It is a pretty safe bet that your family and friends are just using Microsoft Office as an excuse to avoid talking about Linux.... So what those people are probably saying amounts to: they are comfortable with what they have and don't want to learn something new (may that be Linux or LibreOffice).
Sigh, that may be true for a few people, but my guess is that number is pretty small. I use Linux heavily, but if I could have 1 piece of software ported to Linux it would be MS-Office. There is no equivalent to OneNote in Linux-land. Basket Notepads tries; I even tried to help it along, but gave up in the end as it just wasn't going to meet my needs as I evaluated it more. To Evernote users, sorry, it doesn't meet my needs either.
Also, the UI of LOffice is pretty clunky. I find it very slow to use because I have to stop and search for features/commands that I know are there but can't easily find. It's rendering is also only about 95% accurate, leaving artifacts and weird visual stuff on my screen (like it showing me where the margins are but text is shown out of bounds). LOffice is a good attempt and I wish it well because I'd like to see it catch on for more mainstream usage, but it's not there yet. But for a quick view of a MS-Word doc on Linux, it works well enough.
And if you objectively compare them to the features that OneNote provides, they all come up short. At least that was true for me with the features I was after, and I tried a lot of them. I don't care for MS and their products as a whole, but they did a great job creating OneNote. It's at the perfect place for getting the job done and easy to use. If MS would port MS-Office (mainly for OneNote), I could give up MS-Windows and anything else that I just had to have would probably work under Wine. Heck, I'd give up all of my MS-Windows only games to get a Linux version of OneNote!
Err, no. OneNote can be either local and/or cloud based, your choice from version 2010 forward. I presently use it in both ways at the moment in that some notebooks are local only (things with personal data), some notebooks are in the cloud (things I want everywhere easily and I don't care if anyone else hacked in and saw it).
I thought Kate Mara was the only real redeeming part of this movie. Like you, I got to see it for free and I'm also glad I didn't have to pay for the tickets.
Really? I much preferred the first (2005) version over the the one I saw today. Fortunately for me, someone else paid for the ticket; I'm glad I didn't. Really, no Stan Lee cameo and no teaser scene after the credits? Was this really made by Marvel?
Why does everything have to be done for mobile, especially a framework that I see as fairly heavy? I run KDE on my desktop and it's fine. But on my phone? Why should I care about Plasma there? Not everything on my desktop needs to be on mobile.
I agree completely. Too often we see change for the sake of change, for UI people to justify their jobs (or so it seems to me).
My father is in his 70's and has slowly been losing his ability to figure out how to accomplish new things. He can remember things he learned as little as 5 years ago, but new things stymy him. Changing UI's have caused him to eventually give up using the computer, even his web email interface changed enough he couldn't use it any more. We considered adding voice recognition software, e.g. Dragon Naturally Speaking, but even that was to much for him to learn. Sadly, he's had to give up using the computer all together.
I'd really like to see more software people come to realize that when something works well, to basically leave it alone. When software reaches that level of maturity, it's a good thing to leave it working. If that's boring for the developers, then go find a new software project and leave the mature product as is.
I think that the adjustable standing desks are on over complicated solution to the problem.
Use fixed standing desk with a drafting stool.
Close. If you're in a cube, raise the desk supports to the height that's correct for you; this may require an extra brace, just depending on how everything is supported. It's important that it be ergonomically the correctly height for *you*.
Others have said get a good mat; I think it's good advice.
Get a good chair that can be raised high enough to allow you to sit at the elevated desk. I had to order a "lab stool" off the internet (from Global Industrial, cost was ~$150). It's very adjustable, has a curved back and support for the legs, also has a ring to support the feet that's adjustable.
Then you can stand and sit.:) I tend to go back and forth, about an hour at a time in each position. I also have the same setup (with the same chair) at home. I like it a lot and I feel better. You can move slightly while "standing", that helps too.
