I should say right now my experience has been 100% identical. I haven't worn deodorant in years; my current girlfreind and previous ones have never said "you stink" and a couple have even said they like my smell. One was a fanatic for it -- but she was peculiar;)
But you left out the one, singularly most important aspect -- diet. You MUST eat properly if you're going to stop using deodorant.
Stop eatinng fast food. Stop eating processed food. Stop drinking soda, drink more tea. Eat fresh veggies, lean meats. Etc etc.
You'll find that along with smelling like a clean human being (which is, if you think about it, better than smelling like chemicals), if you're overweight -- you soon won't be. I dropped 20 pounds in a year. I've kept it off too. Amazingly, the effect of clean lifestyle is enough that I don't even need deodorant after riding my bike to work or going to the gym.
It's amazing what good can come of the most obvious changes in habits.
I should say that while my little powerbook is about four times as fast as my work computer (according to my code which I've run on both machines) -- JSpringies is intolerably slow with antialiasing on my powerbook, and runs quite realtime on my work computer. I'm not kidding here -- the difference is appaling.
Sometimes the benefits of a higher quality imaging model aren't worth the performance hit. I would have been happy, personally, if it were some sort of apple specific switch to the VM or a class library thing you could turn on and off. I'm no java professional, however (I'm a c/c++ programmer) -- so I'm not certain how such things would be gracefully handled.
As it stands, I'm happy they made this decision -- though I haven't installed the upgrade yet. Having been burnt by the battery performance trouble with the last (10.2.4) update, I'm going to be a little more cautious about upgrades from now on.
Same here -- I've got the same machine (and am running 10.2.4) and as of yesterday I still had 3 or 4 hours battery life. I know because I spent yesterday hacking (read -- porting my linux Qt-based code to standard c++ and making an abstract bridge for different gui types) in a coffee shop and didn't leave until the battery was dead. I didn't time it, but it "felt" like about 3.5 hours.
Nonetheless, I'm concerned. If battery damage is permanent, and if I've got damage, I'll be one ticked off first-time apple owner.
My solution is very, very simple: stop watching the d*mned television.
It's all I can do not to curse about this but here it is as I see it: up until the 80's, you could expect an hour long tv show to consist of maybe 7 to ten minutes of commercials, and the rest being the tv show. Many, if not all, the commercials were for local companies and services. Fine.
We all know how commercials have become, so the market for the TiVO was born. In fact, over thanksgiving, at a relative's house, we tried to watch some james bond movie and it was, quite literally, 10 minutes of movie interspaced with 15 minute chevy/coke/dell commercial breaks. A 90 minute movie took THREE HOURS.
Of course, nobody who runs the networks likes that we have the choice to skip commercials or anything we're not interested in, so the odds are there will be no such thing as a TiVO in five years. If it takes technology like in the AOL case here, so be it -- if on the other hand it takes legislation, well then so be it too. My bet is that once the AOL device fails to sell (think DIVX) hollywood will simply make PVRs illegal.
You can see similar things happening in the movie industry; hell the last time I saw a movie I was shown SIX commercials before the previews began. And I had already paid something like 9 dollars just to get in. Think "captive audience" -- e.g., you and me.
I think what we need to start doing, here, is think about wether it's worth it.
Is it better to stay at home & watch TV, or to go out to a local coffee shop and write some code, read a book, or talk to a pretty girl/boy? Is it better to be steeped in advertising, or to go for a walk? (sadly, depending on where you live there isn't always a difference due to proliferation of billboards)
Anyway, what i'd really like to get at here is that once you get past the commercials, TV itself just isn't all that good -- and the world outside is SO MUCH BETTER.
I stopped watching TV four years ago -- with only the occasional late night conan o'brian and/or simpson's rerun. Since I gave up TV I've lost 20 pounds, gotten in great shape, dated much much more... etc etc. In fact, the only thing I'm missing is the internal scheduler I used to have which said "be home by 7 so you can catch ".
