, but bombing places into the ground and killing isn't the answer. If it were, 1/4 of the world would still be part of the glorious British empire. The US is now the biggest, the wealthiest, the most important country in the world. Learn from the lessons of previous empires if you want to stay that way.
You're dealing, most likely, with Arab terrorists.
Damn right - just like Oklahoma, yes?
I'm more sorry than I can express about the loss of life in your country. I wish there were some way I could help the families and friends of the people who died.
I know what *won't* help: a war.
It must be terribly hard for you to realise, given that you've probably never been out your country, but Syrians and Afghani are *just as human as you*. One American isn't worth *more* in some sense than a non-American, despite what you might think.
You know how to stop hatred? Build prosperity. Pick the countries that you think may have caused this, and make them happy, so they never need to resort to something like this again. Suicide missions aren't something that you do lightly -- there is years of hatred and tension that America needs to *defuse*.
And yes, I said the same about Britain when the IRA were killing people in my country.
Releasing the prisoners was a culmination of a process going back many many years (involving, among other things, Ireland re-writing its constitution to remove the claim on Northern Ireland).
Israel and Palestine have had 50 years to hate each other -- the Protestants and Catholics in Ireland have had about 300. You don't defuse a situation like that by bombing the hell out of one side (we know, Thatcher did her best).
Peace and reconciliation is, in the long run, the only way forward.
The biggest thing the American government can do now is say 'What have we done to these people? How have the affected their lives so badly that they will kill themselves just to hurt our civilians? How can *we* change *our* behaviour so that something like this never happens again.'
But they won't. They'll pick some small, badly defended country, and have a one-sided TV war so all the folks back home can sit back and see that Uncle Sam is *sorting them bastards out*. And the whole thing will start all over again.
Don't make the US into Zimbabwe. Make it into South Africa.
No, he was quoting Ghandi, who was responding to 'an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth', in much the same way that Jesus did.
Amazing how the 'fundamentalist' Christians are those furthest away from the teachings of Christ.
In order to help you destroy your productivity:
http://www.zzt.org/
The problem I find with Java (and C++, it's cousin), is the sheer amount of verbiage you need to write anything. For example - both Lisp and Python are strongly typed, but not statically typed, which means you don't have to declare the types of variables... which cuts down on clutter. After a couple of hours of apprehension, I've also grown to love Python's semantic spacing - I've always indended code to indicate nesting, and now I don't have to indicate it in a second, redundant fashion.
Whenever I try to read Java, I find it very hard to see the wood for the trees -- it's the same problem people have with the parentheses in Lisp, I suppose.
I *think* I replied to an anonymous coward, who must subsequently have been moderated down to -1.
Lisp is easier to read than Java in a couple of ways. Mainly because the brackets tell you all you need to know about the program structure. no need to look for semi-colons, or braces, or line breaks, or whatever. This makes lisp incredibly easy to parse and manipulate... particularly if you use a decent editor.
But yes, prefix notation is not what we are conditioned to read these days -- infix is the way. That's why I tend to use Python.
Why should analysing complexity have anything to do with readability or easy of debugging?
I've not have to analyse complexity for a while, but I'd be happier to do it with clear recursive functions and a handy copy of Concrete Mathematics by my side than some god-awful iterative mess that hides the whole point of the function.
At the risk of sounding faecetious: Yes - learn Python instead. A lot of people describe aspects of Python as 'Lisp without the parentheses'... it's certainly easier than Lisp for someone coming from C or Basic to understand. Once you're happy with things like list comprehensions and lambda functions, Lisp will make a lot more sense (and you can appreciate it's power and beauty).
Once more suggestion : never ever write Lisp without a decent editor (Emacs comes to mind). Backeting hell awaits.
Recursion is neither evil nor unnatural. It's the natural way to define many things.
For example, what's the natural way to define the factorial, n! ?
0! = 1
n! = n * (n-1)! if n > 0
Clear and simple.
Suppose I have to perform a function on every node of a rooted tree:
starting with the root:
walk through any children.
process the current node.
And that will translate directly into clear and easy to understand (and easy to debug) code.
You think and use recursion every day, you just don't recognise it. That's not to say that recursion is the only thing that should be used, but when used correctly it makes code very easy to understand.
No it isn't. Konqueror is no relation to Gecko.