Cheap - look at the example of British Nuclear Fuels, where there are less subsidies than the US situation. How many billions do you think they have lost? All those rare earths used in nuclear components are not cheap.
Clean - Learn some chemistry or physics. Advertising will not make it clean - only careful research which has not yet been done (it's a pity the advertising money didn't go into research instead, but the advertising obviously worked on those that are now young adults).
Coal, Oil or Lime flavoured jelly is more radioactive than released wastes - This is actually quite true is you consider the total amount of the coal, oil or jelly that is used each year, the only thing is that the radioactive materials are so spread out to be completely harmless (particularly in the jelly) and are of a different type to those in high grade nuclear waste. We are talking about amounts of radiation too small to measure on an unconcentrated sample (gravity seperation can concentrate it more). Remember, some background radiation comes from the rocks beneath our feet. Ten million tonnes of coal is always going to be more radioactive than a barium enema, but the coal is somewhat spread out and there are worse wastes produced from nuclear power plants than those that are used for comparison in their advertising material.
No carbon dioxide emissions - A good reason. Personally I don't think it is a good enough reason. Nuclear power is not likely to ever happen in the country I live in anyway. There are no plans for a nuclear weapons program, so there is no economic reason to have it.
Nuclear rockets are a different issue - we're not talking about just boiling water here. Some people protest loudly whenever they hear the word nuclear (like in the case of the cassini probe, where risks were minimal and possible consequnces small). Each design will have to be looked at on it's merits. People also protest loudly and not listen to reason because of all of the lies in the past - to the extent that some people will not beleive anyone with a technical background, because they lump us in with 1980's tobacco industry medical researchers.
Three Mile Island... caused by imbeciles
Wasn't the verdict criminal negligence? Aren't the plants still built and inspected by the lowest bidder with "self-assessment" instead of real checks and balances? I would be very happy to hear otherwise.
If not, the imbeciles still have seats in congress.
Most obvious, HURD has been around way longer than darwin,
Obvious? How?
OK, one is almost ready for release, and the other has been released. That is, one is around and the other one isn't. How can the one that is not "around" at all obviously have been around longer. Also, which is more important - licence or the ability to be able to actually get the code, work on it, improve it AND get valid improvements into the main release.
I suspect your post should read that development on HURD started long before Darwin was ever thought of.
Yes, unlike Darwin [gnu.org], Hurd is Free, not just source-avaliable.
Can anyone submit a patch to it, or is it only as "free" as as Emacs wasn't? I personally don't think a closed development model works well with open source.
I don't know why, but I've always had a thing against loud hypocrites.
So's my car, but I can't afford the fuel costs of taking a jump jet aircraft down to the local shops.
BeOS never quite got to the stage where I would use it over a *nix system, Windows is by no stretch of the imagination more useful to me than it's predessorers and the hurd needs work. The apps I want to use run happily in a *nix environment, a not in a modern real time OS that an ordinary individual can afford.
wtf is wrong with these people, reusing existing acronyms?
Isn't that the general nature of people that use computers professionally for their own sake?
Example question: IP as used as a word in conversation is
- Intermediate Pressure
- Internet Protocol
- Intelectual Property
- All of the above plus something new soon
The real annoynaces are the acronyms that only apply within a single company or workplace, and those that believe that everyone on earth should know what they mean when they use them.
In general democrats seem to be fans of new weapons programs,
Good point - the other odd thing is that Nixon went to China, and GW Bush is finally putting the childish blockade of Cuba to an end. Those that lean towards socialism don't want to look remotely like a communist, and those on the right don't want to look as if they are so far to the right that they meet up with Stalin looping around the circle from the other direction.
Your milage may vary, particularly since I use kilometres.
Would we have these advances in technology if the Democrats were still in office?
I strongly suspect that this is not the sort of thing that can be cobbled together in a few months. The funding would have come from the previous administration and not the current one.
Higher military funding = more technological innovation.
And you can pay for the funding by blocking your military allies out of US trade - or at least that seems to be the plan.
Thoughts anyone?
The new administration hasn't been in long enough to do anything but talk. Effects of budgets don't happen until the money is spent to do stuff.
2. nitch movies like foriegn or art films may not make as much money in theaters
"Fellowship of the Ring", "Harry Potter and the PHILOSOPHERS stone", "The Matrix" - none of these were made in Hollywood. Foriegn films are doing better than you would think, particularly since most of the stuff that comes out of Hollywood now is a remake, and everything that is vaguely new comes out in triplicate (eg. asteroid films, or films about the enigma code).