And, if you want to tell me "but cable has all these good shows" ask yourself if most cable stations hae commercials. As far as I know all but a few have *plenty* of commercials -- and yet you're PAYING for it. Paying! Bah! it's not worth it. At least normal TV is free.
Now, excuse me while I calm down. We shouldn't be fighting an escalating arms war to skip commercials -- we should simply stop watching altogether.
If you do, you'll thank yourself for it. Trust me.
I don't mind the snideness so much -- but, you should consider that not everybody watches everything on TV which you have. I never saw that documentary; & I pretty much don't watch television (barring simpsons reruns and conan o'brian). I certainly don't have cable, nor have I ever.
Anyway, thanks for the explanation. Also, now I realize that the slideshow screensavers must use this "ken burns effect".
Now, this is one of my apple gripes. Mac os has some great keyboard commands, and some great features that blow everybody away. But... the only way I learn these things is when somebody tells me. There's no documentation saying "to switch between windows of one app, hit command tilde". No.
You learn because some fat, sarcastic apple geek looks down his nose at you because you're doing something crudely and as such, he feels he has the right to scorn you. It pains me that that's the ONLY way to learn how to use a mac properly.
Of course, I've just earned my fat sarcastic apple geek prize for this snarky post. But hell, I'm skinny. So pttth.
[whoops, I posted anonymously, so happy cut-n-paste]
OK, slap me for my ignorance; but being as I'm just a lowly programmer and I don't have a digital camera, nor do I have a mighty digital video thing -- I've never used iMovie, nor have I even fired it up.
But, I keep hearing about this reviled "Ken Burns Effect". All I can do is guess it's like Homer star-wiping those handicam shots of Flanders when he was trying to pimp him out to the singles scene.
So, anybody care to educate me on this one? I'm baffled.
And, is it Ken Burns Effect (no apostrophe, as in : Ken is burning) or Ken Burn's Effect (with apostrophe, as in belonging or pertaining to Ken Burns)
I'm typing this at an SGI 320 right now -- I've been using it for a few years now. Nice machine.
But there's touble with them thar gui proms -- if you use a USB mouse which isn't SGI's default one, well, you're f*cked. Which is too bad, since now if I have to make a change (fortunately I haven't had to in a couple years) I have to dig up that POS mouse just to use the prom. Fooey.
I'll take a keyboard navigable text-mode bios any day. Who cares if your fancy bios has 1280x1024 16 bit color with icons and scrollbars and all that hoo ha if IT DOESN'T REALLY WORK.
Am I the only person who thinks that the original was among the WORST GAMES EVER MADE? Dragon's Lair was not a game. It was more like that damned blinking-lighted Simon electronic sysiphean time waster than a video game. In fact, I'm not 100% certain dragon's Lair could even be considered a video game.
Perhaps it was an experiment to see if youth around the western world would feed money into a machine to see if they could press a knob in the right direction at the right time. And it made millions, so the answer is "yes".
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here. Why, oh why do people talk about that game as if it were fun? You could have hooked up a machine with pre-programmed timings to move the joystick in the right direction at the right time and consistently beat the "game".
Hey... that's near my office. I'll go out at lunch and let you all know if I see something like a towering inferno or some sort of non-euclidean horror.
Of course, if it's the latter, I'll promptly go insane...
Would you prefer they release a "final" that's not ready? A final that's buggy/crashy/etc?
Have patience. You won't die if it takes them X more months to produce a final.
As a full time user of kdevelop 2, which is a solid, powerful ide, I'm glad they're working on 3 but I'll happily wait until final to move over my projects.
(The alphas have crashed on me way too much to get any useful work done. Not that I'm griping, gideon is amazing -- and I've done my duty by submitting many bug reports and backtraces.)
I remember my calculus class in high school (ca. 1994) -- I was getting an A, and was bored, so instead of paying attention I wrote scorched earth for my Ti85 calculator.
