Ok, I read through the article and came away with absolutely no information. He says some things we already know: data centers are expensive, IT people are overworked, and the rest of an organization only notices the technology folks when something breaks. So, what should we do about it?
Well, here's where you expect an innovator like Andreesen to come up with a brilliant idea that's going to begin the next IT paradigm shift, but all he says is that we need to find some revolutionary way to automate our own stuff -- basically, to automate the act of automating things. And how? Well, he doesn't really know. He makes some vague reference to sending out automatic updates to hundreds of servers at a time, and that's it.
Real bright there, Marc. Automatic patches and updates. As if that's the answer. In the real world, you don't have a huge farm of servers that all run the same patchlevel of the same operating system. I've got a few hundred boxen behind the glass, for example, that are a mix of Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Windows 2000, and Windows NT. And I'd guess that at least 50 percent of them would experience some sort of problem if we were to just push updates out to them unattended -- different applications require different patchlevels and break on others.
Let's not forget the fact that there's more than just servers. There's infrastructure such as routers, firewalls, and switches. And of course there is the dreaded desktop, which is probably the source of 90+ percent of IT headaches. Until the IT world wakes up and gets the hell off local desktops, the maintenance nightmare will continue. Seen what Microsoft is doing lately? Their vision of the future is one in which applications are loaded through a browser and executed in a local.NET environment. It's basically the same as Java applets, but they call it "Smart Clients" to give you the impression that it's something they invented. Sounds a lot like Network Computing to me -- which simply means that Network Computing is a good idea after all! And now that Microsoft has "invented" it, the idiots who make up most of the world may finally start to adopt the idea. Make the desktop a stateless device like it was 20 years ago when we all had dumb terminals on our desks, and IT overhead will drop like a rock.
The other trend you're going to start to see is outsourcing. People are realizing that it's expensive to build and run a data center. Fortunately, you don't have to. All you have to do is run your servers at a hosting center that knows how to do outsourced IT (as opposed to just hosting web sites, like the first generation of centers like Exodus did).
There are ways of streamlining IT after all. Unfortunately, Marc Andreesen didn't touch on any of them. I give this article a "C minus."
As part of the ongoing effort to promote efficient use of spectrum, the FCC today asked for public comment on the possibility of permitting unlicensed transmitters to operate in additional frequency bands.
Forget about it. As soon as John Ashcroft hears about this, he'll put the kibosh on it because these are frequencies that big corporations can make mone... er, I mean, because terrorists can use these frequencies to plan attacks.
I'm probably going to get modded down for this, but it's got to be said (and this is from experience; it's not mindless cheerleading) --
This isn't the best use of OpenBSD developer time, if what they want is a better OpenBSD. Despite its good (but not perfect) security track record, this is an operating system that is riddled with mysterious problems when it comes to Unix compatibility.
I've got a bunch of source code that builds and runs fine on FreeBSD, Solaris, Linux, and a bunch of other Unices, but OpenBSD introduces reliability problems and some serious performance problems. (The same computer processes the same data with the same program at about 20% of the speed of Linux.)
SMP is a nice thing to have, but before OpenBSD can really be seriously considered for production use on any but the most trivial tasks, the reliability and performance issues need to be ironed out first.
Is this really a proper Solaris? I thought that the next Solaris was supposed to have GNOME in it, and I still don't see that silly little "foot" menu anywhere in the film! Are they going back on their promises?
But there is an interesting possibility arriving from the PC world: clusters. PC hardware is so staggeringly cheap that it's becomming viable to run enterprise applications accross clusters of PC's, viewing each PC as un-reliable and likely to fail.
A cluster of PC's isn't even in the same league as a mainframe. PC operating systems aren't designed for that type of thing. Anyone stupid enough to try this is probably also stupid enough to try using Microsoft Cluster Services. And anyone who has seen Microsoft Cluster Services in action knows that it only protects you from hardware failure --- if Windows fails (and we all know that Windows is far less reliable than the hardware it runs on), you get two parallel blue screens. (Don't mod this up as 'Funny' -- I'm dead serious here.)
Linux is reliable but most of the clustering software we have available for Linux is geared more towards parallelizing an application and getting more work done with more machines, than towards N+1 reliability. You need to be able to have processes maintain their state in parallel on multiple machines -- not an easy thing to do.