A little more attention to detail would result in less crap films. Even "Titanic", with an enormous budget and hundreds of people working on it had things like the ship going under a bridge that was at the level of the bow. In the past this would be called a mistake - now I think they have a belief that mistakes don't matter, the customers are idiots that will swallow anything. Why should people with such an attitude be protected?
Question for you: if I poured a bucket if liquid N2 all over an open notebook, would it cause the paper to wrinkle up like a bucket of water would?
The results are pretty boring - it would just get cold. I dropped a ball of crumpled paper in the liquid once, and nothing happened. However, it wasn't in there for very long, so there may have still been a gas layer between the paper and the liquid. There isn't enough water in the paper to freeze and shatter it like wetter plant material, and you don't have the glass transistion temperature effect that you have with some plastics (brittle at low temperatures).
A lot of steels also become brittle at low temperatures (different mechanism) , but it's easy to order one that doesn't.
As for pouring the stuff on my hand - I've done it during a superconductor demonstration, it wasn't deliberate, and it did hurt when I touched the bit of cold ceramic. By the next day the mark had gone.
I used to work with liquid nitrogen for metal testing, and it was also used to cool the electron microscopes. In a lot of movies, someone comes in contact with liquid nitrogen, then falls to the floor and shatters. Reality doesn't quite work that way. Anyone that has had a skin cancer "burnt" off with liquid nitrogen can tell you that it takes an uncomfortably long time to chill a small area of skin. I've had liquid nitrogen on my skin on occasion, and with breif contact it isn't the liquid that burns but any metal that the liquid has been in contact with. It takes a few minutes of immersion just to freeze a banana all of the way through. You just need to treat it with the same respect that you would treat a concentrated acid - keep it out of the eyes and off the skin.
The big safety hazard is if you have poor ventilation and end up with low levels of oxygen in the room. Another hassle is that the liquid conducts elecricity. The biggest problem, however, would be your PC icing up. Thermal stresses could also be a big problem.
Ultimatly, the question is why do it? If you have electronics that operate best at low temperatures then it makes sense, but PCs have components made to run at room temperature. Semiconductor behavior is temperature depenant, so the machine may not run as intended at low temperatures (the CPU may end up being made of a lot of resistors instead of transistors). Tin-Lead solder has known cracking problems at sub-zero temperatures, and not a great deal of strength anyway (Scott of the Antarctic got to stay there forever after the solder failed in fuel tins at low temperatures). Delamination of tracks from the fibreglass base could also be a problem if the board gets very cold - copper and fibreglass shrink at different rates.
All of these things can be designed around. the easiest solution that I can think of off the top of my head is a great big lump of metal in contact with a resivior of liquid nitrogen under a feeder tank. When the CPU gets too hot, drip in a bit more liquid - just keep the liquid a long way from the CPU to keep all the ice and water away. a watercooled block would, of course do the same job if somewhat less efficently - or my favorite: airconditioning, big heatsinks and big fans. That way the user doesn't overheat either.
Coal is messy, releases more radioactive wastes too that people don't know about.
A few years ago some bright spark in advertising in the nuclear industry found out that radioactive rocks are in the ground. He also found out that a lot of the background radiation we experience is due to radioactive material in the ground. He worked out that if you examine large amounts of sedimentary rock you will find as much radioactive material as you will find in the nuclear waste produced by a nuclear power plant. Hence this argument that "coal plants produce more nuclear waste" was born.
One big flaw in this argument, is that heavy metals are, well, heavy. Ash, as you would expect from stuff that you see flying in the air after combustion, is light. The pollution control systems in power plants are designed to catch very fine grains of ash, and many portions of these systems use gravity to do the work. Now, if you succeed in getting most of the very light ash, right down to sub-micron size, what do you think happens to the heavy metals? Remember kids, the particle size is probably going to be about the same.
Also, since you still only have small amounts of radioactive material to thousands of tonnes of ash, it isn't concentrated enough to easily detect, let alone have an effect on anyone. What you end up with is ash in a heap that is slightly more radioactive than the average brick, and probably a lot less radioactive than some bricks.
btw, I have read that coal powerplans are not very efficient in any way.
In comparison to 100% efficency, certainly not, but in comparison to a small internal combustion engine they are very efficent - for a start they don't have to move their own weight around and you can have a really hot fire. You don't see big oil powered power plants with pistons, you see oil powered plants producing steam and running it through turbines.