If you don't have a cube that you can raise the surface, check out a product called "Varidesk"; if you have 2 monitors, you'll want the "plus" version. I bought 1 of these for my wife and she loves it.
The only other internal company name I've come across that's more universal is ex G.E. employees referring to it as "Generous Electric".
When I worked at TI (Texas Instruments) in the 90's, it was pretty universally referred to as "Training Institute" because so many people would work there for a few years after college before going somewhere else. Some people also called it "Tiny Income". There's some truth to both.:)
Maybe, but in almost every single browser topic here on/. there will be at least one thread going off about shitty Australis --- Which really puts into question the rest of their complaints. The Firefox Australis UI may look different than the previous traditional FF UI... but so what?! If you don't like it, its little more than some standard CSS to adjust the UI however the hell you want.
Almost every single FF bitch about changes is little more than bullshit --- I have yet to see a FF change that can't be reverted with either CSS or an extension.
If there really was some agenda to "destroy" Firefox, they certainly wouldn't leave in the ability to undo/revert these so-called horrible changes.
There are some changes that I'll agree with you on. I hate the Australis UI change, but the Classic Theme Restorer plugin does fix most of that. But I'll call BS on the rest.
There were a number of changes (say from v25-35 timeframe) where they removed the ability to turn things on and off by removing the controls from the about:config interface. Can't fix that with CSS or an extension if the code to do what you want is completely gone.
And don't get me started on the stupidity of the Chat/Loop/webrtc thing they just added as a core tech... with no ability to remove it. If there was ever a candidate for doing something as a plugin, that seems like it to me, but they didn't do that. Sure, I can turn off the control with an about:config change, but I can't get rid of the bloat and potential for bugs and who knows what else it could bring when I'll never use it.
I don't believe there's a conspiracy to kill FF, but there's been so many stupid decisions lately by Mozilla that a conspiracy actually starts to look slightly believable.
I don't think we need to do anything at all, don't push STEM and don't try to eliminate Humanity majors.
In general, most people end up doing something that's fairly agreeable to them, which means they have an interest and somehow get the skills (thru classes and/or on the job training). Because we have a diversity of interests, we'll end up with a diversity of education/workers... i.e. we'll have STEM majors and Humanity majors as people are naturally inclined.
Sure, there will always be bubbles as people try to jump on fads, but for the long run, this is not something to worry about and I'd just ignore the article.
I'm not a backer, I've never heard of this project before. But if I was a backer, I'd ask for my money back. Is that possible? That's a serious question, I really don't know if that's possible with kickstarter campaigns (in a case like this, it seems that you should be able to get your money back if they change the project you signed up for.
I bought something there this last Christmas. The item (a variable height desk) was the same price no matter where I looked. It's the only thing I've ever bought there. It was fun to look in the catalog for the unusual items; it was always good for at least 1 chuckle for some goofy item and ususally several.
True. And it's not that people prefer MSO over OpenOffice, it's just that they need to be able to interact with people using Office. And opening a Word document on OpenOffice usually ends up like a big mess. Same for Powerpoint or Excel. Interchangeability is just a mess right now.
Sure, interoperability is an issue for some people, but some of us do prefer MSO over OO. Yeah, I really wish we still had the menubar rather than the ribbon, but if I'm typing anything substantial, I really want MSWord because I can't find anything in OO (that's a bit of a training issue, but I really do have trouble finding options/commands in OO to the point that OO is very frustrating for me).
An even bigger issue for me is that only MSO has OneNote (or an equivalent). I don't care at all about Outlook because I use Thunderbird, and only a little about Powerpoint and Excel (my needs for these 2 tools is so limited OO works just fine). Until OO gets an equivalent to OneNote, only MSO can really meet my needs.
