Yet we are frequently and loudly told by Open Source evangelists that the fact lots of people CAN look at the code *implicitly* means lots of people WILL be looking at the code.
Yes, and? Nobody expects some 'if key == 0123456789 user = root' style of coding here. A lot of people actually look at code. But there is a huge difference between spotting incidental coding errors (bugs) and deliberate, obfuscated Covert Channels. Here we talk about the latter category.
I know, on Slashdot one is supposed to not agree, ever.;) What you write makes a lot of sense to me, now. Actually, if I wanted to build a prototype to demonstrate the feasibility, I would probably still do an analogue one. I still gobble together parts from my shelf and solder, faster than gobbling stuff together and solder and program. The very moment even a small series needs to be done, the use of uPs becomes a must. My comment was motivated by some remarks of some people in here, who seemed to imply that it couldn't be done in analog; or it would be a miracle if it worked with an analog controller. No, digital is not by default 'better' than analog. It cannot produce miracles. In the end the world is analog, and controlling is done easier and more precise in digital.
Have you looked at the circuit diagrams? What do you mean with proper error checking and recovery in this context? You think a digital controller would not make the thing fall over when the gyroscope fails? Are you sure you know what you are talking about here, or just reproducing what you heard in 101 of digital controllers?
And I have mod points, but don't give you any. 'Troll' is awfully harsh, I agree. I'd rather give you some 'un-informed'. The higher part count is surely on the side of the digital controller. Just look at the diagrams offered: analog means direct processing of signals, no A/D. Just some op-amps, pwm, done. Harder to debug? Nonsense. You debug with a voltmeter instead of a logic analyzer. You are right with respect to advanced controlling, though, like counting, timing, delays. But none is needed here, some filters are just enough, and filters are implemented easier with some RCs around an op-amp. Also, you need a bridge. A bridge is much more simple if build in an analog manner. So your 'just impractical' is a good reason to not give you any mod points. It might be your opinion, and you sure may have one, but to me, an EE with some experience in developing controllers, it doesn't hold water in the case of a gyroscope.
I'd mod you up if I had mod points. So I can only dump my comments mired with frustration here. Of course, what the shit is 360 degrees here? On a plane you have 360 degrees. You can draw them on a simple exercise book from your school days. Though, those so-called scientists, being engineers, ought to know the basics of undergrad engineering: a sphere has 4 times pi. And their camera doesn't. Look at the photo of the original article, it is a hemisphere. No way to see the nadir of the 'dark' half. In principle we have a 2-dimensional array of 2-dimensional sensors. So that's stereoscopy, left-right and up-down. That is 2 pi. Should anyone be doubtful, still: make this hypothetical experiment: place the camera hemisphere in front of the table at which you sit. Half above, half below the surface. You can see left and right, and you get a parallax for the objects on the table. And you get to see the bottom of the table when you use the cameras positioned below the table plane. All hunky dory. But this is 3D only in your phantasy. 3D would be if you could move around, and see that table from the side, from behind, from top, from bottom. How can you see objects behind your monitor as placed on that desktop, with the camera arranged in front? Yes, the article says by placing more than one camera. Fine, again. But nothing beyond what we have known for generations: Just put sufficient cameras to record any object from at least two perspectives, and you can reconstitute the three-dimensional space. None of this is being done by said camera.
this is bad advertisement. And timothy ought not have posted it. As someone who has worked in stereoscopic research, there is nothing new to it in this 'development'. Except, of course, maybe the brute force real-time stitching of the images. The idea to arrange a multitude of cameras on a half-sphere has grown a beard over decades. Worse, there is not much of a difference between a traditional '3D'-view (which isn't, actually, 3D), and this arrangement. A quarter century ago some chaps had a somewhat functional setup with 6 cameras and 5 perspectives. In these days, we can - thanks to advances in computers - calculate any intermediate 2D perspective with parallax. 'And what', is the only comment I could give. And most relevant, probably, it doesn't address the most pressing question: How to project it; how to reconstruct a (calculated) 3-dimensional object in view-space (dunno if this word exists, but is the best construction I could think of)? And don't come and tell me, to use a similar setup of projectors! because that wouldn't work. Much ado about nothing. The good prof is eventually just hoping for tenure by advertising this thingy. I do agree, the stitching algorithm could be new, more powerful, more precise. But then, the public wouldn't actually be impressed sufficiently. No, EPFL, you didn't do much of a service to yourself with this clip, alas.