Microsoft Windows will still consume more than half of the computer's resources, even before you load any applications... and it'll cost $10,000. (Hopefully, it won't matter because most people will have switched to Linux by 2012.)
Even though computers will be much more powerful, people will still generally only use them for e-mail and word processing.
Bill Gates announces for the sixth or seventh time since the original 1992 'Cairo' announcement, that the next version of Windows will have a database in the filesystem.
If you want to see mainstream adoption of open source, you have to look outside of the USA. If you follow the Linux news sites you'll see lots of foreign organizations, particularly governments, looking to make big switchovers to Linux and other open source software. Bill and Steve have been doing a lot of travelling lately, offering what basically amounts to bribes to keep these organizations on Windows.
So yes, the world has already started the mainstream move to open source, but the United States is the last place you'll see this effect -- because we're too heavily entrenched in Microsoft crap to be among the first.
This parallels other technology shifts. Why do other nations have wireless networks that are so much better than those found in the USA? Because they didn't become heavily entrenched in landlines the way the USA did, so they were able to leapfrog. It's the same way with software: fewer installations of Microsoft crap mean an easier deployment of something else.
Just give it time. Basic economics will work it out.
This could actually be a good thing. Pay a premium for advertising-free premium content. It's not all that different from paying for premium television channels (HBO, Cinemax, etc.) on your cable or satellite system.
If they're smart, they'll also make this available to non-AOL users through the Netscape Network as well, so all you need is their "Screen Name Service" and a browser to sign on. Price this fairly -- say, $4.95 a month -- and they might garner a good number of users. It's actually working pretty well so far for Real Networks; why not expand things a bit?
With ad revenues for web sites dwindling rapidly, this is probably inevitable. And I think it's ok.
I wouldn't worry about.Net "smart clients" too much... the API is very well-defined, and the good folks at the Mono project are making sure the Free world will be on board.
Arrgh. I am sick and tired of the Slashbot groupthink idea that the BBS is a thing of the past. The BBS community is alive and well on the Internet. It's single-line dialup systems that are dead.
BBS's still provide the greatest sense of a cohesive online community out there. Better than "blog" type nonsense, and certainly better than what the likes of MSN and AOL have to offer.
I've run UNCENSORED! BBS for 14 years and I'm not about to stop now. And the 200+ users aren't going to stop logging in, either. Modern BBS's offer access via telnet/ssh or web, your choice. And the Internet-connectedness of it all has made it possible for BBS communities to attain geographic diversity, something which was not possible when you had to deal with long distance modem calls.
Please, people, let's get the perspective straight. The BBS is alive and well, so stop pushing this "bygone era" myth.
The basic problem with satellite-based Internet access is physically unsolvable: even though speeds are in the multimegabit range, the latency is unacceptable for chatty applications. The time it takes a radio signal to get from an uplink dish, to the satellite, and back to a downlink dish, is in the multi hundred millisecond range -- and it can't be sped up without, to paraphrase our old friend Scotty, changing the laws of physics.
Good bandwidth combined with crappy latency is just fine if all you're doing is downloading. A transfer that takes 30 seconds still takes 30 seconds, so who cares if it started and ended one second later? E-mail... usually not a problem either. But web pages? It's going to feel a bit sluggish, as those pages take a second or two to start loading, even if they do load fast once they start. You can completely forget about using telnet or SSH. If you remember what netlag was like when the Internet was still using a lot of 56k and 19.2k connections -- that's what it's like with satellite.
I'm glad to see that there are more options opening up, but the latency of satellite Internet is something that cannot be fixed.
The Web has largely made technology shows obsolete.
There's nothing new out there.
The latter can be squarely blamed on the fact that the computer industry has become hostile to new ideas. Everything's gotta be the same old humdrum PeeCee stuff. Ten years ago, everyone was trying out new ideas. Nowadays, nobody wants to try anything new because there's no hope of making any money -- all good ideas are promptly stolen by Microsoft, Intel, Dell, Cisco, etc.... who can do it bigger and cheaper.
Is it any wonder that the only part of the tech world where change is really happening, is in the open source universe? Where the business rules don't apply?
Re:Does not work like that
on
Fun With Wine
·
· Score: 2
To break Wine, they need to break backwards compatibility. Their existing MASSIVE market of users and companies that use old programs on new Windows will prevent them from ever doing this like you say.