I'm very similar. Progressives are great when generally doing life. However, when working at the computer, single vision lens are a must. Better yet, get you eye doctor to proscribe "office/computer" lens. The focal point for them are about 1 yard/meter, or about the length of your arm, which is where the computer screens should be sitting. Besides always having to move your head with progressives when reading the computer screen, when you do find the sweet focal spot, you'll find that you're having to tilt your head back slightly. After some time, you'll start having muscle aches in your neck... not good. Go for 2 pairs of glasses, a bit of a hassle but well worth it. If your eye doctor gives you any hassle over this or doesn't seem familiar with computer lens, go somewhere else.
I think the lines need to be built by and maintained by one company or by the municipality and the service provided by competition.
I totally agree with you. Of course, that means that we start to treat broadband like a utility and not a private business, which is fine by me.
There are good and bad points to excluding customers. It's ridiculous to run a 20 mile fiber to one person's house or even a group of five or six houses and charge them the same as everyone else. If they want cable- they should live with the rest of civilization.
I think you need to think that thru a little more. Going by that logic, you're saying that farmers (who grow your food) and others who just like small town life don't deserve high-speed internet. I'm not sure what word I want to apply to that, but you don't come out looking so nice there.
Now, if you want to say that those who live further out will need to pay a bit more because of their situation, I think most of us could agree to that. Of course, with the advent of putting access points on water towers and other high places and then a receiver/transmitter dish on the person's house so that lines don't have to be run to individual houses, even those of us not in "the big city" can get better speeds at mostly reasonable prices.
I joined the profession just after PCs were moving into the coporate world. At that time where I worked, the really good stuff ran on expensive "workstations" I couldn't possibly afford, personally. Now days, the equipment is so affordable that the computer setup I have at home is better than my desktop setup at work. That creates it's own kind of stress, for me in having to use "lesser stuff" and for the IT department when I keep asking for something better... not a problem we had in "the old days".
Arguing from analogy is always fraught with peril, but I'll start there. Can you patent a specific ordering of words? No you can't; because that's copyright not patent. Software is the same way, it's an ordering of words that does the instructions of the programmer, for whatever is in his/her imagination. There is lots of creation, but little true innovation (to inspire true patents).
Also, software is one of those things that moves very fast and comes about by building on the works of others. If you start patents for software, you'll stiffle and kill the software industry. We can't wait 28 years for some idea that literally thousands of us could come up with to be freely usable. It would also be very hard to enforce that.
We already have hypersonic missles -- really! Most of the air-to-air missles shot from 1 plane to another are hypersonic and we've had these for decades. This is public knowledge.
What the article is try to get banned is "long-range hypersonic missles", or if you prefer, the old ICBMs going a lot faster. If you could make a very small nuke and stick it in one of the existing missle cases; you could have a pretty awesome weapon if short distances are all you need (say in the 80-100 mile range from what I've read, definitely far enough the pilot wouldn't have to worry about getting caught in it). It'd be pretty easy to hit any coastal city from international air space that way.
I don't have a lot of patience with the profession since it's built on a fatally flawed analogy and all software architects ever do is waste and overhead from a lean perspective.
It *sounds* like you've never worked on a large project then. Fine, fire the architects, but you're still going to need someone to do their job, no matter if you call them the team lead or something else. There needs to be a *technical* person at the top who says "we're marching that way" and here's some stuff we need to keep in mind and do. Some technical person who can push back to the product owner when it's needed and explain in technical gory details when required. That's not the project manager because they're not technical enough; or that's been true for all the projects I've ever worked on.
You need someone to can look ahead at the items coming and notice that there are some common things needed, and that if you spend some time up front to fix (a framework, a subsystem, whatever) that it will be cheaper and faster to do that way than to let small bits of code be written and then refactored a hundred times as the sprints slowly come in.
I'm sorry you don't like the construction analogy, but it's very true that the cheapest time to change a building is when you're still at the blueprint stage before it's built... the cheapest time to change software is during the planning stage before it's written.
Sure, most product owners owners don't really know where they want to end up, but some things are well known and when you have that knowledge you should use it as soon as possible, no matter what you want to call the roles or the results. Protocols, APIs, security, data models and databases, etc are all things that should be planned as much as possible, not organically grown and refactored. Who does that planning?