My port even did terrain damage! Those were the days. I can't believe I had the force of will to program in a language that had ONLY GLOBAL VARIABLES.
Eventually I was spending so much time playing it and tweaking the code (in class, after school, at night...) that my grade(s) begain to slip. So, with an even greater force of will, I deleted it. It was my personal pandora's box and it had to go.
Every now and then I use that calculator (of course I still have it) and think about all the fun I could be having had I not deleted that game.
Not entirely true. back in my BeOS days I wrote an image translator plugin for reading Photoshop files. Look it up on bebits if you want to see (http://www.bebits.com/app/1343)
So, in the month or so I spent I learned both how true, and not true your statement is. yes, the PSD file format is documented, but no, it is *not* easy to parse. And I *do* know what I'm talking about here (I used to write lots of low level stuff for embedded devices and it involved making efficient use of storage).
Basically, since the format was tight, binary, and not at all tagged, you had to absolutely make *certain* that you knew exactly how many bytes to read for every circumstance. if you were off by one byte, complete failure. Well, that would be all well and good if the documentation were good enough, but in essence it would say "this is of type X -- under circumstances Y,Z & P it's even padded, else, it's terminated by Q, else assume that the first four bytes are length, but remember to add R, S & T to this, to figure out where the offset word is. It was nasty stuff, compounded by the fact that many of the string types were undocumented, *and* to top it all off I had to implement my own mac toolbox compression/decompression routines with less than a paragraph of documentation.
So, yes, binary formats aren't necessarily hard to figure out. but, in practice, they tend to have alot of cruft (in PSDTranslator's case, I had to accommodate Adobe's scaling of the PSD spec from 3.0 -> 4.0 -> 5.0 -> 5.5) -- and in the worst case, some parts just *aren't* documented properly. Needless to say, I became all too familiar with my hex editor.
I shudder to think of what the folks at OpenOffice.org, KWord & Abiword have had to trudge through, and I'd like to buy them all a frosty beer.
So, to sum it all up, I wouldn't mind an xml doc filled with binary data. That's fine. Just as long as each binary snippet is *one* object & well documented -- and as long as the xml itself constitutes the main logical document structure. At least then, you can safely parse the document into a DOM tree of binary snippets of known datatype, which can be separately passed on to png loaders, or whatever data type they are. But by god I never want to have to spend a month with my nose in a hex editor and pen and paper trying to figure out data lengths and boundary conditions by hand.
This is what hard drives have gotten larger for, by god. Computers are *supposed* to make things easier for us.
It also seems to work perfectly well under konq (3.1 beta2) -- complete will fullscreen annoyance! Great, now my webbrowsing experience under linux can be just as annoying as windows. That's what we get, for competing to win the desktop;)
Well I hate to be one of those "it works fine for me" types, but... it works fine for me on my p3 700 thinkpad with 256 meg ram. Not a powerhouse, and I tell you, beOS ran much much faster.
For a little reference, seeing BeOS was a sinking ship, I knew I had to find a new development platform. So I tried several distros, before settling down. Redhat, consistently (version 6.2, 7.0 and I think 7.1 or something) was slow as molassas. I tried SuSE, and it hauled a** relatively speaking. So I moved over to SuSE for about a year, before trying slack 8, which became my favorite. Slack made my "meager" p3 run like BeOS used to, and was so well designed, layed out, and documented that I didn't need YaST just to change my default runlevel.
Then, I found gentoo, but frankly gentoo isn't noticeably faster than slack. The only reason I'm sticking with gentoo is that its init system is the most utterly beautiful system I've ever worked with. And, because my work, which required under slack about 20 minutes to build after a "make distclean" builds now in about 7 to 10 minutes, which is a very nice thing.
So, what I'm getting at is that yes, mainstream linux is bloated. Sure. But I'm sure you can either turn off a lot of the nastiness redhat defaults to, or you can install a lighter system.