The coal power plant has much better energy efficiency and makes much less pollution per kWh of energy produced then the small automotive internal combustion engine.
All true, but line losses are a pain. Ultimately you need to produce more energy, but you can at least put all of the pollutants somewhere where they can be managed - and get rid of all the NOx and SOx.
I'm surprised the article didn't mention flywheel
batteries.
I'm not - a flywheel is not a battery, it's a spinning mechanical device. You can store energy in it, just as you can store energy by pumping water uphill for a convenient kinetic energy source later on.
The greater the angular momentum of the flywheel, the more energy you can store, so the bigger and the faster the better. Once the energy requirements of laptops go down, it could be a possibility (for example, like the wind up radio). Currently hard drives and screens consume a lot of power. I had a calculator that needed to be plugged into the wall once, and now most calculators can run on solar cells in fairly low light. I hope to see a laptop running on as little power as that.
Nuclear plants are... Building the thing is a political matter, and thus not subject to the dictates of reason.
That applies to any powerplant. With Hydro, you need to flood large areas, no-one wants to live near a coal-fired plant, and ultimately, no-one wants to build a power plant unless they can get someone else to put up the capital cost (hence the electricity shortages in some places). People even complain about windmills!
The point of electric cars is to move the polluting emissions from the cars to the generating plants
This gets around smog problems. It's impractical to fit cars with eighty metre tall chimneys, but can be done at the power plant. One problem with electric cars using lead acid batteries is that they give off fumes, and you certainly want to keep them all out of the passenger compartment. This creates a design problem, since you want to pack a lot of batteries in for range or performance. Electric motorbikes don't have this problem since the rider is in the open air.
Methanol (or ethanol) can easily be made from... hemp.
Yes, he mentioned hemp, stop giggling and just think of mundane stuff like fibre used to produce rope. It is, of course, easier to produce alcohol from plants with a high sugar content, but a case for using lots of other plant material that is cheap to produce can be made. The price of this approach is falling relative to the oil price.
while here in the USA we happily coddle the gree-freaks
I'm missing something here - don't you still boil water with the stuff at enormous expense over there? How is that coddling the green-freaks? Have your weapons program, have your expensive power plants to show that it can have a peaceful use (in addition to the many peaceful uses discovered since the 50's white elephant of nuclear power) but don't ever be surprised when people laugh at you when it is called "clean" or "cheap".
"Moores Law" is a self-fulfilling prophesy. Moore worked/works for Intel, and pushed for more development, he didn't just watch.
The semiconductors being produced today are made with diode junctions much larger than those produced in fairly small University labs fifteen years ago. The trick is to get a lot of these things in a small space - so fabrication is the limiting factor.
A lot more effort has been applied to semiconductors than has been applied to batteries or fuel cells. For example, zirconia based fuel cells have the potential to be cheap, once the fabrication costs can be brought down.
worked with so many former programmers, analysts, DBAs, DAs etc...who are unable to make the transtion to managing
I worked at one place that had the worst of both worlds - a former technician that couldn't manage, and someone with no technical skills that also couldn't schedule his staff or quote on jobs(due to the lack of technical skills). Between the two of them they ran the place into the ground.
I've also had other managers that were very good from both technical and non technical backgrounds.
best situations I've worked in involve a true team
True, if the manager is good then you get this, and also someone to insulate you from the politics and bullshit at the upper levels.
It's up to the vendor to prove that it works and that it will be good for you. If they can't show you anything better than what you already have then ignore them, even if they are Microsoft. If they can show you something better, then look for holes and unanticipated costs. Also look at the companies with experience at that end of the market, and not just a big PC company starting to ease into the top end (which is really what they are - hugely successful, but a PC company). It may be a good solution, just get them to prove it.
believe that micrograin titania could one day make the perfect engine
Some time ago it was determined that using different materials in different parts of an engine produced a better engine. For efficiency, you want the combustion to occur at a high temperature. To minimise weight in anything that moves, you want to have a relatively light cooling system. The ceramic engine prototypes produced to this point have had the limitation that they do not conduct heat very well (titania is also limited this way), so then a better cooling system has been required for those prototypes, which sometimes cancelled out the benifits of lower engine mass and better fuel efficiency.