My day job right now is dealing with code that had very little upfront planning, very Agile'ish, and the system is a nightmare at times. I'll admit that the source of the problem may be that the devs before me never came back and refactored and cleaned up, but a little more planning would have made much of that unnecessary. That's what an architect brings to the table: some overall planning and technical sense.
For the "big stuff", much of what's listed in the summary, they probably can't create the bandwagon. The reason developers jump on something like that is because it's already in widespread use. All the "big stuff" already has leaders. The best RH could hope to do is to buy some of those out and take them over.
OTOH, do we developers want that? Look at the controversy surrounding systemd, directly developed by RH. If that's a sample of what they do, I'm not so keen for their solutions.
Gotta agree that's stupid. First, you can only hire people that are available with the skills you're looking for. So if you don't have "diverse applicants", you'll never get "higher numbers".
Second, I hope he doesn't mean it, but it sounds like Cook want to be more diverse to look more politically correct. If I were a stock holder, I'd be upset. I wouldn't want him be "diverse" so he can look good; I'd want him to hire the best qualified people in a completely "blind" way. If that means 90% are male, or 80% white, or 85% female, or whatever the numbers work out to be because those were the best people to get the job done, then so be it. If the PC-crowd doesn't like it, then they need to encourage more minorities to get the required education and get qualified.
I also really appreciate the work the KDE developers have done over the years. I'll go look at KDE5 to see what's coming.
However, I really Really REALLY hope they've found a way for you to install KDE and not have to have akonadi or nepomunk installed on my system. For the longest time, they've been force installed because of dependencies and I don't want them on my machine because I never use them and their daemons just suck up resources. Seems like there was something else like this, maybe amarok, but I'm having a hard time remembering. I like KDE in general, but I don't want all of it.
Slashdot Mirror
It is a pretty safe bet that your family and friends are just using Microsoft Office as an excuse to avoid talking about Linux. ... So what those people are probably saying amounts to: they are comfortable with what they have and don't want to learn something new (may that be Linux or LibreOffice).
Sigh, that may be true for a few people, but my guess is that number is pretty small. I use Linux heavily, but if I could have 1 piece of software ported to Linux it would be MS-Office. There is no equivalent to OneNote in Linux-land. Basket Notepads tries; I even tried to help it along, but gave up in the end as it just wasn't going to meet my needs as I evaluated it more. To Evernote users, sorry, it doesn't meet my needs either.
Also, the UI of LOffice is pretty clunky. I find it very slow to use because I have to stop and search for features/commands that I know are there but can't easily find. It's rendering is also only about 95% accurate, leaving artifacts and weird visual stuff on my screen (like it showing me where the margins are but text is shown out of bounds). LOffice is a good attempt and I wish it well because I'd like to see it catch on for more mainstream usage, but it's not there yet. But for a quick view of a MS-Word doc on Linux, it works well enough.
And if you objectively compare them to the features that OneNote provides, they all come up short. At least that was true for me with the features I was after, and I tried a lot of them. I don't care for MS and their products as a whole, but they did a great job creating OneNote. It's at the perfect place for getting the job done and easy to use. If MS would port MS-Office (mainly for OneNote), I could give up MS-Windows and anything else that I just had to have would probably work under Wine. Heck, I'd give up all of my MS-Windows only games to get a Linux version of OneNote!
Evernote is cloud based. OneNote is local.
Err, no. OneNote can be either local and/or cloud based, your choice from version 2010 forward. I presently use it in both ways at the moment in that some notebooks are local only (things with personal data), some notebooks are in the cloud (things I want everywhere easily and I don't care if anyone else hacked in and saw it).
I thought Kate Mara was the only real redeeming part of this movie. Like you, I got to see it for free and I'm also glad I didn't have to pay for the tickets.