That's why we have options and competition people. Stop bitching.
Oh, and one more thing -- I do run kde, and on a well tuned system it hauls like a bat out of hell. You don't need to sacrifice functionality for performance. And yes, BeOS was fast, but BeOS didn't do 10% of what Gnome2 or KDE 3 can do;)
As a gentoo user with a broken startkde script, due to this update, I'd recommend holding off until the package matures just a bit. I gather bugs have been submitted, and in the gentoo world these things get fixed pretty quickly.
For explanation, the kdebase ebuild has a broken patch it runs against startkde, which I, in my ignorance, ignored. I'll fix it later. kde 3.1beta2 runs fine from the console, using startx.
Anyhow, this is a gentoo packaging issue -- not a kde problem. And further, I've been running 3.1 beta 1 for a month or so now with 100% stability -- I was holding off, but speaking as a developer kde 3.1 brings-in/fleshes-out some new APIs which are really quite superb. I didn't feel like waiting!
Yes. I'm at work so I can't give you the exact configuration instructions; but from the keyboard shortcuts control panel in kcontrol, you can set up a keyboard accel to give you a task list.
Mine is set to alt-esc -- and accordingly I pulled the tasklist out of kicker, which I always thought was bad design too. Now, I just hit alt-esc and I get of list of running apps, segregated by desktop. I can click on any one (or nav by keyboard arrows) and it will switch to the right desktop and bring that app to the front.
Between good keyboard accellerators, good desktop switching and whatnot, I find KDE as fast to use as anything I've ever run, including BeOS, which I used to do all my development under.
So, starting Konsole takes ~1.5 seconds, vs xterm at god-knows-how-fast. So what? Konq starts in 2 seconds for me, whereas lynx is xterm-fast. KDevelop starts in ~5 seconds, whereas I could just use vi, which starts in ~.00001 seconds.
My god! You're right -- if I just switched away from the boat and inneficiency of a well-integrated desktop full of code-reuse & modern API syntax, I'd save about 10 seconds per day. Holy moly! Times-a-wastin!
What's with all the "my WM starts faster than yours" hoo-ha I'm always hearing?
Doesn't anybody actually *use* their computers? When I start (kde) I leave it up for days (on a laptop, no less) and I *use* it. I write code, lot's of it. I write mail. Etc etc.
However, I can't help but wonder, what do you types do? Do you just grab a stopwatch and repeatedly time how long it takes to start different WMs? Is the whole goal of modern computing to provide the most obscure functionality as fast as possible? As nice as fluxbox and windowmaker are, I'll take KDEs rock solid APIs and frameworks any day, even if they take ~30 seconds to start on my little thinkpad. But of course, *using* my computer isn't very l33t of me, is it?
Back in 1996, I worked about 15 feet from the computer museum as a modeler/texture-mapper for the alice project, which is now at carnegie mellon but at that time was still at the UVa CS dept. I spent much of the summer sleeping in a couch in the lab, and would walk past many of the old computer display cases when I would wake up and go to the bathroom to brush my teeth and wash my face.
I have to say, it was easy to spend hours wandering along those display cases; but what always struck me was that modern computers not only look the same, but they *continue* to look the same. Were I to dissasemble the circe 1994/5 SGI I used in the alice lab, it would probably not look much different from the circa 2000 SGI desktop I'm typing this at right now.
I guess bland homogeneity is what we pay for standardization and progress, but it seems like there is no concept of unique technologies anymore, or at least unique technologies that can be observed without a microscope.
Well, that's all, I just got a pang of nostalgia seeing the museum mentioned.
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I should say right now my experience has been 100% identical. I haven't worn deodorant in years; my current girlfreind and previous ones have never said "you stink" and a couple have even said they like my smell. One was a fanatic for it -- but she was peculiar ;)
But you left out the one, singularly most important aspect -- diet. You MUST eat properly if you're going to stop using deodorant.
Stop eatinng fast food.