Fine, thanks, learned something here. I was actually talking out of some cuff w.r.t. exim. The term in question was 'switching user'. As you describe it now, exim doesn't 'switch' user 'back' neither. So I withdraw whatever I wrote and state the opposite.
I would hope that recipient extraction from the envelope is done by an unprivileged process, though, and only a valid recipient reported back for spawning the delivery-to-mailbox process.
As it happens, you're right, noexec won't help here
The reason this works is that exim runs initially as root. Though it drops its privileges early on, it retains (at least in some circumstances) the ability to switch back to root—this allows it, for example, to switch to another user when delivering their mail.
Then we should consider postfix as superior. Because for security, we don't want any input ever to be touched by privileged code. Postfix spawns a mail delivery that runs with the privileges of the recipient. If, as you describe it, the users are switched around, that's surely less safe. Instead, for the delivery to another user, one better kills off the first delivery process, and spawns a new one, running as the user of the second mailbox, and so forth. Because one never knows what shit one has on one's hands when elevating privileges.
[... and there goes my karma:( ] Actually, exim was never the thing to do, and yet Debian had it in default. Just read the archives, and this has been under discussion ever since. OpenBSD has sendmail, likewise, and this has been under discussion ever since. I am totally a FOSS person [and there goes even more karma.( ], hate blobs. I can do with less functionality if only the software is free. And some perceive postfix as 'not free enough' and so forth. Whatever, relevant is, that exim has always been a dog, almost impossible to configure, and finally with 4.0 changed the style of its configuration. sendmail: just try to understand why you need to install a compiler (m4) to create a configure file? Plus it used to have some security holes several years ago. In a nutshell, for the last 10 years, being on Debian, OpenBSD or whatnot, the first thing to go in all my boxes is any not-postfix MTA, and postfix to come thereafter. Yes, I'm a vi person [OMG, all karma negative!:( ], but I also see good arguments for emacs. SMTP is different: I see no good arguments for neither exim nor sendmail. As much as i like choice, and support the existence of exim and sendmail (and qmail), I have always felt that the distros do a disservice by offering anything else than postfix as default.
Currently this is +3, Insightful. It needs to be modded up. You enlightened my day, thank you! Your only mistake: in your scenario you wait until the terrorists have already planted the bombs. That's a bad mistake! The only real thing to do, is that we TSA anyone leaving their house. Scanners and/or gropers before anyone is allowed to leave the house, enter the car. Any day. Security (TSA) in front of our house, the same security when we leave our place of work. Security (TSA) when we go shopping, and the same when we leave the shopping mall. "Oh, beautiful, America"! The land of the hhmm... . At least this kills a few birds with a single stone. Not only no terrorists, also no burglaries, no drug dealers, no mugging. Until now, we misunderstood the term 'security' at the entrance of condominiums, gated communities. It must be just the other way round: The checks are to be done on those leaving the places. Then anyone you ever meet outside, is by definition clean. Then we can finally even abandon those pesky airport controls and body-checks, since nobody can leave any place and enter public space with anything illegal on or in him/her.
The trouble is the distribution. I don't know about the voltages used in the states, but often the electricity is transformed down to 33/11kV, because these voltages are rather simply run underground. So in the average distribution network, you hit a number of (down-)transformers and a number of (underground) cabling until the 3x400V reach the client. It would cost billions to rip it out and put back another one that supports charging of electric cars.