This sounds like something that Bill Gates thought up. It's like the Tablet PC: a solution in search of a problem.
Always remember that in the absence of other people's good ideas to steal, Microsoft attempts to "innovate." The result is usually crappy ideas that come from none other than Gates himself (the Tablet PC has been his pet project for a long time).
What's the point? Wireless displays? Why bother, when you can build an entire wireless computer in a form factor that isn't any larger than this wireless display? And of course you can simply remote your applications, using HTTP or X11, or even RDP if you really insist on staying in the Winworld. Sorry, I don't see any usefulness here.
There's nothing keeping me on Windows. I switched to Linux way back in 1997 and never looked back. I don't need to list the apps that make Linux a useful operating system -- you've heard the list a thousand times.
The reason you can avoind Windows nowadays is because Microsoft lost the browser war. Yes, you heard me correctly: they lost. Microsoft didn't like the idea of applications shifting from Windows to the web. Remember when you needed special Windows apps for everything? You installed one to send messages to someone's pager, another one to do your banking, another one to track your FedEx shipments, etc. Microsoft wanted to keep it that way, but those pesky Netscape people kept pushing this idea of applications executing on a server while you viewed them in a browser. So they went into War Mode on the browser front. All they managed to accomplish was to destroy Netscape's ability to make money selling browsers. But guess what? Nearly all information-access apps moved to the Web anyway. And those apps are as easily accessed from a Linux or Mac desktop as they are from a Windows desktop. Microsoft failed to stop the migration of apps to the web. Say it with me, folks: Microsoft failed. Doesn't that sound good? It's true. Marc Andreesen's vision of web-enabled applications making the OS irrelevant has become a reality, and that's one of the things that has enabled folks like me to ditch Windows without ever missing it.
There is basically no way that they can stop Office from running on Wine.
How about this:
Place a new API call in Windows, let's call it VerifyGenuineMicrosoftWindows() or something to that effect.
Office 11 makes a call to this API, looking for a specific cryptographic signature
Windows replies, using the private key, which is embedded into only Genuine Microsoft Windows
Any WINE developer who attempts to extract the private key for use in the WINE package is promptly thrown in jail, courtesy of the DMCA (i.e. the Disney/Microsoft Copyright Act)
I don't like this. Think about the possibilities for DRM: this is basically Jack Valenti's wet dream. If the whole computer is directly on the glass, there's no place to jack in. No place to tap the signal. No place to do anything. DRM hardware implemented mere nanometers from the pixels. Let's hope this technology does not come to fruition.
Overall, the admins figure they will cut out 99% of the hacking attempts as people would just go elsewhere, or once they did cheat, just wouldn't know how to change their MAC.
While it's true that most of the people with this program will be Windows users and therefore stupid idiots, let's not forget that gamers are very avid about doing whatever it takes to game bigger/faster/better. If MAC-based authentication becomes big (and I don't think it will), all it takes is one person with a few programming skills to write an EZ-Spoofer program. Run EZ-Spoofer, give it your fake MAC address, then run the game server authentication program from inside EZ-Spoofer. The relevant API calls are proxied... voila!
The thing that's scary about this is that when MAC-based authentication fails, some evil entity on the Pacific Northwest might suggest that game servers need the "strong security" provided by Passport... or even (shudder) Palladium.
AOL owning a large portion of the Internet client base is important because of the browser. When they switch to a Gecko-based client, Microsoft's browser hegemony will immediately disappear. That's important. It's very important. If the IE hegemony is allowed to continue, we'll start seeing web pages with embedded.NET applets -- and that would be a huge nail in the coffin of non-Windows desktops.
AOL, whether you hate them or not, is the primary (some might say only) obstacle preventing Microsoft from owning the Internet. If they were to go away, "MSN" and "The Internet" would become synonymous. Is that what you want?
I don't think I could stand to live in that kind of world. I hope AOL retains its huge lead forever.
Many years before this happened Richard pointed out the flaws of relying on non free software. Will any of the slashdot posters who called him crazy then apologize now?
Ok, I'll step up to the microphone and do just that.
I used to say that RMS was a wacko who is hurting the free software universe more than he's helping it at this point. But as time goes on, the closed world is getting so incredibly out of control that RMS's strict adherence to the ideals of free software make more and more sense. Kudos to RMS for being dependably ideal about it.