What has been done in the last decade (or more) is to have ceramic in the combustion chamber and a metal engine block to conduct away the heat. I think this has been used commercially for a few years. The other big problems with the all ceramic engine concept is that in some situations you want a bit of toughness, and that it is not yet known how to produce large pieces of high strength ceramic without a fairly high chance of significant flaws (which are going to be very small internal cracks or gaps). What this would mean in practice, is that you would make your engines, test them to beyond the conditions they are likely to experience and keep the ones that survive. A ceramic connecting rod could be made (and probably has), but something that isn't brittle would be nice in that situation, and you don't have to worry about heat, so steel is a good choice.
SiAlON is another material to watch. Turn rice husks into jet turbine blades!
the last thing I was between me and a bullet is a sheet of something that will shatter with countless sharp edges to cut me to ribbons.
It's fabricated from a powder, and isn't likely to be completely solid. There are going to be a large number of gaps between what used to be the powder particles. Any crack that starts in this material is going to go from gap to gap - following the path of least resistance. The most likely thing that will happen if this material is hit by a bullet is that a small chip will break off. A crack won't be able to make it to the far side of a thick piece of material - it will hit an air gap instead, and a new crack will have to start on the far side of that gap. Hit it hard enough and that will happen, but it will be more difficult to crack through completely than a completely solid piece of alumina. You end up with a material that isn't particularly tough, but it breaks the way you want it to.
If the material is close to 100% of solid density, then you can put a polymer between a couple of layers of it, just like safety glass. One reason this is big news is that alumina is cheap and available by the tonne. Then again, so is silica.
Why, when RMS makes comments on what direction GNOME and KDE should go, "he wants to be in charge"
He got on the board didn't he? Of course he wants to be in charge, he's very up front and honest about it, and I'm sure he doesn't mind a bit of criticism. You may have got a little confused about the whole "liGNUx" and "gnu linux" thing, he didn't want to be in charge, he just wanted to rename it to call attention to the GNU project.
Why did I write these comments? I'm just a bit miffed when he states opinions as if they are hard facts eg. "KDE was a danger to the community". In my opinion, history records that it wasn't - I think in RMS's opinion it was a potential danger, but that still didn't make it a real danger.
When Qt was non-free, KDE was a danger to the community
The way I read it as, not having been under a rock for the last decade is:
When Qt didn't use my specific licence, KDE was a danger to the community.
He could have at least read the previous licences that were not the GPL, but that would have been a waste of his time - anything that he isn't in control of is a danger. Now at least he can focus on real problems instead of inventing a bogeyman.
I admire his effort to reconcile the emnity that he helped to stir up (and has almost entirely disappeared anyway), but I don't admire the way he tries to justify what he did in the same message - he has to point out that they were a danger and he saved the world from a bunch of guys from Norway that would let you look at and change their source code. This "we won, lets work with KDE" message may have been appropriate within a year or two of Qt going GPL, but now it just looks like he's trying to remind the world of a personal victory (athough I'm sure other less stubborn people were the ones that convinced Troll that they could GPL Qt and still get enough money to eat).
This is an opinion. He wrote what he wrote and he knows why, I can only assume and point out my assumptions, and I'll keep doing it for as long as he wants to be in charge of other peoples projects. Perhaps Gnome and KDE should work together on some things, but I think they should both remain indepenant in their core projects. I don't think a monoculture is the way to go, or even identical look and feel (the suggestion by RMS of compatable themes).
Gnome does the Right Thing with respect to clipboards,
Yes, it's a nice copy of the way MS used to do things. Other people have other ideas and implement them in other ways - the right thing is usually just what the author thinks is the right thing. Until there is an ISO standard, there isn't going to be a "right thing", and even then extensions are good. Ultimately, the right thing in X is to support the X clipboard - everything else is an extension.
I always thought that a larger-than-monitor X virtual screen was an independent thing from window managers' workspaces.
It is, but the window manager can handle how it is displayed. The window magager gets to say whether to scroll smoothly or to flip, and whether the mouse pointer has to sit on the edge of the screen for a while before any of that happens.
If you decrease the resolution with "ctrl alt -" then X itself will scroll until you hit an edge that the window manager knows about.
The extra virtual screens in Enlightenment are different - I can't recall how they are done.
Maybe fvwm works differently, long time no see...
Check out the settings on what you use. A lot of stuff decended directly from fvwm or at least implemented most of its features.
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Cheap - look at the example of British Nuclear Fuels, where there are less subsidies than the US situation. How many billions do you think they have lost? All those rare earths used in nuclear components are not cheap.
Clean - Learn some chemistry or physics. Advertising will not make it clean - only careful research which has not yet been done (it's a pity the advertising money didn't go into research instead, but the advertising obviously worked on those that are now young adults).