The trouble is also in the distribution with respect to daytime. Some might think, that they already use a high energy load, maybe even 3, 6 or 12 kW; and 'what is the difference?'. The difference is that until now, high loads are somewhat randomly distributed over time, and usually run for short time-spans. So a 12 kW load runs from 8-9 here, and another one maybe 2-4 there. But think about it: In future when the working population comes home in the evenings, they will want to recharge their cars for the trip to work next morning. Unfortunately, evenings are already the times of highest load in residential areas: lighting, heating, air-co, ovens, you name it.
And it would be very wrong to blame the situation on some '50 year old hardware' or so. It could not be more wrong. The distribution networks were simply not designed with recharging of electric cars at homes in mind; and even less with additional loads correlating with already peak hours.
You don't get this one totally correct. There is no 'attachments' on slashdot, otherwise I'd love to attach a screenshot of my Chrome screen; with no borders, no 'max'/'min'/'close', but all tabs at the very top of the screen. I don't want to convince you at all, sure, but at least I can tell you that there are people around who don't mind to give 100% real estate to an application; be it a browser, mail client or office application. There is lot of work to do on 'intelligent' switching, but rudimentary it works here, of course: clicking on an '@' link brings up the full screen mail client, clicking on an attachment there, switches to the same 'total' full screen office. And with the 'typical' auto-hide lower screen edge, I get Dashboard popping up in all its beauty. If I need to start something else, know the time (actually, I'd love to have an on-top applet above all screens to display the time) that's what I do. And no, I don't want to see some ugly 'Start' button, systray, network strength, CPU-load, date, keyboard layout, username, shutdown button and so forth all the time. But that could be just me.
Maybe you need a bigger screen with higher resolution, or more screens
Hmm. I have 2 HD screens, like 1920x1200, and your argument still doesn't convince me. Should I have 4 27" screens? I am afraid, it would not make a difference. Though, one year ago I could have used similar words like you on an argument like mine. To me it looks like 'panel', which made all the difference from Windows3.1x to Windows95, has been ingrained into the user experience almost like 'computer' is equated with 'Windows'.
I don't say that what Plasma offers is the end to all needs. I for one have another bunch of potential ideas. But 'panel' is dead, for me personally. When I happen to get one, be it on W7, Maverick 10.10 or elsewhere, I feel like someone handed me a crutch to walk up a staircase.
Where I do understand your argument is "slower than just immediately clicking on the desired window's button". But that doesn't apply to me, since my panels were always on auto-hide. These days, instead of a half-brew (that is half-complete) panel, I get a full screen of tools, applications, displays, folders... . So for me, there is progress.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=201620 is the bug for your taste. Filed on July 27, 2009 and until now without activities from the side of KDE, but close to 20 duplicates, because everyone is running into it all the time.
I understand your point. But that's exactly what I have been trying for the last half year: I set my KDE to 'no panel', even 'no border'. And - loving it! This is not to talk up KDE (which is very lousy in places) or talk down Gnome. It is the paradigm that took me some time to get used to. But now you'd have to pry it from my cold, dead fingers...
Only if someone is interested: I have the Dashboard on a mouse edge, which now takes in principle the task of the panel, except that it is 2-dimensional instead of a line (== more space, no doubt). Another mouse edge does the 'Desktop Grid', so that I can move to another desktop, while yet another one presents all windows of the current desktop. And it is just beautiful to have all real estate 100% for the applications; with a 'panel' (desktop==dashboard) directly underneath; instead of invading the screen.
I have no clue if this will accepted by the majority (I think not); but something will need to be done against those ugly, overloaded, panels. From where one needs to drop sub-panels with sub-menus, because the total, primary, real estate is just the screen width.
So Suse once became Novell, and Novell once became Attachmate, and Attachmate is a business partner of Microsoft, and Microsoft bought some Intellectual Property from Novell...