Really? I much preferred the first (2005) version over the the one I saw today. Fortunately for me, someone else paid for the ticket; I'm glad I didn't. Really, no Stan Lee cameo and no teaser scene after the credits? Was this really made by Marvel?
Why does everything have to be done for mobile, especially a framework that I see as fairly heavy? I run KDE on my desktop and it's fine. But on my phone? Why should I care about Plasma there? Not everything on my desktop needs to be on mobile.
I agree completely. Too often we see change for the sake of change, for UI people to justify their jobs (or so it seems to me).
My father is in his 70's and has slowly been losing his ability to figure out how to accomplish new things. He can remember things he learned as little as 5 years ago, but new things stymy him. Changing UI's have caused him to eventually give up using the computer, even his web email interface changed enough he couldn't use it any more. We considered adding voice recognition software, e.g. Dragon Naturally Speaking, but even that was to much for him to learn. Sadly, he's had to give up using the computer all together.
I'd really like to see more software people come to realize that when something works well, to basically leave it alone. When software reaches that level of maturity, it's a good thing to leave it working. If that's boring for the developers, then go find a new software project and leave the mature product as is.
I think that the adjustable standing desks are on over complicated solution to the problem. Use fixed standing desk with a drafting stool.
Close. If you're in a cube, raise the desk supports to the height that's correct for you; this may require an extra brace, just depending on how everything is supported. It's important that it be ergonomically the correctly height for *you*.
:) I tend to go back and forth, about an hour at a time in each position. I also have the same setup (with the same chair) at home. I like it a lot and I feel better. You can move slightly while "standing", that helps too.
Others have said get a good mat; I think it's good advice.
Get a good chair that can be raised high enough to allow you to sit at the elevated desk. I had to order a "lab stool" off the internet (from Global Industrial, cost was ~$150). It's very adjustable, has a curved back and support for the legs, also has a ring to support the feet that's adjustable.
Then you can stand and sit.
If you don't have a cube that you can raise the surface, check out a product called "Varidesk"; if you have 2 monitors, you'll want the "plus" version. I bought 1 of these for my wife and she loves it.
The only other internal company name I've come across that's more universal is ex G.E. employees referring to it as "Generous Electric".
When I worked at TI (Texas Instruments) in the 90's, it was pretty universally referred to as "Training Institute" because so many people would work there for a few years after college before going somewhere else. Some people also called it "Tiny Income". There's some truth to both. :)
Maybe, but in almost every single browser topic here on /. there will be at least one thread going off about shitty Australis --- Which really puts into question the rest of their complaints. The Firefox Australis UI may look different than the previous traditional FF UI... but so what?! If you don't like it, its little more than some standard CSS to adjust the UI however the hell you want.
Almost every single FF bitch about changes is little more than bullshit --- I have yet to see a FF change that can't be reverted with either CSS or an extension.
If there really was some agenda to "destroy" Firefox, they certainly wouldn't leave in the ability to undo/revert these so-called horrible changes.
There are some changes that I'll agree with you on. I hate the Australis UI change, but the Classic Theme Restorer plugin does fix most of that. But I'll call BS on the rest.
... with no ability to remove it. If there was ever a candidate for doing something as a plugin, that seems like it to me, but they didn't do that. Sure, I can turn off the control with an about:config change, but I can't get rid of the bloat and potential for bugs and who knows what else it could bring when I'll never use it.
There were a number of changes (say from v25-35 timeframe) where they removed the ability to turn things on and off by removing the controls from the about:config interface. Can't fix that with CSS or an extension if the code to do what you want is completely gone.
And don't get me started on the stupidity of the Chat/Loop/webrtc thing they just added as a core tech
I don't believe there's a conspiracy to kill FF, but there's been so many stupid decisions lately by Mozilla that a conspiracy actually starts to look slightly believable.
I don't think we need to do anything at all, don't push STEM and don't try to eliminate Humanity majors.
... i.e. we'll have STEM majors and Humanity majors as people are naturally inclined.