Stop eating processed food.
Stop drinking soda, drink more tea.
Eat fresh veggies, lean meats. Etc etc.
You'll find that along with smelling like a clean human being (which is, if you think about it, better than smelling like chemicals), if you're overweight -- you soon won't be. I dropped 20 pounds in a year. I've kept it off too. Amazingly, the effect of clean lifestyle is enough that I don't even need deodorant after riding my bike to work or going to the gym.
It's amazing what good can come of the most obvious changes in habits.
Yes... but did you ever try running JSpringies?
I should say that while my little powerbook is about four times as fast as my work computer (according to my code which I've run on both machines) -- JSpringies is intolerably slow with antialiasing on my powerbook, and runs quite realtime on my work computer. I'm not kidding here -- the difference is appaling.
Sometimes the benefits of a higher quality imaging model aren't worth the performance hit. I would have been happy, personally, if it were some sort of apple specific switch to the VM or a class library thing you could turn on and off. I'm no java professional, however (I'm a c/c++ programmer) -- so I'm not certain how such things would be gracefully handled.
As it stands, I'm happy they made this decision -- though I haven't installed the upgrade yet. Having been burnt by the battery performance trouble with the last (10.2.4) update, I'm going to be a little more cautious about upgrades from now on.
Same here -- I've got the same machine (and am running 10.2.4) and as of yesterday I still had 3 or 4 hours battery life. I know because I spent yesterday hacking (read -- porting my linux Qt-based code to standard c++ and making an abstract bridge for different gui types) in a coffee shop and didn't leave until the battery was dead. I didn't time it, but it "felt" like about 3.5 hours.
Nonetheless, I'm concerned. If battery damage is permanent, and if I've got damage, I'll be one ticked off first-time apple owner.
My solution is very, very simple: stop watching the d*mned television.
It's all I can do not to curse about this but here it is as I see it: up until the 80's, you could expect an hour long tv show to consist of maybe 7 to ten minutes of commercials, and the rest being the tv show. Many, if not all, the commercials were for local companies and services. Fine.
We all know how commercials have become, so the market for the TiVO was born. In fact, over thanksgiving, at a relative's house, we tried to watch some james bond movie and it was, quite literally, 10 minutes of movie interspaced with 15 minute chevy/coke/dell commercial breaks. A 90 minute movie took THREE HOURS.
Of course, nobody who runs the networks likes that we have the choice to skip commercials or anything we're not interested in, so the odds are there will be no such thing as a TiVO in five years. If it takes technology like in the AOL case here, so be it -- if on the other hand it takes legislation, well then so be it too. My bet is that once the AOL device fails to sell (think DIVX) hollywood will simply make PVRs illegal.
You can see similar things happening in the movie industry; hell the last time I saw a movie I was shown SIX commercials before the previews began. And I had already paid something like 9 dollars just to get in. Think "captive audience" -- e.g., you and me.
I think what we need to start doing, here, is think about wether it's worth it.
Is it better to stay at home & watch TV, or to go out to a local coffee shop and write some code, read a book, or talk to a pretty girl/boy? Is it better to be steeped in advertising, or to go for a walk? (sadly, depending on where you live there isn't always a difference due to proliferation of billboards)
Anyway, what i'd really like to get at here is that once you get past the commercials, TV itself just isn't all that good -- and the world outside is SO MUCH BETTER.
I stopped watching TV four years ago -- with only the occasional late night conan o'brian and/or simpson's rerun. Since I gave up TV I've lost 20 pounds, gotten in great shape, dated much much more... etc etc. In fact, the only thing I'm missing is the internal scheduler I used to have which said "be home by 7 so you can catch ".
And, if you want to tell me "but cable has all these good shows" ask yourself if most cable stations hae commercials. As far as I know all but a few have *plenty* of commercials -- and yet you're PAYING for it. Paying! Bah! it's not worth it. At least normal TV is free.
