Tesla got huge loans and subsidies from the US government, and continues to do so. It would be losing money on each car otherwise. If you don't believe me, do a search for Tesla on some of the more conservative/laissez faire-friendly business sites like Forbes, WSJ or Bloomberg, they're frothing mad about it.
So yes, I agree with you -- technology will. But not without tangible, material help via government policy.
If you read the the grandparent a bit more carefully, you would have noticed it was about feminism, not about women.
Oh, I read it carefully enough. The goal of feminism is to provide equality to women in society, and this includes distributing the responsibility of child-rearing to both genders.
Taking months or years off for child raising, or working only part time, or refusing to travel - none of these things should affect your career or your pay. It ought to be possible to drop out of the workforce at 25, raise your kids full-time for 20 years, and then rejoin the workforce as a senior manager.
I assume you're aiming this dig at women, when the truly enlightened nations extend this courtesy to both men and women. And nobody takes paid parental leave for 20 years, sorry. Everyone who goes away for that long comes back at an adjusted career level, and I'm sure you know that. Why stoop to hyperbole?
It makes as much sense as the rest of the progressive agenda...
Let me guess - over the age of 50? You are being left behind, just like your parents were left behind on such progressive concepts as the end of colonialism and racism. It's not something to be upset about, it's just how civilization works.
All you people complaining about the state of Akonadi and the interconnectedness of KDE are missing an important part of the picture.
No matter what OS or desktop or GUI apps you have been using for the past 20 years, all of them have an implied conceptual data model underlying the collection of apps that you are using. For the most part, the "implied" bit has followed the old X11/Windows 2.0 "shared nothing" model, where bits and pieces of the data has been either replicated or ad-hoc shared (apps explicitly being aware of other apps and sharing data with them). This has worked okay for a long time, since users have assumed that this is the way it will always work.
Some of you folks may remember PalmOS, or are using Symbian and/or Android phones now. These platforms make the data model explicit, and all apps are aware of them. On an Android phone, the SMS, IM, Calendar and Contacts apps all know how to access the user's address book without knowing anything at all about each other. If you write a contacts sync backend, you don't need to care about any of those apps - you know how to access the contact data already from the database API.
What ends up happening is that YOUR DATA becomes the central focus of the platform. Not the app's data, or its storage format or anything like that. The apps are relegated to being clients of the larger data model. This is the correct approach for the future of the UI.
The KDE project has had its eye on this model of the future UI for a decade now. There has been bumbling and disorganization, miscommunication, dozens of key people coming and going, cat-herding and unfinished code. This is hardly surprising considering the size and nature of the KDE development team and its organization. Despite your irritations with the current state of a given KDE release, I think it's worth remembering what is being attempted here.
Of course, everyone's threshold is different and you may decide that being part of this massive experiment is not worth the headache. For you folks there are plenty of alternatives and I don't think anyone is going to be upset if you go back to the 80s-style UIs of other desktops such as KDE 3.x.
At the same time, don't be surprised if the KDE project doesn't make it a high priority to enable picking bits and pieces to run elsewhere; it's worthwhile, but it comes with a high opportunity cost that dilutes effort on the larger goals of the project.
The difference is that other contenders for the MMRCA contract will (apparently) come with source for the avionics software, while the F-16IN will not. It's not just India in fact; the UK is pissed about the "joint" F-35 for the same reason.
This is why I oppose the purchase of the F-16IN by India. It's a capable aircraft from what I understand and fits the MRCA requirements of the IAF, but I really really doubt that after facing its own gear in Gulf War I, the US is going to provide any country with sophisticated arms without a kill switch.
The other hero is the shepherd, who has bred the sheepdog since he was a puppy, has likely shared his home and food with him and made him part of the family, but will not hesitate to take him out the back with a rifle the moment he goes feral.
We have plenty of sheepdogs, wish there were better shepherds around.
One of the major effects KDE 4 has had on the free desktop has been to light a fire under the metaphorical asses of Xorg and driver development. There has been tons of work going on in Xorg since the split, but until KDE 4 came along and proved that stuff like Composite could have a real effect on user experience (Compiz came first, yes, but that was more or less just bling until apps started using composite), there was not as much pressure and expectation from free desktop users.