Coal, Oil or Lime flavoured jelly is more radioactive than released wastes - This is actually quite true is you consider the total amount of the coal, oil or jelly that is used each year, the only thing is that the radioactive materials are so spread out to be completely harmless (particularly in the jelly) and are of a different type to those in high grade nuclear waste. We are talking about amounts of radiation too small to measure on an unconcentrated sample (gravity seperation can concentrate it more). Remember, some background radiation comes from the rocks beneath our feet. Ten million tonnes of coal is always going to be more radioactive than a barium enema, but the coal is somewhat spread out and there are worse wastes produced from nuclear power plants than those that are used for comparison in their advertising material.
No carbon dioxide emissions - A good reason. Personally I don't think it is a good enough reason. Nuclear power is not likely to ever happen in the country I live in anyway. There are no plans for a nuclear weapons program, so there is no economic reason to have it.
Nuclear rockets are a different issue - we're not talking about just boiling water here. Some people protest loudly whenever they hear the word nuclear (like in the case of the cassini probe, where risks were minimal and possible consequnces small). Each design will have to be looked at on it's merits. People also protest loudly and not listen to reason because of all of the lies in the past - to the extent that some people will not beleive anyone with a technical background, because they lump us in with 1980's tobacco industry medical researchers.
Wasn't the verdict criminal negligence? Aren't the plants still built and inspected by the lowest bidder with "self-assessment" instead of real checks and balances? I would be very happy to hear otherwise. If not, the imbeciles still have seats in congress.OK, one is almost ready for release, and the other has been released. That is, one is around and the other one isn't. How can the one that is not "around" at all obviously have been around longer. Also, which is more important - licence or the ability to be able to actually get the code, work on it, improve it AND get valid improvements into the main release.
I suspect your post should read that development on HURD started long before Darwin was ever thought of.
I don't know why, but I've always had a thing against loud hypocrites.
BeOS never quite got to the stage where I would use it over a *nix system, Windows is by no stretch of the imagination more useful to me than it's predessorers and the hurd needs work. The apps I want to use run happily in a *nix environment, a not in a modern real time OS that an ordinary individual can afford.
Example question: IP as used as a word in conversation is
- Intermediate Pressure
- Internet Protocol
- Intelectual Property
- All of the above plus something new soon
The real annoynaces are the acronyms that only apply within a single company or workplace, and those that believe that everyone on earth should know what they mean when they use them.
Your milage may vary, particularly since I use kilometres.
A little more attention to detail would result in less crap films. Even "Titanic", with an enormous budget and hundreds of people working on it had things like the ship going under a bridge that was at the level of the bow. In the past this would be called a mistake - now I think they have a belief that mistakes don't matter, the customers are idiots that will swallow anything. Why should people with such an attitude be protected?
A lot of steels also become brittle at low temperatures (different mechanism) , but it's easy to order one that doesn't.
As for pouring the stuff on my hand - I've done it during a superconductor demonstration, it wasn't deliberate, and it did hurt when I touched the bit of cold ceramic. By the next day the mark had gone.
The big safety hazard is if you have poor ventilation and end up with low levels of oxygen in the room. Another hassle is that the liquid conducts elecricity. The biggest problem, however, would be your PC icing up. Thermal stresses could also be a big problem.
Ultimatly, the question is why do it? If you have electronics that operate best at low temperatures then it makes sense, but PCs have components made to run at room temperature. Semiconductor behavior is temperature depenant, so the machine may not run as intended at low temperatures (the CPU may end up being made of a lot of resistors instead of transistors). Tin-Lead solder has known cracking problems at sub-zero temperatures, and not a great deal of strength anyway (Scott of the Antarctic got to stay there forever after the solder failed in fuel tins at low temperatures). Delamination of tracks from the fibreglass base could also be a problem if the board gets very cold - copper and fibreglass shrink at different rates.
All of these things can be designed around. the easiest solution that I can think of off the top of my head is a great big lump of metal in contact with a resivior of liquid nitrogen under a feeder tank. When the CPU gets too hot, drip in a bit more liquid - just keep the liquid a long way from the CPU to keep all the ice and water away. a watercooled block would, of course do the same job if somewhat less efficently - or my favorite: airconditioning, big heatsinks and big fans. That way the user doesn't overheat either.