"Thanks to our new overlords, KDE SC 4.6 was made available almost immediately to the community"
Sometimes ACs need to be taken seriously. Very seriously. I was considering your post as one of this class, until I hit OpenOffice.org [...] still has compatibility issues That kind of kills your post, since an intentionally closed, unpublished, proprietary, format that alas made it as de-facto standard can hardly be expected to be met 100%. Were it published, and nobody from StarOffice through SUN and now Oracle could have written a 100% compatible clone, I might have modded you up.
Ooops, no wonder journals are so full of mischief these days. Confess-confess-confess, or we bring in the comfy chair, you're one and the same person with the GP?!
'Insightful' is a moderation I can agree with; but I seriously doubt you are author and editor in native English. Leaving out one word is an oversight for which I wouldn't blink an eye. Like I wouldn't for you not deciding on the auxiliary. There is not much of coherence in the GP post, which is more a concatenation of ideas without inherent sequence. First, there are not many native Americans in line for the job, and then their mere existence serves as indicator for their (whose?) desire to stay, and then 'they' (who?) miraculously emerge as 'best people for the job'. Why 'we' followed by 'they'? Where is the connector between the taxpayer not paying the salary, but teaching kids? Are those positions all financed directly from non-governmental sponsors? No public schools around? And what does this have to make with six figure salaries?
Maybe I should STFU; but then you should run away from your job, so that the quality of publications can improve. Thank You, Sir!
The problem with research is primarily one of funding
No, it isn't. Being a product of the 'old' continental European system - sooo badly manhandled over the last decade -, I have lived through a time, when a researcher was given a paltry public service position, and expected nothing but to continue his research topic to the best of his knowledge for the rest of his life. And this actually worked in general. That was a system based on trust, and the vocation of the researchers. Then the Anglo-american bean-counters came along and babbled about 'productivity', 'return' and 'evidence'. Promotion and tenure - according to those hare-brained cannot-be-but-accountants - had to be based of 'objective' and 'measurable' criteria. If you work in shoe manufacturing, that's feasible. If you work in academia, it simply isn't. But those bean-counters, oblivious of reality, have taken to hammer the process down onto us nevertheless. And more or less reluctantly we play by the rules and feed numbers to our - by now - bean-counting bosses.
No, the problem is not on funding. It is a total lack of trust that a researcher uses the resources allocated optimally.
While I agree totally with you, some feel different. Ask the OECD, for example. They dish out advice, and ranking, according to the percentage of the populace with a degree. Where we live, the government is trying very hard to bump up the numbers, irrespective how watered-down the syllabus must become, and irrespective of the unemployed/unemployable. If you want to be declared 'developed' by OECD, they (OECD) don't bother about the percentage of adequately employed degree holders. As anecdotal evidence: Recently I bought a netbook in a local chain store of electrical goods. Since I insisted on doing the initial setup of Windows7 on my own (which takes some time), I had a good half hour of chatting with the 6 male and 2 female employees. It was to my big surprise, and utter frustration, that the majority are degree holders with no other jobs offered after graduation. And here we are talking about computer science, material engineering; not sociology. Sure, I for one considered all of them unemployable (at least I wouldn't want to employ them), but I pitied them. Everyone talked them high on the significance of a degree, and the bright future. Now they are hopelessly settled with a study loan and no future.
Slashdot Mirror
Yet we are frequently and loudly told by Open Source evangelists that the fact lots of people CAN look at the code *implicitly* means lots of people WILL be looking at the code.
Yes, and?
Nobody expects some 'if key == 0123456789 user = root' style of coding here. A lot of people actually look at code.
But there is a huge difference between spotting incidental coding errors (bugs) and deliberate, obfuscated Covert Channels. Here we talk about the latter category.
Yep. Got a personal mail from Theo.
I am confident, the other two also got the notification.