Now, excuse me while I calm down. We shouldn't be fighting an escalating arms war to skip commercials -- we should simply stop watching altogether.
If you do, you'll thank yourself for it. Trust me.
Thank you!
I don't mind the snideness so much -- but, you should consider that not everybody watches everything on TV which you have. I never saw that documentary; & I pretty much don't watch television (barring simpsons reruns and conan o'brian). I certainly don't have cable, nor have I ever.
Anyway, thanks for the explanation. Also, now I realize that the slideshow screensavers must use this "ken burns effect".
Repeat after me: "command-~ is your friend"
Try it, you'll like it.
Now, this is one of my apple gripes. Mac os has some great keyboard commands, and some great features that blow everybody away. But... the only way I learn these things is when somebody tells me. There's no documentation saying "to switch between windows of one app, hit command tilde". No.
You learn because some fat, sarcastic apple geek looks down his nose at you because you're doing something crudely and as such, he feels he has the right to scorn you. It pains me that that's the ONLY way to learn how to use a mac properly.
Of course, I've just earned my fat sarcastic apple geek prize for this snarky post. But hell, I'm skinny. So pttth.
[whoops, I posted anonymously, so happy cut-n-paste]
OK, slap me for my ignorance; but being as I'm just a lowly programmer and I don't have a digital camera, nor do I have a mighty digital video thing -- I've never used iMovie, nor have I even fired it up.
But, I keep hearing about this reviled "Ken Burns Effect". All I can do is guess it's like Homer star-wiping those handicam shots of Flanders when he was trying to pimp him out to the singles scene.
So, anybody care to educate me on this one? I'm baffled.
And, is it Ken Burns Effect (no apostrophe, as in : Ken is burning) or Ken Burn's Effect (with apostrophe, as in belonging or pertaining to Ken Burns)
There are pure java X servers available (that will even run in IE using the default ms vm).
I've never use it, but here it is
One could make a webpage which embeds the X server applet and automatically connects it to a machine which does the actual work.
Seems like the best of both worlds to me.
I'm typing this at an SGI 320 right now -- I've been using it for a few years now. Nice machine.
But there's touble with them thar gui proms -- if you use a USB mouse which isn't SGI's default one, well, you're f*cked. Which is too bad, since now if I have to make a change (fortunately I haven't had to in a couple years) I have to dig up that POS mouse just to use the prom. Fooey.
I'll take a keyboard navigable text-mode bios any day. Who cares if your fancy bios has 1280x1024 16 bit color with icons and scrollbars and all that hoo ha if IT DOESN'T REALLY WORK.
Am I the only person who thinks that the original was among the WORST GAMES EVER MADE? Dragon's Lair was not a game. It was more like that damned blinking-lighted Simon electronic sysiphean time waster than a video game. In fact, I'm not 100% certain dragon's Lair could even be considered a video game.
Perhaps it was an experiment to see if youth around the western world would feed money into a machine to see if they could press a knob in the right direction at the right time. And it made millions, so the answer is "yes".
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here. Why, oh why do people talk about that game as if it were fun? You could have hooked up a machine with pre-programmed timings to move the joystick in the right direction at the right time and consistently beat the "game".
Sheesh.
Hey... that's near my office. I'll go out at lunch and let you all know if I see something like a towering inferno or some sort of non-euclidean horror.
Of course, if it's the latter, I'll promptly go insane...
Would you prefer they release a "final" that's not ready? A final that's buggy/crashy/etc?
Have patience. You won't die if it takes them X more months to produce a final.
As a full time user of kdevelop 2, which is a solid, powerful ide, I'm glad they're working on 3 but I'll happily wait until final to move over my projects.
(The alphas have crashed on me way too much to get any useful work done. Not that I'm griping, gideon is amazing -- and I've done my duty by submitting many bug reports and backtraces.)
I remember my calculus class in high school (ca. 1994) -- I was getting an A, and was bored, so instead of paying attention I wrote scorched earth for my Ti85 calculator.