In general, most people end up doing something that's fairly agreeable to them, which means they have an interest and somehow get the skills (thru classes and/or on the job training). Because we have a diversity of interests, we'll end up with a diversity of education/workers
Sure, there will always be bubbles as people try to jump on fads, but for the long run, this is not something to worry about and I'd just ignore the article.
I'm not a backer, I've never heard of this project before. But if I was a backer, I'd ask for my money back. Is that possible? That's a serious question, I really don't know if that's possible with kickstarter campaigns (in a case like this, it seems that you should be able to get your money back if they change the project you signed up for.
I bought something there this last Christmas. The item (a variable height desk) was the same price no matter where I looked. It's the only thing I've ever bought there. It was fun to look in the catalog for the unusual items; it was always good for at least 1 chuckle for some goofy item and ususally several.
True. And it's not that people prefer MSO over OpenOffice, it's just that they need to be able to interact with people using Office. And opening a Word document on OpenOffice usually ends up like a big mess. Same for Powerpoint or Excel. Interchangeability is just a mess right now.
Sure, interoperability is an issue for some people, but some of us do prefer MSO over OO. Yeah, I really wish we still had the menubar rather than the ribbon, but if I'm typing anything substantial, I really want MSWord because I can't find anything in OO (that's a bit of a training issue, but I really do have trouble finding options/commands in OO to the point that OO is very frustrating for me).
An even bigger issue for me is that only MSO has OneNote (or an equivalent). I don't care at all about Outlook because I use Thunderbird, and only a little about Powerpoint and Excel (my needs for these 2 tools is so limited OO works just fine). Until OO gets an equivalent to OneNote, only MSO can really meet my needs.
I'm very similar. Progressives are great when generally doing life. However, when working at the computer, single vision lens are a must. Better yet, get you eye doctor to proscribe "office/computer" lens. The focal point for them are about 1 yard/meter, or about the length of your arm, which is where the computer screens should be sitting. Besides always having to move your head with progressives when reading the computer screen, when you do find the sweet focal spot, you'll find that you're having to tilt your head back slightly. After some time, you'll start having muscle aches in your neck ... not good. Go for 2 pairs of glasses, a bit of a hassle but well worth it. If your eye doctor gives you any hassle over this or doesn't seem familiar with computer lens, go somewhere else.
I think the lines need to be built by and maintained by one company or by the municipality and the service provided by competition.
I totally agree with you. Of course, that means that we start to treat broadband like a utility and not a private business, which is fine by me.
There are good and bad points to excluding customers. It's ridiculous to run a 20 mile fiber to one person's house or even a group of five or six houses and charge them the same as everyone else. If they want cable- they should live with the rest of civilization.
I think you need to think that thru a little more. Going by that logic, you're saying that farmers (who grow your food) and others who just like small town life don't deserve high-speed internet. I'm not sure what word I want to apply to that, but you don't come out looking so nice there.
Now, if you want to say that those who live further out will need to pay a bit more because of their situation, I think most of us could agree to that. Of course, with the advent of putting access points on water towers and other high places and then a receiver/transmitter dish on the person's house so that lines don't have to be run to individual houses, even those of us not in "the big city" can get better speeds at mostly reasonable prices.
I joined the profession just after PCs were moving into the coporate world. At that time where I worked, the really good stuff ran on expensive "workstations" I couldn't possibly afford, personally. Now days, the equipment is so affordable that the computer setup I have at home is better than my desktop setup at work. That creates it's own kind of stress, for me in having to use "lesser stuff" and for the IT department when I keep asking for something better ... not a problem we had in "the old days".
Ah, crap, I just bought 1 too; which means none of data is more than a month old. At least they're giving away a fix. Gee, more mess to deal with... :(
Arguing from analogy is always fraught with peril, but I'll start there. Can you patent a specific ordering of words? No you can't; because that's copyright not patent. Software is the same way, it's an ordering of words that does the instructions of the programmer, for whatever is in his/her imagination. There is lots of creation, but little true innovation (to inspire true patents).