Could you two please confirm? If yes, all other posts here are superfluous. We have been warned, thank you!
I know, on Slashdot one is supposed to not agree, ever. ;)
What you write makes a lot of sense to me, now.
Actually, if I wanted to build a prototype to demonstrate the feasibility, I would probably still do an analogue one. I still gobble together parts from my shelf and solder, faster than gobbling stuff together and solder and program.
The very moment even a small series needs to be done, the use of uPs becomes a must.
My comment was motivated by some remarks of some people in here, who seemed to imply that it couldn't be done in analog; or it would be a miracle if it worked with an analog controller.
No, digital is not by default 'better' than analog. It cannot produce miracles. In the end the world is analog, and controlling is done easier and more precise in digital.
Have you looked at the circuit diagrams?
What do you mean with proper error checking and recovery in this context? You think a digital controller would not make the thing fall over when the gyroscope fails? Are you sure you know what you are talking about here, or just reproducing what you heard in 101 of digital controllers?
And I have mod points, but don't give you any. 'Troll' is awfully harsh, I agree. I'd rather give you some 'un-informed'.
The higher part count is surely on the side of the digital controller. Just look at the diagrams offered: analog means direct processing of signals, no A/D. Just some op-amps, pwm, done.
Harder to debug? Nonsense. You debug with a voltmeter instead of a logic analyzer.
You are right with respect to advanced controlling, though, like counting, timing, delays. But none is needed here, some filters are just enough, and filters are implemented easier with some RCs around an op-amp. Also, you need a bridge. A bridge is much more simple if build in an analog manner. So your 'just impractical' is a good reason to not give you any mod points. It might be your opinion, and you sure may have one, but to me, an EE with some experience in developing controllers, it doesn't hold water in the case of a gyroscope.
I'd mod you up if I had mod points. So I can only dump my comments mired with frustration here.
Of course, what the shit is 360 degrees here? On a plane you have 360 degrees. You can draw them on a simple exercise book from your school days. Though, those so-called scientists, being engineers, ought to know the basics of undergrad engineering: a sphere has 4 times pi. And their camera doesn't. Look at the photo of the original article, it is a hemisphere. No way to see the nadir of the 'dark' half. In principle we have a 2-dimensional array of 2-dimensional sensors. So that's stereoscopy, left-right and up-down. That is 2 pi.
Should anyone be doubtful, still: make this hypothetical experiment: place the camera hemisphere in front of the table at which you sit. Half above, half below the surface. You can see left and right, and you get a parallax for the objects on the table. And you get to see the bottom of the table when you use the cameras positioned below the table plane. All hunky dory. But this is 3D only in your phantasy. 3D would be if you could move around, and see that table from the side, from behind, from top, from bottom. How can you see objects behind your monitor as placed on that desktop, with the camera arranged in front? Yes, the article says by placing more than one camera. Fine, again. But nothing beyond what we have known for generations: Just put sufficient cameras to record any object from at least two perspectives, and you can reconstitute the three-dimensional space.
None of this is being done by said camera.
this is bad advertisement. And timothy ought not have posted it.
As someone who has worked in stereoscopic research, there is nothing new to it in this 'development'. Except, of course, maybe the brute force real-time stitching of the images. The idea to arrange a multitude of cameras on a half-sphere has grown a beard over decades.
Worse, there is not much of a difference between a traditional '3D'-view (which isn't, actually, 3D), and this arrangement. A quarter century ago some chaps had a somewhat functional setup with 6 cameras and 5 perspectives. In these days, we can - thanks to advances in computers - calculate any intermediate 2D perspective with parallax. 'And what', is the only comment I could give.
And most relevant, probably, it doesn't address the most pressing question: How to project it; how to reconstruct a (calculated) 3-dimensional object in view-space (dunno if this word exists, but is the best construction I could think of)? And don't come and tell me, to use a similar setup of projectors! because that wouldn't work. Much ado about nothing. The good prof is eventually just hoping for tenure by advertising this thingy.