However, I still think his insistence on calling Linux "GNU/Linux" is sophomoric and imbecilic. Perhaps if he'd be willing to drop that petty crusade, people would take the rest of his position seriously.
Let me start off by saying that I am a KDE user; I prefer it strongly over GNOME.
However, there's no FUD in this article. We all would like to know what happened to the KDE League. It simply disappeared. The fact is, while the GNOME Foundation actually got together and formed a consortium, and produced results (look at how much Sun's involvement did, for example), the KDE League appeared out of nowhere as a sort of "me too" thing, and then disappeared just as fast.
KDE is a terrific desktop. I use it every day, at home and at work. But the fact of the matter is, KDE is a "cathedral" project. Most people who have observed its development have arrived at this conclusion.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, I read through the article and came away with absolutely no information. He says some things we already know: data centers are expensive, IT people are overworked, and the rest of an organization only notices the technology folks when something breaks. So, what should we do about it?
.NET environment. It's basically the same as Java applets, but they call it "Smart Clients" to give you the impression that it's something they invented. Sounds a lot like Network Computing to me -- which simply means that Network Computing is a good idea after all! And now that Microsoft has "invented" it, the idiots who make up most of the world may finally start to adopt the idea. Make the desktop a stateless device like it was 20 years ago when we all had dumb terminals on our desks, and IT overhead will drop like a rock.
Well, here's where you expect an innovator like Andreesen to come up with a brilliant idea that's going to begin the next IT paradigm shift, but all he says is that we need to find some revolutionary way to automate our own stuff -- basically, to automate the act of automating things. And how? Well, he doesn't really know. He makes some vague reference to sending out automatic updates to hundreds of servers at a time, and that's it.
Real bright there, Marc. Automatic patches and updates. As if that's the answer. In the real world, you don't have a huge farm of servers that all run the same patchlevel of the same operating system. I've got a few hundred boxen behind the glass, for example, that are a mix of Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Windows 2000, and Windows NT. And I'd guess that at least 50 percent of them would experience some sort of problem if we were to just push updates out to them unattended -- different applications require different patchlevels and break on others.
Let's not forget the fact that there's more than just servers. There's infrastructure such as routers, firewalls, and switches. And of course there is the dreaded desktop, which is probably the source of 90+ percent of IT headaches. Until the IT world wakes up and gets the hell off local desktops, the maintenance nightmare will continue. Seen what Microsoft is doing lately? Their vision of the future is one in which applications are loaded through a browser and executed in a local
The other trend you're going to start to see is outsourcing. People are realizing that it's expensive to build and run a data center. Fortunately, you don't have to. All you have to do is run your servers at a hosting center that knows how to do outsourced IT (as opposed to just hosting web sites, like the first generation of centers like Exodus did).
There are ways of streamlining IT after all. Unfortunately, Marc Andreesen didn't touch on any of them. I give this article a "C minus."
I'm probably going to get modded down for this, but it's got to be said (and this is from experience; it's not mindless cheerleading) --
This isn't the best use of OpenBSD developer time, if what they want is a better OpenBSD. Despite its good (but not perfect) security track record, this is an operating system that is riddled with mysterious problems when it comes to Unix compatibility.
I've got a bunch of source code that builds and runs fine on FreeBSD, Solaris, Linux, and a bunch of other Unices, but OpenBSD introduces reliability problems and some serious performance problems. (The same computer processes the same data with the same program at about 20% of the speed of Linux.)
SMP is a nice thing to have, but before OpenBSD can really be seriously considered for production use on any but the most trivial tasks, the reliability and performance issues need to be ironed out first.
Is this really a proper Solaris? I thought that the next Solaris was supposed to have GNOME in it, and I still don't see that silly little "foot" menu anywhere in the film! Are they going back on their promises?
A cluster of PC's isn't even in the same league as a mainframe. PC operating systems aren't designed for that type of thing. Anyone stupid enough to try this is probably also stupid enough to try using Microsoft Cluster Services. And anyone who has seen Microsoft Cluster Services in action knows that it only protects you from hardware failure --- if Windows fails (and we all know that Windows is far less reliable than the hardware it runs on), you get two parallel blue screens. (Don't mod this up as 'Funny' -- I'm dead serious here.)