Also, software is one of those things that moves very fast and comes about by building on the works of others. If you start patents for software, you'll stiffle and kill the software industry. We can't wait 28 years for some idea that literally thousands of us could come up with to be freely usable. It would also be very hard to enforce that.
We already have hypersonic missles -- really! Most of the air-to-air missles shot from 1 plane to another are hypersonic and we've had these for decades. This is public knowledge.
What the article is try to get banned is "long-range hypersonic missles", or if you prefer, the old ICBMs going a lot faster. If you could make a very small nuke and stick it in one of the existing missle cases; you could have a pretty awesome weapon if short distances are all you need (say in the 80-100 mile range from what I've read, definitely far enough the pilot wouldn't have to worry about getting caught in it). It'd be pretty easy to hit any coastal city from international air space that way.
I don't have a lot of patience with the profession since it's built on a fatally flawed analogy and all software architects ever do is waste and overhead from a lean perspective.
It *sounds* like you've never worked on a large project then. Fine, fire the architects, but you're still going to need someone to do their job, no matter if you call them the team lead or something else. There needs to be a *technical* person at the top who says "we're marching that way" and here's some stuff we need to keep in mind and do. Some technical person who can push back to the product owner when it's needed and explain in technical gory details when required. That's not the project manager because they're not technical enough; or that's been true for all the projects I've ever worked on.
... the cheapest time to change software is during the planning stage before it's written.
You need someone to can look ahead at the items coming and notice that there are some common things needed, and that if you spend some time up front to fix (a framework, a subsystem, whatever) that it will be cheaper and faster to do that way than to let small bits of code be written and then refactored a hundred times as the sprints slowly come in.
I'm sorry you don't like the construction analogy, but it's very true that the cheapest time to change a building is when you're still at the blueprint stage before it's built
Sure, most product owners owners don't really know where they want to end up, but some things are well known and when you have that knowledge you should use it as soon as possible, no matter what you want to call the roles or the results. Protocols, APIs, security, data models and databases, etc are all things that should be planned as much as possible, not organically grown and refactored. Who does that planning?
My day job right now is dealing with code that had very little upfront planning, very Agile'ish, and the system is a nightmare at times. I'll admit that the source of the problem may be that the devs before me never came back and refactored and cleaned up, but a little more planning would have made much of that unnecessary. That's what an architect brings to the table: some overall planning and technical sense.
For the "big stuff", much of what's listed in the summary, they probably can't create the bandwagon. The reason developers jump on something like that is because it's already in widespread use. All the "big stuff" already has leaders. The best RH could hope to do is to buy some of those out and take them over.
OTOH, do we developers want that? Look at the controversy surrounding systemd, directly developed by RH. If that's a sample of what they do, I'm not so keen for their solutions.
Gotta agree that's stupid. First, you can only hire people that are available with the skills you're looking for. So if you don't have "diverse applicants", you'll never get "higher numbers".
Second, I hope he doesn't mean it, but it sounds like Cook want to be more diverse to look more politically correct. If I were a stock holder, I'd be upset. I wouldn't want him be "diverse" so he can look good; I'd want him to hire the best qualified people in a completely "blind" way. If that means 90% are male, or 80% white, or 85% female, or whatever the numbers work out to be because those were the best people to get the job done, then so be it. If the PC-crowd doesn't like it, then they need to encourage more minorities to get the required education and get qualified.
I also really appreciate the work the KDE developers have done over the years. I'll go look at KDE5 to see what's coming.
However, I really Really REALLY hope they've found a way for you to install KDE and not have to have akonadi or nepomunk installed on my system. For the longest time, they've been force installed because of dependencies and I don't want them on my machine because I never use them and their daemons just suck up resources. Seems like there was something else like this, maybe amarok, but I'm having a hard time remembering. I like KDE in general, but I don't want all of it.
VMplayer would work too