My port even did terrain damage! Those were the days. I can't believe I had the force of will to program in a language that had ONLY GLOBAL VARIABLES.
Eventually I was spending so much time playing it and tweaking the code (in class, after school, at night...) that my grade(s) begain to slip. So, with an even greater force of will, I deleted it. It was my personal pandora's box and it had to go.
Every now and then I use that calculator (of course I still have it) and think about all the fun I could be having had I not deleted that game.
Not entirely true. back in my BeOS days I wrote an image translator plugin for reading Photoshop files. Look it up on bebits if you want to see (http://www.bebits.com/app/1343)
So, in the month or so I spent I learned both how true, and not true your statement is. yes, the PSD file format is documented, but no, it is *not* easy to parse. And I *do* know what I'm talking about here (I used to write lots of low level stuff for embedded devices and it involved making efficient use of storage).
Basically, since the format was tight, binary, and not at all tagged, you had to absolutely make *certain* that you knew exactly how many bytes to read for every circumstance. if you were off by one byte, complete failure. Well, that would be all well and good if the documentation were good enough, but in essence it would say "this is of type X -- under circumstances Y,Z & P it's even padded, else, it's terminated by Q, else assume that the first four bytes are length, but remember to add R, S & T to this, to figure out where the offset word is. It was nasty stuff, compounded by the fact that many of the string types were undocumented, *and* to top it all off I had to implement my own mac toolbox compression/decompression routines with less than a paragraph of documentation.
So, yes, binary formats aren't necessarily hard to figure out. but, in practice, they tend to have alot of cruft (in PSDTranslator's case, I had to accommodate Adobe's scaling of the PSD spec from 3.0 -> 4.0 -> 5.0 -> 5.5) -- and in the worst case, some parts just *aren't* documented properly. Needless to say, I became all too familiar with my hex editor.
I shudder to think of what the folks at OpenOffice.org, KWord & Abiword have had to trudge through, and I'd like to buy them all a frosty beer.
So, to sum it all up, I wouldn't mind an xml doc filled with binary data. That's fine. Just as long as each binary snippet is *one* object & well documented -- and as long as the xml itself constitutes the main logical document structure. At least then, you can safely parse the document into a DOM tree of binary snippets of known datatype, which can be separately passed on to png loaders, or whatever data type they are. But by god I never want to have to spend a month with my nose in a hex editor and pen and paper trying to figure out data lengths and boundary conditions by hand.
This is what hard drives have gotten larger for, by god. Computers are *supposed* to make things easier for us.
It also seems to work perfectly well under konq (3.1 beta2) -- complete will fullscreen annoyance! Great, now my webbrowsing experience under linux can be just as annoying as windows. That's what we get, for competing to win the desktop ;)
Well I hate to be one of those "it works fine for me" types, but... it works fine for me on my p3 700 thinkpad with 256 meg ram. Not a powerhouse, and I tell you, beOS ran much much faster.
For a little reference, seeing BeOS was a sinking ship, I knew I had to find a new development platform. So I tried several distros, before settling down. Redhat, consistently (version 6.2, 7.0 and I think 7.1 or something) was slow as molassas. I tried SuSE, and it hauled a** relatively speaking. So I moved over to SuSE for about a year, before trying slack 8, which became my favorite. Slack made my "meager" p3 run like BeOS used to, and was so well designed, layed out, and documented that I didn't need YaST just to change my default runlevel.
Then, I found gentoo, but frankly gentoo isn't noticeably faster than slack. The only reason I'm sticking with gentoo is that its init system is the most utterly beautiful system I've ever worked with. And, because my work, which required under slack about 20 minutes to build after a "make distclean" builds now in about 7 to 10 minutes, which is a very nice thing.
So, what I'm getting at is that yes, mainstream linux is bloated. Sure. But I'm sure you can either turn off a lot of the nastiness redhat defaults to, or you can install a lighter system.