Turn on desktop effects on any system using KDE 4 and if you have Xorg with good drivers, the difference in experience is startling.
The rate at which Xorg and some of the drivers are getting better is exciting, as is Qt and KDE itself, and this is in part due to the expectations that KDE 4 has set in the minds of free desktop users. Kudos to the Xorg and FOSS driver devs for stepping up. The next couple of years are going to be fun.
KParts is a non-unique concept implemented pragmatically, leading to KDE devs actually using it.
The entire framework, from querying, instantiating and integrating KParts is optimised for the common case, ie shared libraries used in-process on the local machine, which means it's easy to learn and use.
Other attempts such as Bonobo and the erstwhile KOM/OpenParts were designed for maximum flexibility but didn't catch on because they made developers' lives difficult for these common cases.
...not sure what other hair style could represent "party all over."
The reduction in the quality of the major newspapers in India over the last decade is startling. I don't know whose fault it is though - maybe sports, fashion, lifestyle nonsense and celebrity gossip is all people actually _want_ to read in a newspaper. The Times of India, which used to be pretty good, is truly shameful.
The one thing that appeals to me about TK is the Canvas widget, which was apparently inspired by someone's Scheme graphics or some such thing. No worrying about paint messages and invalid regions -- you just give the Canvas a scene graph of line, text, even 3-color bitmap or even overlaying buttons, and the Canvas takes care of all of that. I would like to see such a high-function widget in other environements. QGraphicsView is available as part of PyQt4 and it's lovely to use from within Python. I've tried it with all sorts of complex canvas items (rich text, SVG etc) and it works great.
From what I understand through a cursory look at your COSA web pages, I get the impression that you are pushing a graphical language that is somewhat like National Instruments' LabVIEW. Have you used LabVIEW? If so, how is it similar/different to your COSA "ideal"?
KDE developers are indeed planning big things for KDE4 but that is what they are stuck at. Show me where the results are.
Why? Who are you? More specifically, why would you assume that the developers who are busy retooling
the plumbing of KDE should take time off to make screenshots for you?
Well I'm taking away a different lesson - when a gentleman with a proven track record of making adolescent jokes about
people's ethnicity like "Jewy Jewenstein", happens to make one that only appears, we must assume, to stem from
ignorance, well then that's funny. On the other hand, when an unknown person from another country makes a joke about a
landmark tragedy in a foreign country without a previous record of doing so, then that's not funny. I suppose the moral
of the story is to develop a reputation for making such jokes so that people get over their initial discomfort and begin
to laugh from the familiarity. A sort of humor by attrition, if you will.
Truly I have learned something today. This has been very useful. Thanks Mr. Bunions.
Excellent, then as your pupil I hope engage your services one last time. Does it count as humour to suggest that US civil engineers and architects come up with buildings with integrated AWACS and wheels? I shall consider your reply part of my ongoing education.
So I went to check out this site, and in there I found this gem:
Attack that, and Uncle Sam's gonna plant his submarine-lauched-missile-shaped foot up Ganesh's giant elephant ass so hard it'll make this last attack on the World Trade Center look like the first time you Arab idiots bombed it.
So he's can't tell an Indian from an Arab from a Muslim from a Hindu from a hole in the ground. But that's ok, because bigots
need to grieve too. When he's not in the throes of nationalistic (-white) symbolic pain, I'm sure he's really a lovely and funny
guy.
Nice article about crates though.
(For the record, I only fit one of those above listed categories, up to you guys who care to work out which one)
Surprised that nobody has yet mentioned Kolab Server, considering it's now stable and usable software based on well-proven components. The server is free software, and there's the third party Toltec connector for Outlook users.
This project really doesn't get enough attention...
People buy chinese goods today simply because they are cheaper. Most of the factories there currently making cheap stuff could dial up quality control if demand for the quality goods justified the increased cost of production. AFAIK this happened with Japan too.
My yardstick for the relevance of free software on Windows is this:
Besides whining, none of you folks has considered porting the GPLed Qt to Windows. It's free software! Nobody is stopping you from doing the porting.