I do agree, the stitching algorithm could be new, more powerful, more precise. But then, the public wouldn't actually be impressed sufficiently.
No, EPFL, you didn't do much of a service to yourself with this clip, alas.
Fine, thanks, learned something here. I was actually talking out of some cuff w.r.t. exim. The term in question was 'switching user'. As you describe it now, exim doesn't 'switch' user 'back' neither. So I withdraw whatever I wrote and state the opposite.
I would hope that recipient extraction from the envelope is done by an unprivileged process, though, and only a valid recipient reported back for spawning the delivery-to-mailbox process.
As it happens, you're right, noexec won't help here
The reason this works is that exim runs initially as root. Though it drops its privileges early on, it retains (at least in some circumstances) the ability to switch back to root—this allows it, for example, to switch to another user when delivering their mail.
Then we should consider postfix as superior. Because for security, we don't want any input ever to be touched by privileged code. Postfix spawns a mail delivery that runs with the privileges of the recipient.
If, as you describe it, the users are switched around, that's surely less safe. Instead, for the delivery to another user, one better kills off the first delivery process, and spawns a new one, running as the user of the second mailbox, and so forth. Because one never knows what shit one has on one's hands when elevating privileges.
[... and there goes my karma :( ] .( ], hate blobs. I can do with less functionality if only the software is free. :( ], but I also see good arguments for emacs. SMTP is different: I see no good arguments for neither exim nor sendmail. As much as i like choice, and support the existence of exim and sendmail (and qmail), I have always felt that the distros do a disservice by offering anything else than postfix as default.
Actually, exim was never the thing to do, and yet Debian had it in default.
Just read the archives, and this has been under discussion ever since. OpenBSD has sendmail, likewise, and this has been under discussion ever since.
I am totally a FOSS person [and there goes even more karma
And some perceive postfix as 'not free enough' and so forth. Whatever, relevant is, that exim has always been a dog, almost impossible to configure, and finally with 4.0 changed the style of its configuration. sendmail: just try to understand why you need to install a compiler (m4) to create a configure file? Plus it used to have some security holes several years ago.
In a nutshell, for the last 10 years, being on Debian, OpenBSD or whatnot, the first thing to go in all my boxes is any not-postfix MTA, and postfix to come thereafter.
Yes, I'm a vi person [OMG, all karma negative!
Currently this is +3, Insightful. It needs to be modded up. You enlightened my day, thank you! ... . At least this kills a few birds with a single stone. Not only no terrorists, also no burglaries, no drug dealers, no mugging.
Your only mistake: in your scenario you wait until the terrorists have already planted the bombs. That's a bad mistake! The only real thing to do, is that we TSA anyone leaving their house. Scanners and/or gropers before anyone is allowed to leave the house, enter the car. Any day. Security (TSA) in front of our house, the same security when we leave our place of work. Security (TSA) when we go shopping, and the same when we leave the shopping mall. "Oh, beautiful, America"! The land of the hhmm
Until now, we misunderstood the term 'security' at the entrance of condominiums, gated communities. It must be just the other way round: The checks are to be done on those leaving the places. Then anyone you ever meet outside, is by definition clean. Then we can finally even abandon those pesky airport controls and body-checks, since nobody can leave any place and enter public space with anything illegal on or in him/her.
Spot on here!
The trouble is the distribution. I don't know about the voltages used in the states, but often the electricity is transformed down to 33/11kV, because these voltages are rather simply run underground. So in the average distribution network, you hit a number of (down-)transformers and a number of (underground) cabling until the 3x400V reach the client. It would cost billions to rip it out and put back another one that supports charging of electric cars.
The trouble is also in the distribution with respect to daytime. Some might think, that they already use a high energy load, maybe even 3, 6 or 12 kW; and 'what is the difference?'. The difference is that until now, high loads are somewhat randomly distributed over time, and usually run for short time-spans. So a 12 kW load runs from 8-9 here, and another one maybe 2-4 there.