Linux is reliable but most of the clustering software we have available for Linux is geared more towards parallelizing an application and getting more work done with more machines, than towards N+1 reliability. You need to be able to have processes maintain their state in parallel on multiple machines -- not an easy thing to do.
If you want to see mainstream adoption of open source, you have to look outside of the USA. If you follow the Linux news sites you'll see lots of foreign organizations, particularly governments, looking to make big switchovers to Linux and other open source software. Bill and Steve have been doing a lot of travelling lately, offering what basically amounts to bribes to keep these organizations on Windows.
So yes, the world has already started the mainstream move to open source, but the United States is the last place you'll see this effect -- because we're too heavily entrenched in Microsoft crap to be among the first.
This parallels other technology shifts. Why do other nations have wireless networks that are so much better than those found in the USA? Because they didn't become heavily entrenched in landlines the way the USA did, so they were able to leapfrog. It's the same way with software: fewer installations of Microsoft crap mean an easier deployment of something else.
Just give it time. Basic economics will work it out.
This could actually be a good thing. Pay a premium for advertising-free premium content. It's not all that different from paying for premium television channels (HBO, Cinemax, etc.) on your cable or satellite system.
If they're smart, they'll also make this available to non-AOL users through the Netscape Network as well, so all you need is their "Screen Name Service" and a browser to sign on. Price this fairly -- say, $4.95 a month -- and they might garner a good number of users. It's actually working pretty well so far for Real Networks; why not expand things a bit?
With ad revenues for web sites dwindling rapidly, this is probably inevitable. And I think it's ok.
I wouldn't worry about .Net "smart clients" too much... the API is very well-defined, and the good folks at the Mono project are making sure the Free world will be on board.
Arrgh. I am sick and tired of the Slashbot groupthink idea that the BBS is a thing of the past. The BBS community is alive and well on the Internet. It's single-line dialup systems that are dead.
BBS's still provide the greatest sense of a cohesive online community out there. Better than "blog" type nonsense, and certainly better than what the likes of MSN and AOL have to offer.
I've run UNCENSORED! BBS for 14 years and I'm not about to stop now. And the 200+ users aren't going to stop logging in, either. Modern BBS's offer access via telnet/ssh or web, your choice. And the Internet-connectedness of it all has made it possible for BBS communities to attain geographic diversity, something which was not possible when you had to deal with long distance modem calls.
Please, people, let's get the perspective straight. The BBS is alive and well, so stop pushing this "bygone era" myth.
The basic problem with satellite-based Internet access is physically unsolvable: even though speeds are in the multimegabit range, the latency is unacceptable for chatty applications. The time it takes a radio signal to get from an uplink dish, to the satellite, and back to a downlink dish, is in the multi hundred millisecond range -- and it can't be sped up without, to paraphrase our old friend Scotty, changing the laws of physics.
... usually not a problem either. But web pages? It's going to feel a bit sluggish, as those pages take a second or two to start loading, even if they do load fast once they start. You can completely forget about using telnet or SSH. If you remember what netlag was like when the Internet was still using a lot of 56k and 19.2k connections -- that's what it's like with satellite.
Good bandwidth combined with crappy latency is just fine if all you're doing is downloading. A transfer that takes 30 seconds still takes 30 seconds, so who cares if it started and ended one second later? E-mail
I'm glad to see that there are more options opening up, but the latency of satellite Internet is something that cannot be fixed.
- The Web has largely made technology shows obsolete.
- There's nothing new out there.
The latter can be squarely blamed on the fact that the computer industry has become hostile to new ideas. Everything's gotta be the same old humdrum PeeCee stuff. Ten years ago, everyone was trying out new ideas. Nowadays, nobody wants to try anything new because there's no hope of making any money -- all good ideas are promptly stolen by Microsoft, Intel, Dell, Cisco, etc.Is it any wonder that the only part of the tech world where change is really happening, is in the open source universe? Where the business rules don't apply?
To break Wine, they need to break backwards compatibility. Their existing MASSIVE market of users and companies that use old programs on new Windows will prevent them from ever doing this like you say.
Right. Breaking backwards compatibility is a bad thing. They couldn't, for example, just wake up one day and decide that the new version of MS Office will run on Windows XP and Windows 2000SP3, but not on earlier Windows 2000 releases, nor on Windows XP or Windows 95/98/ME. API backwards compatibility is there for a reason, right?