One big flaw in this argument, is that heavy metals are, well, heavy. Ash, as you would expect from stuff that you see flying in the air after combustion, is light. The pollution control systems in power plants are designed to catch very fine grains of ash, and many portions of these systems use gravity to do the work. Now, if you succeed in getting most of the very light ash, right down to sub-micron size, what do you think happens to the heavy metals? Remember kids, the particle size is probably going to be about the same.
Also, since you still only have small amounts of radioactive material to thousands of tonnes of ash, it isn't concentrated enough to easily detect, let alone have an effect on anyone. What you end up with is ash in a heap that is slightly more radioactive than the average brick, and probably a lot less radioactive than some bricks.
In comparison to 100% efficency, certainly not, but in comparison to a small internal combustion engine they are very efficent - for a start they don't have to move their own weight around and you can have a really hot fire. You don't see big oil powered power plants with pistons, you see oil powered plants producing steam and running it through turbines.The greater the angular momentum of the flywheel, the more energy you can store, so the bigger and the faster the better. Once the energy requirements of laptops go down, it could be a possibility (for example, like the wind up radio). Currently hard drives and screens consume a lot of power. I had a calculator that needed to be plugged into the wall once, and now most calculators can run on solar cells in fairly low light. I hope to see a laptop running on as little power as that.
Duck and cover!
The semiconductors being produced today are made with diode junctions much larger than those produced in fairly small University labs fifteen years ago. The trick is to get a lot of these things in a small space - so fabrication is the limiting factor.
A lot more effort has been applied to semiconductors than has been applied to batteries or fuel cells. For example, zirconia based fuel cells have the potential to be cheap, once the fabrication costs can be brought down.
I've also had other managers that were very good from both technical and non technical backgrounds.
True, if the manager is good then you get this, and also someone to insulate you from the politics and bullshit at the upper levels.It's up to the vendor to prove that it works and that it will be good for you. If they can't show you anything better than what you already have then ignore them, even if they are Microsoft. If they can show you something better, then look for holes and unanticipated costs. Also look at the companies with experience at that end of the market, and not just a big PC company starting to ease into the top end (which is really what they are - hugely successful, but a PC company). It may be a good solution, just get them to prove it.
What has been done in the last decade (or more) is to have ceramic in the combustion chamber and a metal engine block to conduct away the heat. I think this has been used commercially for a few years. The other big problems with the all ceramic engine concept is that in some situations you want a bit of toughness, and that it is not yet known how to produce large pieces of high strength ceramic without a fairly high chance of significant flaws (which are going to be very small internal cracks or gaps). What this would mean in practice, is that you would make your engines, test them to beyond the conditions they are likely to experience and keep the ones that survive. A ceramic connecting rod could be made (and probably has), but something that isn't brittle would be nice in that situation, and you don't have to worry about heat, so steel is a good choice.
SiAlON is another material to watch. Turn rice husks into jet turbine blades!
If the material is close to 100% of solid density, then you can put a polymer between a couple of layers of it, just like safety glass. One reason this is big news is that alumina is cheap and available by the tonne. Then again, so is silica.
Why did I write these comments? I'm just a bit miffed when he states opinions as if they are hard facts eg. "KDE was a danger to the community". In my opinion, history records that it wasn't - I think in RMS's opinion it was a potential danger, but that still didn't make it a real danger.
When Qt didn't use my specific licence, KDE was a danger to the community.
He could have at least read the previous licences that were not the GPL, but that would have been a waste of his time - anything that he isn't in control of is a danger. Now at least he can focus on real problems instead of inventing a bogeyman.
I admire his effort to reconcile the emnity that he helped to stir up (and has almost entirely disappeared anyway), but I don't admire the way he tries to justify what he did in the same message - he has to point out that they were a danger and he saved the world from a bunch of guys from Norway that would let you look at and change their source code. This "we won, lets work with KDE" message may have been appropriate within a year or two of Qt going GPL, but now it just looks like he's trying to remind the world of a personal victory (athough I'm sure other less stubborn people were the ones that convinced Troll that they could GPL Qt and still get enough money to eat).
This is an opinion. He wrote what he wrote and he knows why, I can only assume and point out my assumptions, and I'll keep doing it for as long as he wants to be in charge of other peoples projects. Perhaps Gnome and KDE should work together on some things, but I think they should both remain indepenant in their core projects. I don't think a monoculture is the way to go, or even identical look and feel (the suggestion by RMS of compatable themes).
The extra virtual screens in Enlightenment are different - I can't recall how they are done.
Check out the settings on what you use. A lot of stuff decended directly from fvwm or at least implemented most of its features.