But think about it: In future when the working population comes home in the evenings, they will want to recharge their cars for the trip to work next morning. Unfortunately, evenings are already the times of highest load in residential areas: lighting, heating, air-co, ovens, you name it.
And it would be very wrong to blame the situation on some '50 year old hardware' or so. It could not be more wrong. The distribution networks were simply not designed with recharging of electric cars at homes in mind; and even less with additional loads correlating with already peak hours.
Or maybe put an app just to do that with thumbnails of app windows on that screen - a permanent "Expose". ;)
Right. Except, I have it underneath and that suits me fine.
Welcome to our new capitalist overlords!
Yes, make the underclass work harder and pay more taxes, Yahoo!
(I am aware that the type of mod points given for this comment depends mostly on the nationality of the mods. Let's see ... .)
You don't get this one totally correct. There is no 'attachments' on slashdot, otherwise I'd love to attach a screenshot of my Chrome screen; with no borders, no 'max'/'min'/'close', but all tabs at the very top of the screen.
I don't want to convince you at all, sure, but at least I can tell you that there are people around who don't mind to give 100% real estate to an application; be it a browser, mail client or office application. There is lot of work to do on 'intelligent' switching, but rudimentary it works here, of course: clicking on an '@' link brings up the full screen mail client, clicking on an attachment there, switches to the same 'total' full screen office.
And with the 'typical' auto-hide lower screen edge, I get Dashboard popping up in all its beauty. If I need to start something else, know the time (actually, I'd love to have an on-top applet above all screens to display the time) that's what I do.
And no, I don't want to see some ugly 'Start' button, systray, network strength, CPU-load, date, keyboard layout, username, shutdown button and so forth all the time. But that could be just me.
Maybe you need a bigger screen with higher resolution, or more screens
Hmm. I have 2 HD screens, like 1920x1200, and your argument still doesn't convince me. Should I have 4 27" screens? I am afraid, it would not make a difference. Though, one year ago I could have used similar words like you on an argument like mine.
To me it looks like 'panel', which made all the difference from Windows3.1x to Windows95, has been ingrained into the user experience almost like 'computer' is equated with 'Windows'.
I don't say that what Plasma offers is the end to all needs. I for one have another bunch of potential ideas. But 'panel' is dead, for me personally. When I happen to get one, be it on W7, Maverick 10.10 or elsewhere, I feel like someone handed me a crutch to walk up a staircase.
Where I do understand your argument is "slower than just immediately clicking on the desired window's button". But that doesn't apply to me, since my panels were always on auto-hide. These days, instead of a half-brew (that is half-complete) panel, I get a full screen of tools, applications, displays, folders ... . So for me, there is progress.
The desktop is rock solid now.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=201620
is the bug for your taste. Filed on July 27, 2009 and until now without activities from the side of KDE, but close to 20 duplicates, because everyone is running into it all the time.
I understand your point. ...
But that's exactly what I have been trying for the last half year: I set my KDE to 'no panel', even 'no border'. And - loving it!
This is not to talk up KDE (which is very lousy in places) or talk down Gnome. It is the paradigm that took me some time to get used to. But now you'd have to pry it from my cold, dead fingers
Only if someone is interested: I have the Dashboard on a mouse edge, which now takes in principle the task of the panel, except that it is 2-dimensional instead of a line (== more space, no doubt).
Another mouse edge does the 'Desktop Grid', so that I can move to another desktop, while yet another one presents all windows of the current desktop. And it is just beautiful to have all real estate 100% for the applications; with a 'panel' (desktop==dashboard) directly underneath; instead of invading the screen.
I have no clue if this will accepted by the majority (I think not); but something will need to be done against those ugly, overloaded, panels. From where one needs to drop sub-panels with sub-menus, because the total, primary, real estate is just the screen width.