That's why we have options and competition people. Stop bitching.
Oh, and one more thing -- I do run kde, and on a well tuned system it hauls like a bat out of hell. You don't need to sacrifice functionality for performance. And yes, BeOS was fast, but BeOS didn't do 10% of what Gnome2 or KDE 3 can do ;)
As a gentoo user with a broken startkde script, due to this update, I'd recommend holding off until the package matures just a bit. I gather bugs have been submitted, and in the gentoo world these things get fixed pretty quickly.
For explanation, the kdebase ebuild has a broken patch it runs against startkde, which I, in my ignorance, ignored. I'll fix it later. kde 3.1beta2 runs fine from the console, using startx.
Anyhow, this is a gentoo packaging issue -- not a kde problem. And further, I've been running 3.1 beta 1 for a month or so now with 100% stability -- I was holding off, but speaking as a developer kde 3.1 brings-in/fleshes-out some new APIs which are really quite superb. I didn't feel like waiting!
You, sir, just made my day. I am in your debt. Funny stuff, that.
Yes.
I'm at work so I can't give you the exact configuration instructions; but from the keyboard shortcuts control panel in kcontrol, you can set up a keyboard accel to give you a task list.
Mine is set to alt-esc -- and accordingly I pulled the tasklist out of kicker, which I always thought was bad design too. Now, I just hit alt-esc and I get of list of running apps, segregated by desktop. I can click on any one (or nav by keyboard arrows) and it will switch to the right desktop and bring that app to the front.
It's very, *very* nice.
For reference, my thinkpad happily sleeps away at night on low-power standby (I know, not the same as full hibernation state-to-disk).
Then, I reopen my lid, and poof, KDE, network connection, yadda yadda, in 1 second.
Between good keyboard accellerators, good desktop switching and whatnot, I find KDE as fast to use as anything I've ever run, including BeOS, which I used to do all my development under.
So, starting Konsole takes ~1.5 seconds, vs xterm at god-knows-how-fast. So what? Konq starts in 2 seconds for me, whereas lynx is xterm-fast. KDevelop starts in ~5 seconds, whereas I could just use vi, which starts in ~.00001 seconds.
My god! You're right -- if I just switched away from the boat and inneficiency of a well-integrated desktop full of code-reuse & modern API syntax, I'd save about 10 seconds per day. Holy moly! Times-a-wastin!
What's with all the "my WM starts faster than yours" hoo-ha I'm always hearing?
Doesn't anybody actually *use* their computers? When I start (kde) I leave it up for days (on a laptop, no less) and I *use* it. I write code, lot's of it. I write mail. Etc etc.
However, I can't help but wonder, what do you types do? Do you just grab a stopwatch and repeatedly time how long it takes to start different WMs? Is the whole goal of modern computing to provide the most obscure functionality as fast as possible? As nice as fluxbox and windowmaker are, I'll take KDEs rock solid APIs and frameworks any day, even if they take ~30 seconds to start on my little thinkpad. But of course, *using* my computer isn't very l33t of me, is it?
Back in 1996, I worked about 15 feet from the computer museum as a modeler/texture-mapper for the alice project, which is now at carnegie mellon but at that time was still at the UVa CS dept. I spent much of the summer sleeping in a couch in the lab, and would walk past many of the old computer display cases when I would wake up and go to the bathroom to brush my teeth and wash my face. I have to say, it was easy to spend hours wandering along those display cases; but what always struck me was that modern computers not only look the same, but they *continue* to look the same. Were I to dissasemble the circe 1994/5 SGI I used in the alice lab, it would probably not look much different from the circa 2000 SGI desktop I'm typing this at right now.
I guess bland homogeneity is what we pay for standardization and progress, but it seems like there is no concept of unique technologies anymore, or at least unique technologies that can be observed without a microscope.
Well, that's all, I just got a pang of nostalgia seeing the museum mentioned.