One would assume that if there were a crying need, somebody would do it. That is how the free software "community" works, isn't it? Stop moaning, start coding.
Slashdot Mirror
Tesla got huge loans and subsidies from the US government, and continues to do so. It would be losing money on each car otherwise. If you don't believe me, do a search for Tesla on some of the more conservative/laissez faire-friendly business sites like Forbes, WSJ or Bloomberg, they're frothing mad about it. So yes, I agree with you -- technology will. But not without tangible, material help via government policy.
I assume you're aiming this dig at women
If you read the the grandparent a bit more carefully, you would have noticed it was about feminism, not about women.
Oh, I read it carefully enough. The goal of feminism is to provide equality to women in society, and this includes distributing the responsibility of child-rearing to both genders.
Nice strawman though.
You appear to be unclear on what this term means.
Taking months or years off for child raising, or working only part time, or refusing to travel - none of these things should affect your career or your pay. It ought to be possible to drop out of the workforce at 25, raise your kids full-time for 20 years, and then rejoin the workforce as a senior manager.
I assume you're aiming this dig at women, when the truly enlightened nations extend this courtesy to both men and women. And nobody takes paid parental leave for 20 years, sorry. Everyone who goes away for that long comes back at an adjusted career level, and I'm sure you know that. Why stoop to hyperbole?
It makes as much sense as the rest of the progressive agenda...
Let me guess - over the age of 50? You are being left behind, just like your parents were left behind on such progressive concepts as the end of colonialism and racism. It's not something to be upset about, it's just how civilization works.
All you people complaining about the state of Akonadi and the interconnectedness of KDE are missing an important part of the picture.
No matter what OS or desktop or GUI apps you have been using for the past 20 years, all of them have an implied conceptual data model underlying the collection of apps that you are using. For the most part, the "implied" bit has followed the old X11/Windows 2.0 "shared nothing" model, where bits and pieces of the data has been either replicated or ad-hoc shared (apps explicitly being aware of other apps and sharing data with them). This has worked okay for a long time, since users have assumed that this is the way it will always work.
Some of you folks may remember PalmOS, or are using Symbian and/or Android phones now. These platforms make the data model explicit, and all apps are aware of them. On an Android phone, the SMS, IM, Calendar and Contacts apps all know how to access the user's address book without knowing anything at all about each other. If you write a contacts sync backend, you don't need to care about any of those apps - you know how to access the contact data already from the database API.
What ends up happening is that YOUR DATA becomes the central focus of the platform. Not the app's data, or its storage format or anything like that. The apps are relegated to being clients of the larger data model. This is the correct approach for the future of the UI.
The KDE project has had its eye on this model of the future UI for a decade now. There has been bumbling and disorganization, miscommunication, dozens of key people coming and going, cat-herding and unfinished code. This is hardly surprising considering the size and nature of the KDE development team and its organization. Despite your irritations with the current state of a given KDE release, I think it's worth remembering what is being attempted here.
Of course, everyone's threshold is different and you may decide that being part of this massive experiment is not worth the headache. For you folks there are plenty of alternatives and I don't think anyone is going to be upset if you go back to the 80s-style UIs of other desktops such as KDE 3.x.
At the same time, don't be surprised if the KDE project doesn't make it a high priority to enable picking bits and pieces to run elsewhere; it's worthwhile, but it comes with a high opportunity cost that dilutes effort on the larger goals of the project.
The difference is that other contenders for the MMRCA contract will (apparently) come with source for the avionics software, while the F-16IN will not. It's not just India in fact; the UK is pissed about the "joint" F-35 for the same reason.
This is why I oppose the purchase of the F-16IN by India. It's a capable aircraft from what I understand and fits the MRCA requirements of the IAF, but I really really doubt that after facing its own gear in Gulf War I, the US is going to provide any country with sophisticated arms without a kill switch.
The other hero is the shepherd, who has bred the sheepdog since he was a puppy, has likely shared his home and food with him and made him part of the family, but will not hesitate to take him out the back with a rifle the moment he goes feral. We have plenty of sheepdogs, wish there were better shepherds around.