This sounds like something that Bill Gates thought up. It's like the Tablet PC: a solution in search of a problem.
Always remember that in the absence of other people's good ideas to steal, Microsoft attempts to "innovate." The result is usually crappy ideas that come from none other than Gates himself (the Tablet PC has been his pet project for a long time).
What's the point? Wireless displays? Why bother, when you can build an entire wireless computer in a form factor that isn't any larger than this wireless display? And of course you can simply remote your applications, using HTTP or X11, or even RDP if you really insist on staying in the Winworld. Sorry, I don't see any usefulness here.
There's nothing keeping me on Windows. I switched to Linux way back in 1997 and never looked back. I don't need to list the apps that make Linux a useful operating system -- you've heard the list a thousand times.
The reason you can avoind Windows nowadays is because Microsoft lost the browser war. Yes, you heard me correctly: they lost. Microsoft didn't like the idea of applications shifting from Windows to the web. Remember when you needed special Windows apps for everything? You installed one to send messages to someone's pager, another one to do your banking, another one to track your FedEx shipments, etc. Microsoft wanted to keep it that way, but those pesky Netscape people kept pushing this idea of applications executing on a server while you viewed them in a browser. So they went into War Mode on the browser front. All they managed to accomplish was to destroy Netscape's ability to make money selling browsers. But guess what? Nearly all information-access apps moved to the Web anyway. And those apps are as easily accessed from a Linux or Mac desktop as they are from a Windows desktop. Microsoft failed to stop the migration of apps to the web. Say it with me, folks: Microsoft failed. Doesn't that sound good? It's true. Marc Andreesen's vision of web-enabled applications making the OS irrelevant has become a reality, and that's one of the things that has enabled folks like me to ditch Windows without ever missing it.
...now I'm going to have to buy the White album again.
- Place a new API call in Windows, let's call it VerifyGenuineMicrosoftWindows() or something to that effect.
- Office 11 makes a call to this API, looking for a specific cryptographic signature
- Windows replies, using the private key, which is embedded into only Genuine Microsoft Windows
- Any WINE developer who attempts to extract the private key for use in the WINE package is promptly thrown in jail, courtesy of the DMCA (i.e. the Disney/Microsoft Copyright Act)
Sound feasible?I don't like this. Think about the possibilities for DRM: this is basically Jack Valenti's wet dream. If the whole computer is directly on the glass, there's no place to jack in. No place to tap the signal. No place to do anything. DRM hardware implemented mere nanometers from the pixels. Let's hope this technology does not come to fruition.
The thing that's scary about this is that when MAC-based authentication fails, some evil entity on the Pacific Northwest might suggest that game servers need the "strong security" provided by Passport
AOL owning a large portion of the Internet client base is important because of the browser. When they switch to a Gecko-based client, Microsoft's browser hegemony will immediately disappear. That's important. It's very important. If the IE hegemony is allowed to continue, we'll start seeing web pages with embedded .NET applets -- and that would be a huge nail in the coffin of non-Windows desktops.
AOL, whether you hate them or not, is the primary (some might say only) obstacle preventing Microsoft from owning the Internet. If they were to go away, "MSN" and "The Internet" would become synonymous. Is that what you want?
I don't think I could stand to live in that kind of world. I hope AOL retains its huge lead forever.
I used to say that RMS was a wacko who is hurting the free software universe more than he's helping it at this point. But as time goes on, the closed world is getting so incredibly out of control that RMS's strict adherence to the ideals of free software make more and more sense. Kudos to RMS for being dependably ideal about it.
However, I still think his insistence on calling Linux "GNU/Linux" is sophomoric and imbecilic. Perhaps if he'd be willing to drop that petty crusade, people would take the rest of his position seriously.
Let me start off by saying that I am a KDE user; I prefer it strongly over GNOME.
However, there's no FUD in this article. We all would like to know what happened to the KDE League. It simply disappeared. The fact is, while the GNOME Foundation actually got together and formed a consortium, and produced results (look at how much Sun's involvement did, for example), the KDE League appeared out of nowhere as a sort of "me too" thing, and then disappeared just as fast.
KDE is a terrific desktop. I use it every day, at home and at work. But the fact of the matter is, KDE is a "cathedral" project. Most people who have observed its development have arrived at this conclusion.