OpenSUSE had packages up almost immediately
So Suse once became Novell, and ...
Novell once became Attachmate, and
Attachmate is a business partner of Microsoft, and
Microsoft bought some Intellectual Property from Novell
"Thanks to our new overlords, KDE SC 4.6 was made available almost immediately to the community"
What I'm curious about:
Does one not need to install cgroup-bin in Ubuntu to make 'it' happen??
To me, this would be a logical prerequisite.
Can any expert confirm or refute this, please?
Sometimes ACs need to be taken seriously. Very seriously.
I was considering your post as one of this class, until I hit
OpenOffice.org [...] still has compatibility issues
That kind of kills your post, since an intentionally closed, unpublished, proprietary, format that alas made it as de-facto standard can hardly be expected to be met 100%. Were it published, and nobody from StarOffice through SUN and now Oracle could have written a 100% compatible clone, I might have modded you up.
Ooops, no wonder journals are so full of mischief these days. Confess-confess-confess, or we bring in the comfy chair, you're one and the same person with the GP?!
'Insightful' is a moderation I can agree with; but I seriously doubt you are author and editor in native English. Leaving out one word is an oversight for which I wouldn't blink an eye. Like I wouldn't for you not deciding on the auxiliary. There is not much of coherence in the GP post, which is more a concatenation of ideas without inherent sequence. First, there are not many native Americans in line for the job, and then their mere existence serves as indicator for their (whose?) desire to stay, and then 'they' (who?) miraculously emerge as 'best people for the job'. Why 'we' followed by 'they'? Where is the connector between the taxpayer not paying the salary, but teaching kids? Are those positions all financed directly from non-governmental sponsors? No public schools around? And what does this have to make with six figure salaries?
Maybe I should STFU; but then you should run away from your job, so that the quality of publications can improve. Thank You, Sir!
The problem with research is primarily one of funding
No, it isn't. Being a product of the 'old' continental European system - sooo badly manhandled over the last decade -, I have lived through a time, when a researcher was given a paltry public service position, and expected nothing but to continue his research topic to the best of his knowledge for the rest of his life. And this actually worked in general. That was a system based on trust, and the vocation of the researchers. Then the Anglo-american bean-counters came along and babbled about 'productivity', 'return' and 'evidence'. Promotion and tenure - according to those hare-brained cannot-be-but-accountants - had to be based of 'objective' and 'measurable' criteria.
If you work in shoe manufacturing, that's feasible. If you work in academia, it simply isn't. But those bean-counters, oblivious of reality, have taken to hammer the process down onto us nevertheless. And more or less reluctantly we play by the rules and feed numbers to our - by now - bean-counting bosses.
No, the problem is not on funding. It is a total lack of trust that a researcher uses the resources allocated optimally.
While I agree totally with you, some feel different. Ask the OECD, for example. They dish out advice, and ranking, according to the percentage of the populace with a degree. Where we live, the government is trying very hard to bump up the numbers, irrespective how watered-down the syllabus must become, and irrespective of the unemployed/unemployable. If you want to be declared 'developed' by OECD, they (OECD) don't bother about the percentage of adequately employed degree holders.
As anecdotal evidence: Recently I bought a netbook in a local chain store of electrical goods. Since I insisted on doing the initial setup of Windows7 on my own (which takes some time), I had a good half hour of chatting with the 6 male and 2 female employees. It was to my big surprise, and utter frustration, that the majority are degree holders with no other jobs offered after graduation. And here we are talking about computer science, material engineering; not sociology. Sure, I for one considered all of them unemployable (at least I wouldn't want to employ them), but I pitied them. Everyone talked them high on the significance of a degree, and the bright future. Now they are hopelessly settled with a study loan and no future.
Most of Microsoft's own software is NOT written in .NET. There is a reason for that.
This would be +5 Informative, if a reference was added!