One of the major effects KDE 4 has had on the free desktop has been to light a fire under the metaphorical asses of Xorg and driver development. There has been tons of work going on in Xorg since the split, but until KDE 4 came along and proved that stuff like Composite could have a real effect on user experience (Compiz came first, yes, but that was more or less just bling until apps started using composite), there was not as much pressure and expectation from free desktop users.
Turn on desktop effects on any system using KDE 4 and if you have Xorg with good drivers, the difference in experience is startling.
The rate at which Xorg and some of the drivers are getting better is exciting, as is Qt and KDE itself, and this is in part due to the expectations that KDE 4 has set in the minds of free desktop users. Kudos to the Xorg and FOSS driver devs for stepping up. The next couple of years are going to be fun.
KParts is a non-unique concept implemented pragmatically, leading to KDE devs actually using it.
The entire framework, from querying, instantiating and integrating KParts is optimised for the common case, ie shared libraries used in-process on the local machine, which means it's easy to learn and use.
Other attempts such as Bonobo and the erstwhile KOM/OpenParts were designed for maximum flexibility but didn't catch on because they made developers' lives difficult for these common cases.
Can you explain to me how today's XKCD is supposed to be funny?
You must be a forcemeat.
...not sure what other hair style could represent "party all over." The reduction in the quality of the major newspapers in India over the last decade is startling. I don't know whose fault it is though - maybe sports, fashion, lifestyle nonsense and celebrity gossip is all people actually _want_ to read in a newspaper. The Times of India, which used to be pretty good, is truly shameful.
This is the kind of comment that ensures I will never be able to entirely give up reading comments on slashdot.
From what I understand through a cursory look at your COSA web pages, I get the impression that you are pushing a graphical language that is somewhat like National Instruments' LabVIEW. Have you used LabVIEW? If so, how is it similar/different to your COSA "ideal"?
Why? Who are you? More specifically, why would you assume that the developers who are busy retooling the plumbing of KDE should take time off to make screenshots for you?
Bye bye roughly 90% of flash sites.
Well I'm taking away a different lesson - when a gentleman with a proven track record of making adolescent jokes about people's ethnicity like "Jewy Jewenstein", happens to make one that only appears, we must assume, to stem from ignorance, well then that's funny. On the other hand, when an unknown person from another country makes a joke about a landmark tragedy in a foreign country without a previous record of doing so, then that's not funny. I suppose the moral of the story is to develop a reputation for making such jokes so that people get over their initial discomfort and begin to laugh from the familiarity. A sort of humor by attrition, if you will.
Truly I have learned something today. This has been very useful. Thanks Mr. Bunions.
Shame. would it have helped if I had placed the comment on an Arab gaming joke site?
Excellent, then as your pupil I hope engage your services one last time. Does it count as humour to suggest that US civil engineers and architects come up with buildings with integrated AWACS and wheels? I shall consider your reply part of my ongoing education.
Oh thank you, I feel edified. I now understand how ignorance becomes funny when it is published on a gaming jokes website.
So I went to check out this site, and in there I found this gem:
So he's can't tell an Indian from an Arab from a Muslim from a Hindu from a hole in the ground. But that's ok, because bigots need to grieve too. When he's not in the throes of nationalistic (-white) symbolic pain, I'm sure he's really a lovely and funny guy.
Nice article about crates though.
(For the record, I only fit one of those above listed categories, up to you guys who care to work out which one)
Surprised that nobody has yet mentioned Kolab Server, considering it's now stable and usable software based on well-proven components. The server is free software, and there's the third party Toltec connector for Outlook users. This project really doesn't get enough attention...
People buy chinese goods today simply because they are cheaper. Most of the factories there currently making cheap stuff could dial up quality control if demand for the quality goods justified the increased cost of production. AFAIK this happened with Japan too.
Besides whining, none of you folks has considered porting the GPLed Qt to Windows. It's free software! Nobody is stopping you from doing the porting.
One would assume that if there were a crying need, somebody would do it. That is how the free software "community" works, isn't it? Stop moaning, start coding.